“‘War-crimes’ trials have become a commonplace since the termination of the hostilities of the recent war, so much so that we forget easily, perhaps, that they are a novelty of these four or five years’ standing.” With this statement on behalf of the accused, Ben B. Blakeney presented a detailed critique of the nascent jurisprudence of command responsibility that arose from European and Far Eastern war crimes trials. An American and formerly a lead defense lawyer at the Tokyo Trial, Blakeney headed the advisory counsel for the defense to represent Adm. Toyoda Soemu, the accused at one of the two international proceedings that followed the Tokyo Trial. It was August 9, 1949, when he began delivering the defense summation at the final stage of the trial. There were few spectators to hear the argument of the day, however, or even journalists. It had been like this for most of the last eight months, during which the court gallery remained virtually empty except for initial sessions in the fall of 1948.

The problem was not that the court was outside the geographical reach of the general public. The occupation authorities set it up inside the Mitsubishi No. 11 Building at the heart of the government district in Maru-no-uchi, central Tokyo, which stood right behind the Meiji Building, the headquarters of the Legal Section of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Access was not an issue in this regard. The courtroom was later relocated to the Japan Youth Building (Nippon seinenkan) at Aoyama Gaien, which was another major structure under control of occupation authorities in the capital city and hardly an obscure location either. Major difficulties – according to Shimanouchi Tatsuoki, one of the Japanese who served in Toyoda’s advisory counsel – were rather that the charge leveled against the accused did not pique much interest among the public and that, moreover, the average Japanese would have had a hard time comprehending the English-only court proceedings. The public curiosity about the trials may have waned, too, given how mundane – or “commonplace” as Blakeney put it – war crimes prosecutions had become.