Scholar links Bush's US and Hirohito's Japan

A top US scholar of wartime Japan said Wednesday that the Bush administration's "war on terror" bore close parallels to Japan's past militarism through a defiance of international law.

Herbert Bix, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his landmark biography of wartime emperor Hirohito, said he believed US aerial bombings and alleged use of torture in Afghanistan and Iraq constituted war crimes.

"The current American rampage in Iraq and elsewhere, not to mention the Bush administration's threats of war against Iran, so clearly replicates Imperial Japan during the period when its leaders willfully disregarded international law and pursued the diplomacy of force," Bix said during a visit to Tokyo.

Japan defied the Nine-Party Treaty guaranteeing China's sovereignty, signed in 1922 in Washington, when imperial troops invaded Manchuria in 1931.

Bix compared Japan's action to current US efforts to scuttle the Treaty of Rome establishing the International Criminal Court, which President George W. Bush argues could unfairly target Americans.

He also said that senior US leaders -- not just rank-and-file soldiers -- should have been held to account for the killings of 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha.

"US war criminality is justice institutionalised, as Japan's once was," Bix said. AFP