Deep Dispatch 003｜Who Gets to Call It Justice?

日本語

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.

TokyoBrainie’s Opening Statement

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.

The Article That Started This

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.

What Judge Pal Actually Argued

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.

This distinction is essential:

• Historical fact: atrocities occurred.
• Moral responsibility: perpetrators and commanders bear responsibility.
• Criminal liability in a specific tribunal: guilt must still be established under valid law, fair procedure and evidence connecting each defendant to an offence.

Pal’s acquittal was a judgment about the tribunal and the charges before it. It was not a certificate declaring Imperial Japan morally innocent.

A country that quotes Pal’s conclusion but deletes his acknowledgment of Japanese atrocities is not defending legal truth. It is using an Indian jurist as a shield.

India Was Not a Background Character

For Indian readers, the war cannot be reduced to a courtroom in Tokyo.

In March 1944, Japan launched Operation U-Go into British India. Japanese forces fought alongside units of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. For many Indians, Bose represented a genuine anti-colonial struggle against British rule. For Japan, the offensive also served an imperial military strategy.

Both facts can be true.

The battles of Imphal and Kohima were fought across the lands of Manipur and Nagaland. British and Indian forces suffered heavily. Local civilians endured displacement, destruction and death. Japanese troops entered an operation whose logistics were catastrophically inadequate.

Japanese official archival material states that more than 30,000 Japanese troops were killed in the counteroffensive and more than 20,000 died from illness and starvation. Other commemorative estimates place Japanese casualties near 54,000. Exact categories differ, but the shape of the disaster does not: a vast army was destroyed not only by enemy fire, but by hunger, disease, exhaustion and command failure.

Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi drove the offensive, resisted withdrawal and removed divisional commanders who opposed continuing it. He was later relieved. After the war he was detained as a suspected Class A war criminal and sent to Singapore for proceedings concerning wartime conduct; he returned to Japan in 1948. Yet the starvation catastrophe at Imphal never produced a reckoning proportionate to the men sacrificed there. He lived until 1966 and later defended the operation.

This is one of Japan’s unresolved forms of injustice: collective mourning without precise accountability.

Soldiers are praised for sacrifice. Families are told that their dead became the foundation of peace. The institution dissolves. The commander writes his explanation.

Japan often converts responsibility into atmosphere.

A Necessary Correction About the Atomic Bombs

Anger deserves accurate chronology.

The atomic bombs were not dropped after Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender.

• Hiroshima was bombed on 6 August 1945.
• The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August and entered the war in Asia.
• Nagasaki was bombed on 9 August.
• Japan communicated an initial acceptance of the Potsdam terms, subject to the position of the Emperor, on 10 August.
• The final acceptance was transmitted on 14 August.
• Japan announced surrender publicly on 15 August.
• The formal Instrument of Surrender was signed aboard the USS Missouri on 2 September 1945.

The false chronology should be abandoned. It weakens a moral indictment that does not need embellishment.

The harder historical question is not whether the bombs came after a signed surrender. They did not. It is whether the deliberate destruction of urban populations was necessary, proportionate and morally defensible—and why the victors’ methods were placed outside the Tokyo courtroom.

Historians continue to dispute the relative weight of the atomic bombings, Soviet entry, blockade, conventional bombing, domestic deadlock and the Emperor’s intervention in producing surrender. Any account that says one factor alone “ended the war” is too clean.

Kyoto, Kokura and the Geography of Human Experiment

Many Japanese children were taught that Kyoto was spared simply because Americans respected its cultural treasures. That is incomplete.

Kyoto appeared on the atomic target list. The Target Committee described it as a large urban and industrial area and considered its intellectual importance an advantage: residents, the planners believed, would better understand the significance of the new weapon. The committee explicitly sought the “greatest psychological effect” on Japan and an initial use spectacular enough to demonstrate the weapon’s international importance.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson repeatedly pressed to remove Kyoto. Cultural and political consequences mattered to him, and his personal familiarity with the city may have reinforced his resolve. But Kyoto was not spared by weather on the day of the mission.

That was Kokura.

On 9 August, Kokura was the primary target for the second atomic bomb. Cloud, haze and smoke prevented the required visual attack. The aircraft proceeded to its secondary target, Nagasaki.

Two true stories are often blended in memory: political intervention spared Kyoto; visibility spared Kokura.

The underlying record is colder than the schoolbook story. Cities were evaluated not only as military and industrial targets, but as stages on which a new weapon could produce psychological and geopolitical meaning.

Was the Bombing “Justice”?

The United States faced a brutal war, Japanese rejection of the Potsdam Declaration, anticipated casualties from invasion, and a Japanese military leadership willing to continue despite catastrophic civilian loss. Any moral assessment that erases that context is unserious.

But context is not absolution.

Hiroshima contained military headquarters and logistics. Nagasaki contained major military industries. They were also living cities filled with children, medical patients, forced labourers, Korean residents, elderly people and other civilians who had no control over Tokyo’s decisions.

The legal status of strategic bombing under the international law of 1945 remains contested. The moral problem is clearer: the weapon’s effect could not be confined to combatants, and psychological shock against a nation was part of the planning logic.

The Tokyo Trial did not place American strategic bombing, the firebombing of Japanese cities or the atomic bombings in the dock. That asymmetry does not erase Japan’s crimes. It reveals the boundary of the victors’ justice.

A court may reach correct findings about the defeated and still fail the test of universality.

Japan’s Double Hierarchy: Looking Up to the West, Looking Down on Asia

Why do some Japanese people become deferential toward Western authority while expressing prejudice toward other Asians?

There is no single Japanese character, and this is not a genetic defect. It is a hierarchy produced by history.

From the Meiji era, survival was associated with mastering the institutions, technology and appearance of the Western powers. “Civilisation” arrived with a ranking system. Japan resisted Western domination by learning its methods—and then built an empire that imposed its own hierarchy on Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese and other Asians.

Defeat in 1945 deepened the structure. The American occupation redesigned institutions. The security alliance made the United States indispensable. English became a prestige filter. Western recognition could certify art, scholarship, business and even Japan’s image of itself.

The result can be a distorted status reflex:

• look upward for validation;
• look sideways with anxiety;
• look downward for someone else to rank.

A country can resent Western domination and still internalise Western status markers. It can remember being racially humiliated and reproduce racial hierarchy against its neighbours.

That contradiction is not uniquely Japanese. But Japan is responsible for confronting its own version of it.

My Anger Is Real. Race Is Too Blunt an Instrument.

I understand why anger reaches for the phrase “white people.” Western empires racialised power, divided the world, extracted resources, wrote legal categories and often described their own violence as civilisation.

But skin colour is too blunt a category for the argument I want to make.

The target is not every white person. The target is a system of moral authority built from military victory, empire, capital, English-language media and institutional access. White supremacy is a historical structure; whiteness is not collective criminal guilt.

The United States itself contains the people who ordered wars and the people who exposed them; the state that dropped the bombs and citizens who spent decades questioning that decision; racial hierarchy and movements that fought it.

Our generation does not know America only through occupation textbooks and Hollywood. We saw the Iraq War and its false claims about weapons of mass destruction, the expansion of drone warfare under Barack Obama, decades of strategic and economic entanglement with China across administrations, and Donald Trump’s openly transactional nationalism.

America has no permanent moral halo. Neither does Japan, India, Britain, China or any other nation.

The answer to selective Western morality is not reverse racial morality. It is one standard.

Three Incomplete Models of Justice

1. Japan: Remorse Without Assignment

Post-war Japan often speaks in the passive voice. “Many lives were lost.” “A tragedy occurred.” “Mistakes were made.”

Collective remorse can be sincere, but it can also conceal the chain of command. When everyone inherits vague guilt, the people who made specific decisions become strangely difficult to see.

The dead are sanctified. The institution survives by becoming abstract.

2. America: Universal Rules With a National Exception

American political language frequently presents its values as universal. Yet when American force causes mass civilian death, necessity, context and national security suddenly become dominant.

The defeated receive law. The victor receives explanation.

The United States is not alone in this behaviour. It is simply unusually powerful in converting national interpretation into international vocabulary.

3. Pal: Symmetry Before Punishment

Pal demanded that law bind the accuser as well as the accused. That is indispensable.

But legal symmetry can also become incomplete if admirers use procedural objections to avoid the victims of Japanese occupation. A fair trial is not the same thing as historical amnesia. Rejecting retroactive prosecution does not require denying massacre, torture, forced labour or abuse of prisoners.

Pal’s strongest legacy is not “Japan was innocent.” It is: justice that cannot face the victor is not yet complete.

The Standard I Would Defend

A credible international justice should satisfy at least five principles:

1. The same protection for civilians, regardless of flag.
2. The same command responsibility for leaders who sacrifice their own troops and those who abuse enemies or occupied populations.
3. No retroactive criminal punishment—but no immunity for conduct already prohibited by the laws of war.
4. A clear distinction between legal guilt, historical fact, political responsibility and moral judgment.
5. No monopoly on memory: Chinese, Korean, Southeast Asian, Indian, Japanese and Allied victims must all remain visible.

Symmetry does not mean pretending every act was identical. It means no state receives automatic exemption because it won.

To Indian Readers

Judge Pal should not be reduced to “the Indian who defended Japan.” He was challenging the architecture of international law in a world still dominated by colonial empires.

Nor should India be asked to accept a romantic Japanese story of Asian liberation. Indians fought in the British Indian Army; others joined the INA to fight British rule; civilians in Northeast India experienced the invasion on their land. These histories cannot be flattened into a single patriotic script.

Modern India and Japan meet as democracies, industrial partners and societies trying to navigate a world shaped by American power and Chinese ambition. Serious friendship does not require shared mythology. It requires the confidence to examine both empires, both victimhood and both responsibility.

Pal’s question belongs to India, Japan and the world:

Can law be called universal when its authors place themselves outside it?

TokyoBrainie’s Final Cut

My ancestors do not need me to pretend Imperial Japan was innocent.

They need me to refuse the lie that their deaths were either glorious abstractions or sufficient payment for decisions made by others. They need me to remember the civilians and prisoners harmed by Japan without accepting that the victors therefore became morally immaculate.

The victims of Japanese aggression deserve truth. The victims of strategic bombing deserve truth. The soldiers starved by their own command deserve truth. The people of Imphal, Kohima, Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not compete for moral rank.

Justice that judges only the defeated is power in a robe.

Memory that mourns only one’s own dead is nationalism in funeral clothing.

And a country that apologises forever without naming who sacrificed its people has not yet learned accountability.

The scale must be capable of weighing everyone—or it is not the scale of justice.

日本語要旨｜TokyoBrainieの主張

パール判事は「日本は何も悪くなかった」と証明した人物ではない。日本軍による民間人・捕虜への残虐行為について、証拠は圧倒的だと認めながら、事後法、勝者だけで構成された法廷、敗者だけを対象にした選択的訴追を批判し、全被告の無罪を主張した。

したがって、パール判決の核心は日本無罪論ではなく、「勝者を裁けない法は普遍的な法なのか」という問いにある。

インパール作戦では、日本兵は敵の銃弾だけでなく、補給を軽視した作戦と撤退判断の遅れによって、飢餓・病気・疲労で大量に死亡した。牟田口廉也は戦後に拘束され、戦争犯罪をめぐる手続きも受けたが、インパールで自軍を消耗させた指揮責任に見合う社会的・制度的検証が行われたとは言い難い。日本は兵士の「尊い犠牲」を語る一方、誰が犠牲にしたのかを曖昧にしやすい。

原爆投下が降伏文書署名後だったという時系列は誤りである。広島は8月6日、長崎は9日、最終受諾は14日、正式署名は9月2日。ただし、この訂正は、都市住民を心理的衝撃の対象にした標的選定や、戦勝国側の戦略爆撃が東京裁判の対象外だったという道徳的・法的非対称性を消さない。

京都は文化財があるため最初から候補外だったのではなく、実際に原爆候補地として高く評価されていた。京都を外したのはスティムソン陸軍長官の介入であり、天候で投下を免れたのは8月9日の第一目標だった小倉である。

日本人の一部に見られる欧米への過剰な権威付与と、他のアジア人への差別は、DNAではなく歴史的な序列の内面化として考えるべきだ。明治以来の西洋化、帝国日本が作ったアジア内部の序列、敗戦と占領、日米安保、英語圏の承認力が重なっている。

批判の対象は白人個人ではない。軍事力、帝国、資本、英語メディア、国際制度を通じて、自国の道徳を普遍的基準に変換できる権力である。西洋の選択的正義への答えは、逆向きの人種的憎悪ではなく、勝者と敗者、自国と敵国に同じ基準を適用することだ。

Sources and Further Reading

Original Japanese essay, “Judge Pal’s Battle”: https://note.com/jog_jp/n/n4fff60140cb1

Radhabinod Pal, Dissentient Judgment, full text: https://www.worldcourts.com/imtfe/eng/decisions/1948.11.04_IMTFE_Judgment_Pal.pdf

Takeshi Nakajima, “The Tokyo Tribunal, Justice Pal and the Revisionist Distortion of History”: https://apjjf.org/2011/9/44/nakajima-takeshi/3627/article

IMTFE majority judgment: https://www.worldcourts.com/imtfe/eng/decisions/1948.11.04_IMTFE_Judgment.htm

US National Security Archive, Target Committee memorandum, 12 May 1945: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28512-document-11-memorandum-major-j-derry-and-dr-nf-ramsey-general-lr-groves-summary

US National Archives, “The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”: https://www.archives.gov/news/topics/hiroshima-nagasaki-75

Harry S. Truman Library, Japan’s final acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, 14 August 1945: https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/100/presidents-news-conference

US National Archives, “Surrender of Japan”: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/surrender-of-japan

Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, Imphal operation begins: https://www.jacar.go.jp/english/exhibition/shuhou-english/timeline/nenpyo19440308.html

Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, termination of the Imphal operation: https://www.jacar.go.jp/english/exhibition/shuhou-english/timeline/nenpyo19440704.html

National Army Museum, “Battles of Imphal and Kohima”: https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/battle-imphal

UK Government, Battle of Imphal 70th anniversary commemoration: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-battle-of-imphal-70th-anniversary-commemorations

US Office of the Historian, 1946 memorandum listing Mutaguchi’s detention status: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v08/d344

National Diet Library, Case File #196, Mutaguchi Renya: https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/en/books/R100000002-I029750346

Editorial note: The topics, personal perspective and final analysis are my own. This article distinguishes legal judgment, historical evidence, family memory and editorial opinion. The original Japanese essay is treated as a starting argument, not as an independent authority for every historical claim.

Original Notion archive