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 travelled 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.

Indeed, many of postwar Japan’s nationalist leaders and thinkers have long upheld Judge 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 one of self-defence 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, Judge Pal has stepped back into the spotlight, where he remains a touchstone of the culture wars surrounding the Tokyo trials.

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