As the 80th anniversary of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East—better known as the Tokyo Trials—approaches, a significant collection of personal archives has surfaced to reinforce the historical record of World War II in Asia. The private journals and legal files of David Nelson Sutton, an American associate prosecutor who played a pivotal role in documenting Japanese war crimes, have been formally donated to the Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre.
Purchased at an American auction for nearly $100,000 by history collector Zou Dehuai, these eighteen sets of documents represent a rare bridge between Western legal proceedings and the ground-level reality of the 1937 massacre. Sutton, then 51, was dispatched to China twice in 1946 to investigate Japanese atrocities, bacteriological warfare, and economic exploitation. His findings eventually compiled a "wall of evidence" that became central to the prosecution’s case against Japan’s top-tier war criminals.
The diaries offer a visceral, day-by-day account of the legal machinery that sought to hold Imperial Japan’s leadership accountable. Entries detail Sutton's arrival in Nanjing in April 1946 and his subsequent impressions of the accused at the Tokyo Trials, whom he described as looking like a "sorry lot of losers" upon their first appearance in court. Beyond personal reflections, the collection includes an 89-page report titled "Nanjing Atrocities Against Civilians," featuring 27 Chinese witness testimonies that Sutton meticulously curated.
Crucially, the archive sheds light on the work of Robert Wilson, an American doctor at Nanjing’s Drum Tower Hospital who remained in the city during the occupation. Wilson’s first-hand accounts of treating victims—including an eight-year-old boy bayoneted by Japanese soldiers—were processed by Sutton to form the bedrock of the "ironclad evidence" presented to the 11-nation tribunal. For Beijing, the return of these documents is not merely an archival gain but a symbolic victory in the ongoing battle over historical narrative.
The donor, Zou Dehuai, emphasizes that these records serve as a vital warning to future generations in China, Japan, and the United States. By housing these Western-authored legal documents in Nanjing, the memorial hall aims to provide an unassailable rebuttal to historical revisionism. The collection serves as a stark reminder that the verdict of the Tokyo Trials was a multilateral legal consensus based on rigorous field investigation, rather than a mere victors' justice.