Japan Still Honours The Calcutta Judge Who Stood Alone At Its War Crimes Trial

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a shrine in the heart of Tokyo stands a monument to a man most Indians have never heard of. He was not a soldier, a saint or a statesman. He was a judge from Calcutta, and the reason Japan still honours him lies in a single extraordinary act of dissent he committed more than seventy years ago, when he alone among eleven judges refused to send a defeated nation's leaders to the gallows. His name was Radhabinod Pal, and his is one of the strangest and most moving stories in the long history of India's ties with Japan.Also Read: He Worked For US Immigration By Day and Plotted Against The Raj By Night: The Taraknath Das Story

Who Was Radhabinod Pal?

Born in 1886 into a poor family in a Bengal village, in what is now Bangladesh, Pal rose through sheer intellect. He took his degrees in mathematics before turning to law, and taught himself international law so thoroughly that it would one day place him at the centre of a global reckoning. He became a judge of the Calcutta High Court in 1941 and vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta in 1944. He was, by every account, a scholar first, a man more at ease with legal principle than with politics.

How Did An Indian Judge End Up At Japan's War Crimes Trial?

After the Second World War, the victorious Allies set up the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Japan's answer to the Nuremberg trials, to judge its wartime leaders. Eleven judges were appointed, each from a nation on the winning side. India, then still under British rule, sent Pal. He was in fact the last judge chosen, added after protests that the bench carried no proper Asian voice. Twenty-eight of Japan's senior military and political figures stood accused, among them the wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo. The weight of the tribunal moved towards conviction. Pal did not.

What Did His Lone Dissent Actually Say?

Pal produced a dissenting judgement of around 1,235 pages, arguing that every defendant should be acquitted of the gravest charge, conspiracy to wage aggressive war. Two other judges, from France and the Netherlands, filed partial dissents, but Pal alone held that the accused were not guilty on every count. His objection was rooted in law, not sympathy. He held that the tribunal was applying rules invented after the events it was judging, a breach of the principle that no one may be punished under a law that did not exist at the time. He called the proceedings victor's justice, a legal ritual staged to satisfy a thirst for revenge. And he pointed to the glaring silence at its heart: that the colonial conduct of the Western powers and the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never placed on trial at all.

It is vital to understand what Pal was not saying. He did not deny Japan's atrocities. He acknowledged the horrors of the Nanking massacre and condemned Japanese wartime conduct in the harshest terms. His argument was about the fairness of the court and the even-handedness of the law, never the innocence of the accused. That distinction is the key to reading him honestly.

Why Does Japan Still Honour Him?

For a defeated and shamed nation, Pal's dissent was a lifeline. While much of the world branded Japan as simply evil, an Asian jurist had stood in the courtroom and insisted the trial was biased and politically driven. The gratitude ran deep. In 1966 the Emperor awarded Pal the Order of the Sacred Treasure, First Class, one of Japan's highest honours. Monuments to him were later raised at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo and at a shrine in Kyoto. Decades on, the affection held firm. In 2007, the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe made a point of flying to Kolkata to meet Pal's son, Prasanta, and to thank the family on behalf of the Japanese people.

Is His Legacy As Simple As It Seems?

Not quite, and an honest telling must say so. Pal's dissent has been embraced in Japan not only as a gesture of friendship but also, more troublingly, by nationalists who twist it into a claim that Imperial Japan did no wrong. The Yasukuni monument sits at the centre of that unease, for the shrine itself remains a lightning rod across Asia. Tojo is said to have left a haiku in Pal's honour before his execution. Pal himself would likely have rejected the uses to which his words have since been put, for he condemned the crimes even as he questioned the court. His legacy, like his judgement, resists an easy reading.Also Read: He Edited A Banned Newspaper To Spread Bhagat Singh's Ideas: The Sohan Singh Josh Story

Why Have So Few Indians Heard Of Him?

The thought worth carrying away is this. In Japan, Pal is close to a household name, quoted by prime ministers and honoured at shrines. In 2016, the actor Irrfan Khan brought him to a wider audience in a television dramatisation of the trial. In India, the country he represented, he is very nearly a stranger. Perhaps that is the quiet lesson of his life. Moral courage is seldom rewarded at home in its own time, and those who stand alone are often remembered last by their own people. The next time the phrase victor's justice is spoken, it is worth recalling the Calcutta judge who wrote more than a thousand pages to say it aloud, and a nation an ocean away that has never forgotten him for it.