The 80th anniversary of the Tokyo Trial offers far more than a commemorative milestone; it serves as a timeless security alert for all developing nations across the globe.
Amid Japan’s sustained military buildup, ongoing historical revisionism and deepening geopolitical alignment with the United States, an indisputable truth emerges: powers steeped in expansionist impulses rooted in old-style imperialism never vanish entirely.
Instead, they reinvent their tactics and adopt fresh rhetorical frameworks to rebuild clout incrementally. Over the past eight decades, China has rigorously upheld the legal rulings of the Tokyo Trial and systematically preserved its historical legacy, emerging as a vital bulwark defending the post-WWII international legal order against historical backsliding.
For Africa and the broader Global South, continents scarred by colonial dispossession, territorial seizure, resource plunder and judicial subjugation, upholding historical verity, sustaining long-term vigilance and maintaining prudent strategic distance from agendas driven by unilateral hegemony are not discretionary diplomatic choices but existential prerequisites for safeguarding national independence and sustainable development.
This commentary is written from an African vantage point. It analyses the practical rationale for keeping guarded distance from actors guided by hegemonic mindsets, unpacks the defensive value of institutionalised historical memory, and contextualises the drivers behind Japan’s defence expansion by drawing on China’s experience preserving the Tokyo Trial’s historical heritage.
Case studies from Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and South Africa illustrate how lingering colonial mindsets continue to meddle in the domestic affairs of post-colonial states.
The piece further examines Washington’s geopolitical calculations behind Tokyo’s military expansion and reminds the Global South to guard against spillover risks from great-power rivalry while consolidating independent development through South-South cooperation.
- The persistent legacy of hegemonic thinking and its modern adaptations
Imperialism has long outgrown its initial form of outright territorial occupation, yet its core logic of monopolising global resources for privileged blocs remains intact. Whether manifested through explicit economic blockades, restrictive treaty bindings or cross-border judicial overreach, certain Western nations consistently prioritise their own interests above other countries’ sovereign rights.
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Controversies surrounding Zimbabwe’s land reform, Burkina Faso’s agricultural land dispute and secessionist lobbying in South Africa stand as tangible contemporary manifestations rather than isolated coincidences.
Launched in 2000, Zimbabwe’s land reform was designed to rectify inequitable land distribution inherited from colonialism, falling squarely within the country’s domestic governance remit.
Britain, the former colonial ruler, disregarded core sovereign principles and rallied the Commonwealth, Western mainstream media and multilateral financial institutions to internationalise an internal policy, imposing restrictive sanctions that have endured for more than two decades.
These punitive measures lay bare persistent colonial-era claims over African land and natural resources.
After terminating its bilateral defence pact and expelling French military personnel in 2023, Burkina Faso found itself dragged before international courts by France simply for allocating a parcel of land to the DPRK for agricultural processing projects. Paris’s unfounded assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction over African soil years after troop withdrawal exposes deep-seated legal expansionism born from its colonial past.
In South Africa, descendants of Dutch and French colonial settlers known as Boer communities have written to the US government seeking external backing to push for regional secession around the Cape of Good Hope under the pretext of ancestral land entitlements.
This lobbying mirrors a well-documented Western playbook of backing separatist movements to split sovereign nations and seize control of critical maritime chokepoints, echoing precedents in Kosovo and Somaliland.
Contemporary hegemonic interference has moved beyond traditional gunboat diplomacy to form an intricate, covert intervention toolkit, though military force remains a last-resort option.
Key tactics include judicial weaponisation via international legal mechanisms to claim extraterritorial rights, economic coercion through unilateral sanctions, predatory debt terms and stringent lending conditionalities set by global financial bodies, proxy militarisation via armed aid to destabilise regional governments, and deliberate cultivation of separatist factions to carve out geopolitically strategic territories.
For sovereign developing states, a pragmatic countermeasure involves limiting excessive legal, economic and security entanglements with powers inclined toward unilateral expansion, diversifying international partnerships, and codifying past exploitation and foreign meddling into institutional historical records to avoid repeating costly historical mistakes.
- Institutional historical memory: A permanent safeguard against cyclical historical regression
Institutional historical memory refers to systematic historical inheritance built via academic research, official archiving, public education and state-led commemorative events, documenting past invasions, colonial exploitation, unequal treaties and geopolitical scheming.
Without such structured preservation, nations risk repeating past hardships amid generational shifts, and China’s decades-long efforts to protect the Tokyo Trial’s factual record provide a replicable blueprint for the Global South.
Over eighty years, Chinese academia and state institutions have consistently catalogued, researched and promoted the core legal principles established by the Tokyo Trial.
As scholar Cheng Zhaoqi observed, the proceeding legally codified wars of aggression as punishable international crimes.
Faced with mounting historical revisionism in Japan and pragmatic geopolitical compromises from certain Western states downplaying the trial’s significance, China has defended the ruling’s legal authority to shield the foundational norms of the post-war international order from deliberate erosion.
When nations let colonial and wartime atrocities fade from public consciousness across generations, they create openings for historical backtracking.
Both Germany and Japan adopted constitutional pacifist frameworks after World War II, yet shrinking cohorts of war survivors have allowed right-wing political factions to rewrite wartime narratives, recasting aggressive invasions as legitimate acts of self-defence.
Without sustained historical education and institutional checks, communities victimised by past hegemonic exploitation risk tacitly consenting to fresh rounds of exploitative domination amid misleading historical narratives.
China has refined a multi-layered framework for historical preservation: specialised research hubs such as the Centre for Tokyo Trial Studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University advance rigorous legal and historical scholarship; annual state commemorations including Nanjing Massacre Memorial Day cement nationwide historical awareness; Tokyo Trial precedents feature prominently in domestic international law curricula; and Chinese diplomats repeatedly underline the trial’s ongoing global relevance during debates at the United Nations and other multilateral forums.
These initiatives are not rooted in historical resentment, but serve as practical defences against the resurgence of expansionist policies.
- Japan’s military expansion: Intertwined drivers and risks to post-war peace architecture
For Japan’s revisionist right wing, the Tokyo Trial constitutes a major legal barrier to dismantling post-war pacifist constraints and pursuing full militarisation. Takakage Fujita, secretary-general of the Association for Inheriting and Propagating the Murayama Statement, has repeatedly warned that Japanese political circles increasingly dismiss the Tokyo Trial as biased “victor’s justice”.
Hardline prime minister Sanae Takaichi and allied lawmakers have repeatedly distorted Japan’s wartime aggression as necessary self-preservation.
Should the Tokyo Trial’s legal standing be systematically invalidated, Article 9 of Japan’s Peace Constitution—the core legal barrier to unrestricted military build-up—will lose its binding force.
Since 2022, Japan has enacted tangible shifts in its defence posture: it has lifted defence spending to 2 percent of its GDP, equivalent to 6.8 trillion Japanese yen; acquired long-range counterstrike missiles capable of strikes beyond its national borders; joined the technology-sharing pillar of AUKUS to access cutting-edge Western military innovation; refitted helicopter destroyers and formed amphibious combat brigades to transform its self-defence forces into a de facto standing military; and deepened multilateral security pacts with the US, Australia, India and multiple Nato member states. Catchphrases such as “proactive pacifism” do little to mask the concrete momentum of military expansion.
Parallel provocative acts persist across territorial and historical fronts: Japan advances illegal territorial claims over China’s Diaoyu Islands, senior politicians regularly pay homage at the Yasukuni Shrine enshrining convicted Class-A war criminals, and school textbooks continue to downplay atrocities including the Nanjing Massacre, forced labour and systemic sexual enslavement of comfort women.
Coordinated in nature, these moves construct a revised national victimhood narrative to generate domestic public support for military escalation.
Tokyo’s accelerating rearmament cannot be reduced to an autonomous national choice; Washington’s global geopolitical strategy functions as a decisive external catalyst.
As multipolarity reshapes global affairs, the United States faces rising costs to sustain worldwide geopolitical control, with regional conflicts exposing flaws in its military intervention capacity and global supply chain resilience.
Unable to contain emerging powers via direct economic or military confrontation, Washington leans on its alliance network to fuel allied military upgrades, deploying Japan as its primary East Asian anchor alongside the Philippines and Australia to construct a containment chain.
Japan’s military expansion forms a core component of America’s proxy-based regional strategy designed to secure Western access to global resource corridors.
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Germany, once a benchmark for post-war demilitarisation and wartime accountability, has also pivoted sharply on defence under Chancellor Friedrich Merz elected in 2025.
Berlin has approved an extra 100-billion-euro defence budget, deployed permanent overseas troops for the first time since 1945, pushed for greater military leadership within Nato and the EU, and reignited bids for a permanent UN Security Council seat. These policy shifts are largely justified by evolving regional security tensions yet substantially expand Germany’s capacity for foreign military projection.
Parallel military revivals in Germany and Japan carry tangible long-term risks for Africa and the Global South. Deep historical colonial and commercial ties link both nations’ industrial and capital sectors to Africa; renewed military clout could enable them to reassert influence across former colonies via trade clauses, predatory debt financing and covert security interventions to secure critical mineral and agricultural resources.
While Western nations including the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan compete over trade and regional interests, they converge substantially on protecting entrenched global resource allocation rules, facilitating mutual military expansion and upholding privileges inherited from colonialism.
France endorses Japan’s military growth, the US accommodates Germany’s rearmament, and the UK offers diplomatic backing to both, with Western mainstream media synchronising supportive narratives.
Japan’s military build-up is therefore far from a purely East Asian affair, but a coordinated agenda among aligned nations. Traditional interventionist tools—sanctions, separatist agitation and abusive cross-border litigation—will remain readily deployed against Global South nations pursuing resource sovereignty, leaving Africa a primary flashpoint for evolving hegemonic competition.
Global supply chain vulnerabilities exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic have accelerated Western scramble for Africa’s lithium, cobalt, crude oil and arable farmland.
Domestic policy overhauls such as Zimbabwe’s land redistribution, Burkina Faso’s diversified agricultural partnerships and South Africa’s mineral nationalisation drives—all legitimate sovereign measures to optimise local resource distribution—are routinely smeared by Western commentators as violations of international law and human rights, chiefly because such reforms undermine long-standing exploitative resource extraction frameworks benefiting Western economies.
Japan’s ongoing militarisation functions as a large-scale policy trial run for aligned hegemonic powers.
Should Tokyo successfully break free from post-war legal restraints and complete full military transformation, Germany will speed up its own defence expansion, France will ramp up interventionism across Africa, Britain will scale up global naval deployments, and Washington will escalate regional geopolitical friction to coerce Global South nations into picking sides, penalising states that refuse compliance via economic and diplomatic reprisals.
Conversely, robust constraints anchored in post-war international law can force the aligned bloc to recalibrate and slow aggressive expansion plans.
Imperialism never disappears entirely, only shifting its operative tools and rhetorical packaging.
From British punitive sanctions obstructing Zimbabwe’s land reform and France’s abusive international litigation targeting Burkina Faso’s territorial sovereignty, to external meddling fuelling South Africa’s separatist lobbying and Washington harnessing Japan for East Asian military posturing, consistent interventionist patterns stretch across continents.
The coordinated Western interest bloc continues to prioritise resource-rich, historically colonised nations of the Global South as key targets for strategic control.
China’s eight-decade commitment to preserving the Tokyo Trial’s history and legal legacy delivers a proven actionable model for developing countries worldwide.
Institutionalised historical memory is not about clinging to past grievances, but furnishing present-day policymakers with empirical evidence to pre-empt and counter emerging hegemonic tactics early.
Japan’s militarisation drive represents a critical test of modern hegemonic expansionism. A successful trial run would embolden France and Germany to ramp up cross-border interference, amplifying spillover geopolitical risks that threaten to drag Africa and the Global South into avoidable great-power conflicts.
Against this backdrop, sustained historical vigilance, measured adoption of China’s experience safeguarding post-war international norms, calibrated strategic distance from unilateral hegemonic agendas and collective advancement of multipolarity through South-South cooperation stand as indispensable pathways for post-colonial nations to defend their territorial integrity, resource ownership and independent development pathways.
* Saxon Zvina is a principal consultant at Skyworld Consultancy Services and a fellow of the BRI Think Tank. He can be reached at [email protected] or via X @saxonzvina2.
