An Indian judge, remembered by fewer and fewer of his own countrymen 40 years after his death, is still big in Japan.
In recent weeks alone, NHK, the public broadcaster, devoted 55 minutes of prime time to his life, and a scholar came out with a 309-page book exploring his thinking and its impact on Japan. Capping it all, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, during a visit to India last week, paid tribute to him in a speech to the Indian Parliament in New Delhi and then traveled to Calcutta to meet the judge's 81-year-old son.
A monument to the judge -- erected two years ago at the Yasukuni shrine, the memorial to Japan's war dead and a rallying point for Japanese nationalists -- provides a clue to his identity: Radhabinod Pal, the only one out of 11 Allied justices who handed down a not-guilty verdict for Japan's top wartime leaders at the post-World War II International Military Tribunal for the Far East, or the Tokyo Trials.
"Justice Pal is highly respected even today by many Japanese for the noble spirit of courage he exhibited during the International Military Tribunal for the Far East," Abe told the Indian Parliament.
Many of postwar Japan's nationalist leaders and thinkers have long upheld Pal as a hero, seizing on -- and often distorting -- his dissenting opinion at the Tokyo Trials to argue that Japan did not wage a war of aggression in Asia but rather one of self-defense and liberation.
As nationalist politicians like Abe have gained power in recent years, and as like-minded academics and journalists have pushed forward a revisionist view of Japan's wartime history, Pal has stepped back into the spotlight.
Abe, who has cast doubt on the validity of the Tokyo Trials in the past, avoided elaborating on his views in the Indian Parliament or during his 20-minute meeting with Pal's son, Prasanta. But the meeting's subtext was not lost on some Japanese newspapers, which warned that it would hardly help repair Japan's poor image among its neighbors.
After the war, conventional war crimes by the Japanese, categorized as Class B and Class C, were handled in local trials throughout Asia. Twenty-five top leaders were charged with Class A crimes -- of waging aggressive wars and committing crimes against peace and humanity -- and tried in Tokyo by justices from 11 countries.
It was not clear why the British and US authorities selected Pal, who had served in Calcutta's high court and strongly sympathized with the anti-colonial struggle in India. As an Asian nationalist, he saw things very differently from the other judges.
In colonizing parts of Asia, Japan had merely aped the Western powers, he said.
While he fully acknowledged Japan's war atrocities -- including the Nanjing massacre -- he said they were covered in the Class B and C trials.
Pal also described the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US as the worst atrocities of the war, comparable with Nazi crimes.
The US occupation of Japan ended in 1952, after Tokyo signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty and accepted the Tokyo Trials' verdict.
But the end of the occupation also lifted a ban on the publication of Pal's 1,235-page dissent, which Japanese nationalists brandished and began using as the basis of their argument that the Tokyo trials were a sham.
Takeshi Nakajima, an associate professor at the Hokkaido University Public Policy School whose book Judge Pal, was published last month, said that Japanese critics of the trials selectively chose passages from his dissent.
"Pal was very hard on Japan, though he of course spoke very severely of the United States," Nakajima said.
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