[T]his book is a fine achievement, and does indeed succeed in laying to rest some of the myths that have persisted around the story of Judge Pal.

The International Journal of Asian Studies

Nariaki Nakazato’s timely and important book appears sixty years after the commencement of the Tokyo war crimes trials, proceedings that helped shape postwar Japan and that were decisive in the development of international humanitarian law. The dissenting judgment by the Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal, which labeled the majority view ‘victor’s justice,’ has been hailed by Japan’s postwar right as proof of the illegitimacy of the trial, and even as vindication of Japan’s wartime actions. Against this, a leading Japanese historian of India offers a detailed analysis of Pal’s legal judgment, a finely grained account of his life and times as a figure shaped by his Indian milieu, and a critical evaluation of the appropriations of Pal by Japan’s ‘revisionists.’ This meticulously researched and fascinating account could only be crafted by someone equally at home with modern Indian history and current political controversies in Japan over its past. It is essential reading for scholars and students of the Tokyo trials, of international humanitarian law, and of the uses and abuses of history.

Sanjay Seth, Goldsmiths, University of London

Neonationalist Mythology in Postwar Japan is a passionate, nuanced, and meticulously detailed analysis of the factors in Japanese and Indian history, as well as those in the history of the United States’ reorganization of its Asian interests and alliances in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, that have enabled an obscure legal document—Justice Radhabinod Pal’s dissenting judgment at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (1946–48)—to play a pivotal part in the rise of neonationalism and the politics of war-crimes denial in contemporary Japan.

Gyanendra Pandey, Emory University

Neonationalist Mythology in Postwar Japan offers a much-awaited critical biography of Radhabinod Pal, a Bengali jurist who produced a controversial dissenting opinion at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Based on meticulous archival research and interviews involving Bengali, English, and Japanese languages, Nariaki Nakazato sheds new light on Pal’s life and the troubling legacy of his dissentient judgment in the making of the rightist nationalist discourse in postwar Japan.

Yuma Totani, University of Hawaii