Shinzo Abe's passage to Calcutta

JYOTI MALHOTRA

New Delhi, July 13, 2007 : From Tokyo to Calcutta, history will come full circle on August 23, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visits the city, the highlight of a 48-hour passage to India that would have begun in Delhi and incorporated a joint session of Parliament the day before.

But it is Abe’s journey to the eastern metropolis that is electrifying both South Block and the Japanese establishment.

That’s because the Japanese PM has decided to meet the family of Justice Radhabinod Pal, who offered the lone, dissenting opinion at the war crimes tribunal indicting Japan after the Second World War.

In the history lesson rerun, here’s a nugget : Apart from the seven Japanese men hanged to death for their ``war crimes’’, many were thrown into detention. Among them was Kishi Nobusuke, a minister in the Japanese government at the time of Pearl Harbour in 1942, and later prime minister of Japan in 1957.

It helps that Kishi’s grandson is none other than Shinzo Abe himself.

Considering Justice Pal in 1948, argued that the Tokyo Trials were an act of revenge the Allied victors were perpetrating over the vanquished, Justice Pal and Prime Minister Kishi were to later become very good friends.

``Every one of the accused must be found not guilty of every one of the charges in the indictment and should be acquitted on all those charges,’’ Pal said.

Although the Occupation forces banned Justice Pal’s type-written, book-length judgement opposing the various death sentences and detentions of Japanese ``war criminals’’ at the time, it was widely read in Japan later.

There is even a museum devoted to Pal’s memory in Hakone, a resort town near Mt. Fuji, which houses a pen used by the Indian judge during the trials. The pen was donated by Kishi to the museum.

Clearly, Abe is keen on leveraging both history and nostalgia in the cause of modern-day diplomacy and national interest. India is a huge market and even better, Delhi’s best friend these days, the US, has been Japan’s main ally since the end of the War.

Delhi, of course, is blissfully playing along.

Abe will bring with him more than a hundred top honchos of Japanese industry, ten of whom will come together with an equivalent number of Indian captains to form a Business Forum.

He hopes Japanese business will be able to return to a market they ceded to Korean and US majors in the last decade and a half of recession back home.

It is expected that Abe will make material promises that will make Buddhadev Bhattacharjee smile, but this is something the Japanese are still keeping a closely guarded secret.

Japan’s Mitsubhishi Chemicals is said to be the most successful foreign investment in all West Bengal, and Abe would certainly like to use that as a model to take the Indo-Japanese great leap forward.

The Japanese PM will also visit Netaji Bhawan, another historical link connecting the two cities – it is believed that the ashes in an urn in the Renkoji temple in Tokyo are those of Netaji Subhas Bose, after he was believed to have been killed in an air-crash in Taipei in 1945.

But Japanese officials, acutely aware of the sensitivity of the subject, especially in the wake of the Mukherjee Commission which rejected the idea of the ashes being those of Bose, pointed out that ``Japan is always alive to the sentiments of the people of Calcutta. We know that history is always delicate for any nation.’’

An Abe homage to Rabindranath Tagore is on the cards, as is the inauguration of a brand-new Japanese cultural centre for Calcutta. Besides of course, talks with chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee.

ENDS