Action under Coercion: An Explanation of the Acts and Words of the WWII Japanese War Criminals by the Play-Acting Theory of Action

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  • 権力の下での行為 : 日本人戦犯の心理と行為の演技論的考察
  • ケンリョク ノ シタ デ ノ コウイ : ニホンジン センパン ノ シンリ ト コウイ ノ エンギロンテキ コウサツ

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In this paper I propose an account of the acts and words of the WWII Japanese War Criminals. It will be made in terms of the play-acting theory of action. After the WWII the United Nations established the military tribunals for the Japanese officers and soldiers who were suspected to commit war crimes. The accused were called class ʻBʼ or class ʻCʼ war criminal suspects. The judicial decisions made upon them were based on a philosophical view that an officer or a soldier could be regarded as an individual who could have acted as a free, independent, moral agent even if he was put under a superior order in army. Moral individualism as this, however, was quite unfamiliar to the members of the Japanese armed forces. So they did not feel it acceptable to consider themselves as guilty on account of such an individualist conception of military activities. But they did not think themselves totally guiltless, either. Some of them accepted the death penalty considering themselves as a representative of the Japanese military, which had committed no small numbers of criminal acts as known to them. Nevertheless they could not take it to be true that they were personally guilty simply because they were obliged to do those things charged on them on some military command. But death penalty was inevitable. In this situation they would rather think it the case that they were sacrificed as a scapegoat for Japanʼs future flourishing or anything that be good for the Japanese people. In short, the total situation in tribunal coerced them to take the mandatory death as a voluntary self-sacrificial act of their own. They declined death on the scaffold in the depth of their mind but they could neither have occasions to establish their innocence from their view point nor escape the punishment altogether. They embarked on, in a sense, a kind of day-dream in which they were a voluntary victim that would be sacrificed for the sake of something sublime. In this way the penalty fallen upon them were systematically translated into an act of quite a different kind that might well be regarded as an act in a drama of martyrdom. They went through the capital punishment as if they were not a real person but a character in a play; they playacted. In this sense the process of law in the military tribunals after the WWII in the Far East might not achieve the expected end, that is, bringing about correct recognitions of the personal responsibility for the atrocities and massacres committed by the Japanese armed forces.

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