Not really. I mean, yes, when the war ended, war criminals were sought out. But that was by the US military, which was occupying Japan at the time. There weren't amateurs like Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. But an important difference between the German and the Japanese war criminals is that, after 1952, there was no legal basis to arrest and put on trial the Japanese war criminals. With Nazi war criminals, there were still courts to try them. Plus Israel. Rudolf Hess was in prison until he died in 1987, and people are to this day still hunting Nazis. But the Japanese by and large disagreed with the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in a way that the Germans weren't really objecting to the Nuremberg Trials. The Japanese position was that it was ex post facto law to put on trial military and political leaders for actions that were not, according to Japanese law, illegal at the time they were committed. For this reason, when the Peace Treaty between the US and Japan was signed in 1952, President Truman granted Japan's request for amnesty for all suspected war criminals who were still uncaught. Part of the reason for the US allowing this was strategic--as the Cold War heated up, the US looked to Japan as an ally against communism. So starting as early as 1948, the US stopped seeking Japanese war criminals in order to put the past as enemies behind them and work towards a future alliance.

Making matters even more complicated was that the #1 war criminal was the Emperor, but the US made the strategic decision to not prosecute him--it was felt he was too strong of a figurehead. Keeping him in power would make controlling Japan easier. His son, the current Emperor, was at that time a young boy, so could not credibly take Emperor Hirohito's place in 1945. Complicating matters still further is that the US decided to not prosecute some of the most horrific war criminals of all--the men who ran unit 731, the human experimentation division in China. The things they did were nighmarishly evil, but in yet another strategic decision, the US let them go in exchange for the data they had collected. Those men went on to be leaders in the medical field in Japan, and there was just nothing that anyone could legally do.