Yet the Tokyo trial still had its own legal ground to break. It was “more or less the touchstone for the possibility of organized international justice,” in the words of Dutch judge Bert Röling.

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, as the Tokyo trial was officially called, lasted longer than the trial in Nuremberg—it stretched from May, 1946, to November, 1948—and was ...

The Tokyo war crimes trial is consequential not because of long-defunct Wilsonian daydreams about a world pacified by international law, but because it misfired and fizzled.