War crimes trials and the politics of justice: the case of Kinoshita Eiichi, 1945–57

Considerations of justice and of politics were closely interconnected in the post‐1945 Allied pursuit of Japanese war crimes suspects. Recent scholarship deals with the issue in broad terms, but this article shows the potential effect on individual cases, by examining the British pursuit of Lieutenant‐General Kinoshita Eiichi, held responsible for cruel torture of wartime prisoners in Shanghai. Using archival sources from Britain, Hong Kong and the U.S., parliamentary debates and contemporary newspapers, the article demonstrates that Allied authorities performed delicate and sometimes contradictory balancing acts in their pursuit of retributive justice for war crimes between 1945 and the late nineteen‐fifties.