Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, risked irritating Beijing and Seoul during a state visit to India on Thursday by paying homage to a Bengali judge revered by Japanese militarists for denouncing the legitimacy of the 1946-1948 Tokyo war crimes trials.
In a gesture to nationalists disappointed by his decision not to visit the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo last week to commemorate the end of the second world war, Mr Abe held a 20-minute meeting with the son of Justice Radhabinod Pal in Kolkata.
Aides described it as a “courtesy visit”.
Justice Pal, who died in 1967, was the only judge at the war crimes trial to rule that all the defendants – including Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister – were innocent.
His dissenting judgment has been seized on by those who say that Japan was subjected to “victors’ justice” and that its leaders were condemned under international laws applied retroactively.
Vivek Pinto, a visiting research fellow at Tokyo’s International Christian University, said: “Pal has become a rightwing darling.” The veneration of Pal, the subject of a tribute at the Yasukuni shrine, “shows the right is determined to show that the [Tokyo] trial was a big hoax, which in a sense it was”.
Mr Abe, who has pledged to restore Japanese pride and release it from what he calls the “postwar regime”, has had to put aside some of his convictions in the interests of better relations with China. He has not visited Yasukuni, where a number of Class A war criminals are honoured but compromised by sending an expensive potted plant to the shrine.
More than one commentator has likened his meeting with Pal’s son to a proxy visit to Yasukuni aimed at salving his conscience and mollifying some of his more nationalistic supporters.
South Korea’s biggest newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, criticised the meeting, saying in an editorial before it took place: “He will travel all the way to India to embrace the descendants of a judge hailed as a hero by Japanese militarists for claiming innocence for Class A war criminals.”
The judge has become a potent, if ambiguous, symbol of Indo-Japanese understanding. In 2005, Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, told a New Delhi banquet in honour of the last visiting Japanese premier, Junichiro Koizumi, that Pal’s dissenting judgment would “always symbolise the affection and regard our people have for your country”.
In a separate foray into sensitive wartime areas, which still dominate Asian diplomacy, Mr Abe met descendants of Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian nationalist who sided with imperial Japan during the second world war. Japan’s right says Bose confirms its view that, in the 1930s and 1940s, the country was waging a war of liberation from colonialism – not a war of aggression.
