At the Tokyo Trial, the Chinese prosecution team — the smallest of all participating delegations, seventeen members in total, with fewer than ten working on the bench during courtroom sessions — faced off against an American delegation of more than a hundred, a Soviet delegation of more than seventy, and 112 defense lawyers serving Japan’s 28 Class-A war criminals, and still secured the indictment on 44 charges tied to crimes against China. It is one of the most stark resource-asymmetric victories in the history of international jurisprudence: what won justice was not resources, but will. Eighty years later (May 14, 2026), this episode is both the jurisprudential bedrock of the Sino-Japanese memory contest and the object of a systematic denialism campaign by the Japanese right.
“If This Was Not War, May I Ask — What Is?”
May 14, 2026 marks the 80th anniversary of the first address delivered by Xiang Zhejun (向哲濬), the Chinese prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. On May 14, 1946, in open court, a Japanese defense attorney mounted a not-guilty defense for the war criminals on the ground that Japan and China had not been at war — because Japan had never formally declared war on China.
Xiang Zhejun rebutted on the spot with evidence: from the Mukden Incident of September 18, 1931 onward, Japan had waged warlike operations inside China, killing millions of Chinese; the Marco Polo Bridge Incident alone had killed hundreds in a single night; and Japan had subsequently dispatched troops across the whole of China, sending countless innocent civilians to their deaths.
If this was not war, may I ask — what is?
On May 3, 2026, CCTV used AI to reconstruct Prosecutor Xiang Zhejun’s voice and resync it to the original courtroom footage — the first time in eighty years that people have been able to hear those resonant, sharply-delivered words.
The Extreme Resource Asymmetry: Seventeen Against the Hundreds
During the Tokyo Trial, the resource investments of the various parties showed a stunning asymmetry:
| Party | Delegation Size | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| United States | More than 100 | Lead party of the trial |
| Soviet Union | More than 70 | Active belligerent period relatively short |
| Japan (defense) | 112 defense lawyers | Serving only 28 Class-A defendants |
| China | 17 in total over the trial | Just 2 at the opening of the proceedings |
The Chinese indictment enumerated 55 charges against Japanese war criminals, of which no fewer than 44 were tied to crimes of aggression against China. Yet in the period — the heaviest stretch before and immediately after the trial opened — when the workload was most crushing, Xiang Zhejun’s prosecution team consisted only of himself and his secretary Qiu Shaoheng (裘劭恒) — two people.
The Chinese delegation was so undermanned that even the International Tribunal itself took notice. Foreign colleagues who saw them burning the midnight oil in solitary strain — both sympathetic and uneasy — urged the secretary to bring in more staff. The secretary was at a loss: he could hardly explain it as the country’s poverty, and even less as the government’s indifference.
Decades later, Professor Xiang Longwan (向隆万), Xiang Zhejun’s son, traveled to the United States to consult Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries and discovered that over those three years, Chiang’s entries on the Tokyo Trial amounted to just two.
This resource asymmetry was no accident. Victory in the War of Resistance did not immediately lift China’s international standing or state capacity. A country that had been bled for fourteen years and lost tens of millions of its people could not afford to maintain a large international judicial team. Yet it is precisely this lopsided predicament that underscores the historic weight of what Xiang Zhejun and his colleagues accomplished.
Stepping Aside in Favor of a Better Fit — Xiang Zhejun’s Strategic Foresight
Xiang Zhejun had originally been slated to serve as China’s judge at the Tokyo Trial. But he judged himself too old for the role (he was 54 at the time) and instead recommended his Tsinghua junior Mei Ju-ao (梅汝璈) — likewise trained in English-American law, likewise a fluent English speaker, and, at 42, much younger — to take the bench.
And yet, in the marathon of late nights and double-shifts that followed — one man doing the work of several — Xiang Zhejun never once cited his own age.
This decision mattered enormously: Mei Ju-ao’s distinguished performance at the Tokyo Trial — in particular his steadfast insistence on a death sentence during the sentencing debate — has become a classic moment in the history of Chinese jurisprudence. Xiang Zhejun’s stepping aside was not personal modesty but strategic judgment: he knew that a vigorous judge capable of sustained international-courtroom resistance was a better fit for the role than he himself was. That optimal-allocation thinking, in conditions of extreme resource scarcity, is one of the key reasons why the seventeen-person team managed to deliver results.
Four Institutional Contributions
Under Xiang Zhejun’s leadership, the prosecution team made at least four institutional contributions to the Tokyo Trial:
2.1 Pushing the Crime Window Back to 1928
The team succeeded in pushing the indictment’s starting date from 1937 back to the Huanggutun Incident of 1928. The International Prosecution Section ultimately relied on the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact, signed by fifteen states, as the legal basis, advancing the start of the indictment by nine years. This critical framing argued for Japan’s premeditation, broke the Japanese-side narrative that the Mukden Incident was an “accident,” and laid the cornerstone of the trial.
2.2 Recovering Key Defendants
On February 7, 1946 — the very day Xiang Zhejun arrived in Tokyo — he submitted a list of eleven Japanese war criminals wanted for crimes of aggression against China. Kenji Doihara had initially not been listed as a defendant on grounds of insufficient evidence; it was precisely the Chinese prosecutors’ persistence and effort that won both Doihara and Itagaki Seishirō over to the Chinese prosecution’s portfolio.
2.3 Cross-Border Evidence Collection
American prosecutor Sutton visited China twice, traveling to Shanghai, Beiping, Chongqing, and Nanjing, and assembled a large body of first-hand testimony, statistical records, and photographic archives. Zhu Shiming, China’s highest-ranking official in Japan at the time, personally persuaded MacArthur to open the sealed Japanese archives, giving Xiang Zhejun access to the war criminals’ own first-hand evidence.
2.4 Assistance From International Friends
Chief Prosecutor Joseph Keenan repeatedly pressed Nanjing to send more personnel and worked alongside Xiang Zhejun to interrogate the war criminals. Throughout those difficult years, these international friends formed what was, in effect, an extension of the “Chinese prosecution team.”
The Contemporary Confrontation of Historical Memory
Eighty years on (2026), the historical significance of the Tokyo Trial has become one of the central battlegrounds in the Sino-Japanese memory politics contest:
- The Japanese right’s systematic denialism: at 20:03 on the same day (May 14), Chang’anjie Zhishi (a commentary account affiliated with Beijing Daily) reported on a Japanese student who, after learning about the historical facts of the Nanjing Massacre at an international school, expressed remorse — and was furiously berated by her father for it. Japanese netizens piled in to declare that the child had been “brainwashed.”
- The institutionalization of the information-warfare budget: since China’s 2015 Victory Day parade, Japan has cumulatively spent more than 56 billion yen on anti-China opinion smearing; paid platforms now recruit netizens to spread falsehoods such as “the Nanjing Massacre is a lie,” and the practice has become a full-fledged industrial chain.
- The contemporary echo of Xiang Zhejun’s 80th-anniversary memorial: CCTV’s AI reconstruction of Xiang’s voice, paired against the Japanese right’s historical denialism, forms an eighty-year-spanning contrast between jurisprudential rebuttal and after-the-fact denial.
Shen Yi, 19:59 — 80th anniversary of the first address by Chinese prosecutor Xiang Zhejun at the Tokyo Trial
Chang’anjie Zhishi, 20:03 — Japanese schoolgirl’s guilt over the Nanjing Massacre scolded by her father: a contemporary sample of right-wing denialism