The postwar trajectory of the Japanese was in many respects quite similar to that of Germany's, although popular memory often holds that the Japanese faced no repercussions for their wartime activities.

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known more popularly as the Tokyo Trials, did put a number of Japanese defendants on trial for wartime actions. The Tokyo Trials were much like the Nuremberg IMT in that they were tribunals with judges from the victorious Allied powers and there was a hierarchical classification of both the defendants and their crimes. There was also a Pacific version of the National Military Tribunals (NMT) where individual occupation powers tried Japanese defendants for crimes committed against Allied nationals and soldiers. One of the ways the Asian NMT broke with their European counterparts was that the tribunal of Yamashita Tomoyuki actually touched upon American jurisprudence. The indicted Japanese general appealed to the US Supreme Court in Yamashita v. Steyer after his conviction, but SCOTUS refused to hear his case. The Tokyo Trials were also notable for what they did not do, namely try Hirohito. The Japanese Emperor was the nominal head of state but MacArthur and others in the American occupation government made a deliberate choice not to put Hirohito in the docket. The argument was that Hirohito was a figurehead forced into a war he did not want, hence there was no need for prosecution. While this defense has some merit, there was a sense at the time that the Class A defendants at the Tokyo Trials like Tojo Hideki were colluding with the American occupation to give cover for the Emperor. This was one of the clouds that hung over postwar estimations of the Tokyo Trials in that it allegedly showed a political imperative standing in the way of international justice.

But in general, the Tokyo Trials were mired in much of the same procedural murk, bickering between Allied powers, and lengthy tribunals as the IMT. Although popular memory holds that the IMT and NMTs to have successful in holding Germans accountable for Nazism, their actual record was rather mixed. Public opinion surveys in the American zones of Germany showed most Germans were bored by the tribunals and thought them unfair. Evidence from Germans outside the American zones such as the diaries of Victor Klemperer show this to be the case throughout Germany. Moreover, although the IMT convicted its share of defendants, the NMTs often ran into deeper resistance. The emerging Cold War took the sails out of NMT prosecutions as a number of Germans began advocating for clemency and occupation authorities began to argue that getting Germany back on its feet was more important than revisiting the Nazi era. There was only a brief window (ca. 1945-48) in which the Allied powers pursued these matters of justice with vigor. If a defendant in these NMTs received a capital sentence in this period, they might be executed, but other than that, most of those found guilty in the NMTs were amnestied during the period sometimes termed "amnesty fever" of ca. 1949-1955. One of the ironies of postwar Europe was that the safest place to be if one was a Nazi with a questionable past was Germany.

The Tokyo Trials were arguably as successful as the IMT, which is to say they underscored the incredible difficulties of these tribunals. Although there was an incredible amount of ink spilled in the Cold War over the legal failures of the IMTs (and this sense of failure did not take hold in popular memory), the international tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia have shown many of the same problems wherein tribunals take too long and get mired in dull procedural questions.