Road Show

The International Military Tribunal in Tokyo looked last week like a third-string road company of the Nurnberg show.

It was not that civilization's taste for justice was jaded, or that preparations for the trial of high Japanese war criminals had been halfhearted. Allied legal authorities had worked on the 55 -count indictment for eight months. Much care had gone into fitting the courtroom with dark, walnut-toned paneling, imposing daises, convenient perches for the press and motion picture cameramen. The klieg lights suggested a Hollywood premiere.

Nurnberg's impresarios had used simpler furnishings, relied on the majesty of the concept to set the tone. The German production had a touch of Wagner -- elaborate vaunting of guilt, protestations of heroic innocence. Tokyo's had the flavor of Gilbert & Sullivan.

The 28 Japanese war criminals, clutching ribboned copies of their indictment, shuffled into court like schoolboys carrying their primers to class. In the shadow of reckoning and doom, they giggled and gossiped. In the role created by Robert Jackson, U.S. Chief Prosecutor Joseph B. Keenan was pushing a sober trial of "crimes against peace" and "crimes against humanity." But Prosecutor Kee nan (who looks like W. C. Fields) had to deal with the opera bouffe element which the West so often finds in the Japanese character. The chief Jap defendant, Hideki Tojo, picked his nose unconcernedly and flirted with an American stenographer. Hiroshi Oshima, wartime ambassador to Germany, affected the dandy, with white pocket handkerchief, smart bow tie and black-ribboned pince-nez.

Shumei Okawa, onetime Manchurian railway official, carried comic indifference into broad buffoonery. He-interrupted proceedings by opening his crumpled shirt and rubbing his scrawny chest. Although a U.S. lieutenant colonel was assigned to watch him, Okawa slyly outwitted him, twice darted from his chair to smack startled Tojo's gleaming pate. Let out of court for a sanity test, he babbled in high-pitched English: "I don't like the U.S.; America is democrazy."

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