He was E. Stuart McDougall (1886-1957, a judge of the Quebec court of appeal and very briefly a Quebec cabinet minister in the 1930s.) Bass has almost nothing to say about him except to note that he, along with the Australian and New Zealand judges, worked in close concert with the British judge and formed the core of the majority consensus on the tribunal. The closest Bass comes to anything about McDougall personally is his comment that in the sweltering summer heat of Tokyo, "the Canadian judge, acclimatized to Montreal temperatures, was especially miserable."
Americans! If a place is north of the border, it surely can know nothing of summer heat.
More about the book itself shortly.
Update, November 28: The war crimes trial of the Japanese leadership after World War Two was a good deal less successful than the Nuremburg trials that preceded it. The Japanese defence argued effectively against the charge of waging aggressive war, not only by arguing that such a crime did not exist in international law, but also by arguing that Japan's war aim -- building up its imperial holdings in Asia -- mirrored what the prosecuting powers had always done and continued to do even as the trial went on. And in response the charges of war crimes and atrocities, the Japanese could simply point to Hiroshima. The judge from India strongly endorsed these defences and argued for the acquittal of all the defendants.
Bass's method is to focus closely on the trial itself, almost a day by day and judgment by judgment recitation. The part of his title "... and the making of modern Asia" is developed only briefly, in an epilogue. (The executions of those convicted are given a great deal more space.) It is easy to grasp how the debates at the trial and among the judges would be picked up in anti-imperialist movements across Asia and the rest of the colonized world, but that is mostly implied rather than worked out in detail.
I was impressed by the evidence Bass's book provides of what might be called the historical-industrial complex, faced with materials that took "years and years to get through." Bass is not a specialist in Japanese history and acknowledges he does not read Japanese or Chinese, But he was able to assign researchers to translate everything of possible interest (rather than make notes or summaries) in the Japanese and Chinese archives, and he read all the translations whether he used them or not. That takes a well-funded scholar!
Update, December 2: Gary Bass gets in touch to tell me, gently:
You had an amusing complaint that provincial Americans don’t know about Canadian temperatures. As it happens, I’m Canadian and grew up in Toronto (also have US citizenship), and have some basis for writing that Montréal summers are milder than those in Tokyo.
I grew in Vancouver and still find summers in both Toronto and Montréal pretty steamy and sticky. But I've never been to Tokyo, so I defer to his experience.
