Seventy years after they were first convened, a Chinese language transcript of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal has been released at this year's Shanghai Book Fair.
The edited transcript details the proceedings of the trial of Japanese wartime leaders, and its publishers say they hope it can give Chinese readers a better understanding of the country's history.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, also known as the Tokyo Trials, was first convened in 1946 following the Japanese surrender at the end of the Second World War, to try Japanese leaders for war crimes.
This new book selects portions of the proceedings' transcripts relating to China and translates them into Chinese for the first time. And it was attracting plenty of attention at this year's Shanghai Book Fair.
The book was jointly published by Shanghai Jiaotong University Press and the National Library of China Publishing House. The book's translator, Xiang Longwan, is the son of the chief China prosecutor at the Tokyo Trials. Xiang said he hoped the book would help Chinese people learn more about the country's wartime history.
"He took part in all the trial, and from the trial proceeding, you can find many talks in the court from my father. At that time, I was young, only five years to eight years, too young, so I just knew my father was to Tokyo, and sometimes back, and in the evening type-writing some documents, the next morning, back to Tokyo," Xiang said.
"We published this book to make it more convenient for Chinese readers to learn the trial. The original English transcript has over 50,000 pages, a heavy volume. The transcript records irrefutable evidences of war crimes that were convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East," said Cheng Zhaoqi, director of CTR for The Tokyo Trial Studies, Sh Jiaotong University.
It is now 70 years since the tribunal was first convened and the publishers of the transcripts say they expect more books about the trials will be released by the end of the year.
