TOKYO, May 4 (Xinhua) -- A few hundred meters from the east exit of Tokyo's Ikebukuro Station stands a sprawling commercial complex, Sunshine City. Next to it, East Ikebukuro Central Park offers a pleasant pocket of greenery.
Without knowing its history, it is difficult to associate this place with the Tokyo Trial of eighty years ago.
Actually, this site was once a prison. Built in 1895, it went by different names over the years, including Sugamo Prison and Tokyo Detention House.
Before and during World War II, the prison was used primarily to hold political prisoners, including government dissenters. After Japan's defeat in 1945, the Allied occupation forces took over the facility and converted it into Sugamo Prison for the detention of Japanese war criminals.
In addition to the Class-A war criminals tried at the Tokyo Trial, many Class-B and Class-C war criminals were also held there, with the inmate population reaching nearly 2,000 at its peak.
"Class-A war criminals prosecuted at the Tokyo Trial were mostly wartime leaders. Class-B and Class-C war criminals were mainly those involved in specific wartime acts, for example, abusing prisoners of war and killing civilians," said Aiko Utsumi, a professor emeritus at Keisen University in Japan.
In 1948, seven Class-A war criminals, including Hideki Tojo, were executed in Sugamo Prison. Some Class-B and Class-C war criminals were also put to death at the site. For a time, Sugamo Prison became a central arena of war accountability in postwar Japan.
But that mass reckoning proved short-lived.
As the Allied occupation of Japan came to an end in 1952, the handling of war criminals began to shift.
On one hand, the outbreak of the Cold War prompted U.S. occupation authorities to recalibrate their policies towards Japan to integrate the country into the Western bloc. On the other hand, after Japan regained its full sovereignty, a domestic movement calling for the release of convicted war criminals started to gain momentum.
"There was a reluctance in Japanese society at the time to accept the judgment of the war crimes trials," Utsumi said, adding that many people believed that Japan had simply been forced to accept the verdicts because it had lost the war, and that the convicted war criminals were victims who had borne the brunt of a one-sided judgment imposed by the Allied powers.
Under such a climate, a petition campaign demanding the release of war criminals spread quickly. Organizations supporting war criminals and their families also emerged across Japan.
Utsumi said that through this process, a new interpretive logic had gradually taken shape in the country: the war crimes trials had been conducted by the Allied powers, not by Japan's own judicial system, and therefore, those individuals did not violate Japanese domestic laws and should not be regarded as "war criminals" within Japan. Under this logic, the convicted were not only released one by one but also became eligible for government allowances and pensions.
It was against this backdrop that Sugamo Prison moved toward its end. In 1958, the prison was closed after the release of the last group of war criminals. The surrounding areas subsequently underwent urban rezoning, and the original structures were demolished in 1971. By 1978, Sunshine City had risen on the site, quickly establishing itself as one of Tokyo's commercial landmarks.
The prison, once dedicated to enforcing accountability for the war, had been entirely remade into a place of consumption and entertainment. On the surface, this was nothing more than normal urban renewal. But beneath the surface, it reflected postwar Japanese society's intent to downplay its war responsibility and distort the collective memory of the past.
Such a transformation is not an isolated case in Tokyo.
Junichi Hasegawa, head of an association that organizes tours of war-linked sites across Tokyo, has spent years tracking them down and mapping them against the city's present-day landscape.
He produced a "Shinjuku peace map" that uses current city blocks as a reference grid, marking the precise locations of former Japanese army training grounds, logistics facilities, and other military installations.
In Hasegawa's view, successive rounds of urban renewal have rendered wartime traces almost unrecognizable, and with them, society's collective memory of war responsibility has been fading.
He noted that when today's students learn history primarily from textbooks that cast Japan as a victim, with little awareness of Japan's history of aggression, they often fail to realize that the baseball field beneath their feet may once have been a wartime training ground.
Today, the only trace of Sugamo Prison that remains in East Ikebukuro Central Park is a small stone monument in one corner. The inscription reads: "Praying for eternal peace," with no further explanation of the prison's history.
When the physical reminders meant to keep history alive have vanished, and when the war responsibility that deserves concrete reckoning is reduced to a simple prayer, the history of Japan's brutal aggression risks disappearing from public memory. ■
