[Part I of a two part series on the treatment of prisoners of war examines Japan's World War II treatment of prisoners and the verdicts of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal punishing prisoner abuse. Utsumi Aiko is Japan's leading specialist on World War II POW issues. See also the two part article by Wall Street Journal correspondent Jess Bravin on the rights, and abuses of those rights, of POWs under the Japanese in World War II and the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The articles raise important issues about responsibility: the responsibility of the soldier who commits abuses of prisoners, and the officials at the highest levels who frame policies of degradation and atrocities. The analogy should be a chilling one for a nation that pioneered, in the wake of World War II, in pressing charges of prisoner abuse and insisting on responsibility both of the immediate perpetrator of violations of human rights, on up through the chain of command to the highest authority.]