Saturday, November 23, 2024

Book Notes: Canada in the post -World War II Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal

I've been reading in Gary Bass's Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia, a finalist for the Cundill History Prize 2024. There was a Canadian on the panel of judges at the Tokyo trial of Japan's accused war criminals, and I naturally wanted to find out a bit about him.

 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. But 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.  

  

 
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