Revealed: blunder that allowed dissenting judge to sit on Japanese war crimes tribunal

To some Japanese nationalists, Judge Radhabinod Pal is a hero.

Pal, India's representative at the war crimes tribunal marking the end of the second world war, earned a place in history as the sole dissenting voice on the tribunal that in 1948 found all 25 Japanese defendants guilty of Class-A war crimes. To his supporters, Pal understood that imperial Japan did not wage a war of aggression in the 1930s and 1940s, that its actions were forced upon the government of the day by the West and that none of its leaders could be considered war criminals.

But evidence has emerged that Pal was appointed incorrectly in spite of objections by the Indian governor general's secretariat, according to documents unearthed in the Indian National Archive.

How Justice Radhabinod Pal was named to the tribunal has long been a mystery, but the documents discovered by Nariaki Nakazato, a professor at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Oriental Culture, indicate there was confusion and conflict within the British authorities in India.

That enabled the appointment of Pal, a lawyer with nationalist leanings and links to Subhas Chandra Bose, who allied himself with Tokyo and mobilised Indian prisoners-of-war to fight the British alongside the Japanese. Nakazato unveiled his findings last month.

In the decades since Pal dropped his bombshell by questioning the legitimacy of the proceedings and disagreeing with the rest of the judges from the Allied Powers, extreme nationalists in Japan have taken his dissenting opinion as proof that Japan was the victim of the war.