Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will have a busy day in Kolkata on Thursday but he has let it be known that he wants to spend some time with a certain Pal family.

Because Prashanta Pal of 16 F, Dover Lane is the son of the late Radha Binod Pal, the judge who’s remembered for his dissenting verdict in the Tokyo trial of Japanese war criminals by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East after World War II.

Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, Japan’s Industry and Commerce Minister from 1941 till the surrender in 1945, was imprisoned as a suspected Class A war criminal for three years. Unlike Tojo and others in the Cabinet, Kishi was never tried by the Tribunal. He later went on to become Japan’s Prime Minister.

Prashanta Pal recalls the visit to Japan with his father in 1966. “We even had a Dr Pal Reception Committee waiting for us.”

“I remember Kishi. He would call me Prashanto. He once asked his secretary to take me out to a night club. I was embarrassed because he said this in my father’s presence.”

So when Abe’s Kolkata visit plans were being drawn up, the Japanese Consulate proposed that he meet the PM. Pal took his own time to say yes because “I am 81, have almost lost my eyesight and can barely step out unaccompanied.”

The Consul General came home with mementoes on which Pal and family engraved their signatures. “These were dried oranges, preserved by Kishi when he was in prison. His daughter (Shinzo Abe’s mother) had saved them.”