The 1946-1948 Tokyo Trial court records explicitly establishes the history of Japan's war of aggression, and the publication of Chinese translation will enable more people to access key historical records and gain a clearer understanding of truth, said Chinese scholars participating in the record's translation work.
China on Thursday released the first complete Chinese translation of records, 80 years after the landmark tribunal that brought Japan's wartime leaders to justice.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, convened in Tokyo in 1946 by 11 countries, sentenced figures including former Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo to death for crimes against humanity. However, the court documents were primarily written in English and Japanese, while Chinese-language records remained fragmented.
The newly published translation spans 40 volumes, totaling more than 20,000 pages and 22 million characters. Launched at the Zhejiang Yuexiu University in Shaoxing, a city in east China's Zhejiang Province, the project fills a domestic archival gap after more than a decade of work.
Ye Xingguo, head of the translation team, said that the translation work gives more people access to true history.
"By translating it into Chinese, we greatly expanded the readership and significantly increased its reach. This history must not be forgotten," Ye said.
Zhao Yuhui, an associate research fellow at the Institute for War Trials and World Peace at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said that presenting the complete record in Chinese is of special strategic significance for remembering and defending historical truth and maintaining world peace.
"After learning about the history of the Tokyo Trials, one can see how an international court made a ruling 80 years ago on this history—that is, it definitively concluded that Japan's war of aggression was an international war crime," she said.
Chinese translation of 1946-1948 Tokyo Trials records to expose truth to more: scholars
