June 9 marks International Archives Day. As the “living witnesses to history”, archival records play a decisive role in the prosecution of war crimes. Eighty years ago, a silent “battle for the archives” unfolded in Tokyo, Japan.

In the period immediately before and after Japan’s surrender in 1945, the Japanese military launched a systematic campaign to destroy official records. Large quantities of confidential documents documenting the atrocities committed by Japanese forces were deliberately burned. By the time American forces officially entered Tokyo, more than three months had elapsed since the large-scale destruction of documents, leaving the Allied powers with only limited original materials. As a result, the evidence-gathering efforts of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Trial) were, for a time, confronted with enormous difficulties.

Faced with Japan’s deliberate destruction of evidence, the Chinese prosecution team fought a painstaking “battle for the archives” during the Tokyo Trial. After obtaining permission to enter the former Imperial Japanese Army archives, which had been sealed off, they conducted around-the-clock searches through the remaining files and ultimately uncovered a number of crucial documents. Ni Zhengyu, Chief Adviser to the Chinese prosecution, discovered the military directive Restrictions on Statements by Military Personnel Returning to Japan from China, which explicitly prohibited returning soldiers from discussing the atrocities committed in China. The document directly refuted the defense’s claim that the Japanese military had maintained strict discipline and had never engaged in indiscriminate killings. Meanwhile, Gao Wenbin, a translator of the Chinese team, came across the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun while reviewing newspaper collections. There he discovered the newspaper’s notorious series of reports on the “Hundred-Man Killing Contest”, which included photographs of Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda posing with their swords, together with detailed accounts of the so-called “contest”. These reports later became key evidence in the Nanjing Trial, leading to the execution of the two war criminals.

In addition to the surviving Japanese archives, the Chinese team also undertook an extensive search for diplomatic records from third parties, including reports filed by the United States Embassy on conditions in Nanking after the city’s fall and top-secret telegrams and accompanying documents sent to Germany by the German Ambassador to China, Oskar Paul Trautmann. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that, although Germany was Japan’s wartime ally, its diplomatic missions objectively documented the killings, arson, rape, and looting committed by Japanese troops in Nanking. These records, originating from different sources and different perspectives, corroborated the surviving Japanese documents and together formed an unbroken chain of evidence, providing indispensable evidentiary support for the historic judgments rendered by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.

The Chinese Prosecution Team at the Tokyo Trial