Judge Radhabinod Pal, Imphal, Hiroshima and the unequal memory of empire
Deep Dispatch 003 · Tokyo Dispatch · Law, War and Historical Memory · India–Japan · 11 October 2026
Justice is easiest to pronounce from the winner’s bench. It becomes meaningful only when the same law can reach the victor, the defeated, the enemy—and ourselves.
My grandfather narrowly escaped being sent to the front at the end of the Pacific War. His brothers did not. All of them died.
In my family’s telling, one was a senior naval officer who remained aboard as his warship went down. I grew up with the feeling that the Japan in which I live was built partly on lives like theirs: men who did not return, families that absorbed the silence, and descendants who inherited questions that no ceremony could settle.
When I say that this history is in my DNA, I do not mean biological hatred. I mean that memory has become instinct.
But honouring my family does not require me to say that Imperial Japan’s war was just. Their deaths do not prove the wisdom of the men who commanded them. They prove that ordinary people paid, with their bodies, for decisions made above them.
To honour them honestly, I must reject two evasions at once: the Japanese military leadership’s refusal to answer for the lives it consumed, and the victorious powers’ claim to exclusive moral authority.
This essay is written from that refusal.
A Japanese essay titled “Judge Pal’s Battle,” originally published in 1998 and republished on note in 2025, presents Radhabinod Pal—the Indian judge at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East—as the jurist who exposed the Tokyo Trial as punishment written by the victors after victory.
Its central challenge remains powerful. If aggressive war, mass killing and abuse of prisoners are crimes, can a tribunal claim justice while excluding the conduct of the states that created it? Can the Soviet Union sit in judgment after violating the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact? Can powers that incinerated cities treat civilian destruction as morally relevant only when committed by the defeated?
Those questions should not be buried.
But Pal must not be turned into a mascot for Japanese innocence. His judgment was more difficult—and more valuable—than that.
Pal concluded that every defendant should be acquitted on every charge. His central legal objections concerned retroactivity, jurisdiction and selective prosecution.
The category of “crimes against peace” allowed leaders to be punished personally for planning or waging aggressive war. Pal argued that this criminal liability had not been established in international law when the acts occurred. To create the crime after the war and apply it backwards violated the principle against ex post facto punishment.
He also regarded a tribunal constituted by the victorious powers, prosecuting only the defeated side, as structurally compromised. Law that applies only downward is not universal law. It is power wearing legal robes.
That critique does not mean Pal believed Japanese forces committed no atrocities. In his dissent he wrote that, even after allowing for propaganda and exaggeration, the evidence remained overwhelming that Japanese forces had committed atrocities against civilians and prisoners of war.