Radhabinod Pal (1886–1967) is both a puzzling and a historically important figure. Moderately prominent in 1940s India as a lawyer, professor of law and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta, Pal achieved sudden and rather unexpected international fame following his appointment in 1946 as Indian representative on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), set up in Tokyo to try Japanese war crimes. As Nariaki Nakazato's researches show, Pal's appointment to this position was almost accidental. He was one of two Indian judges who put their names forward after the Government of India's first two choices for the post declined the invitation. Pal's expression of interest in the job reached the government fractionally earlier than that of the other volunteer, assuring his appointment. Questions were then raised about Pal's qualifications for the post, since he had served as a high court judge in India only briefly and on a temporary basis, but the appointment was allowed to stand.

The timing of Pal's assignment to the IMTFE was crucial. Colonial rule in India was in its final throes, and Indian independence would be declared while the Tokyo Trials were underway. Against this background Pal, to the surprise of his fellow Tribunal judges, put forward a dissenting ruling radically at odds with the findings of the majority. The trials found twenty-five Japanese military and political leaders guilty of a range of offences including crimes against peace, murder, and crimes against humanity, and seven were sentenced to death. In his dissenting judgment, Pal, on the contrary, disputed the guilty verdicts and accepted most of the arguments of the defence lawyers. At the core of these arguments was the proposition that the Tribunal itself was legally invalid, because it sought to apply the notions of “crimes against peace” and “crimes against humanity” retrospectively. Pal's lengthy dissenting judgment accepted these arguments, and concluded that all the accused should be acquitted. Indeed, as Nakazato's careful examination of the Pal statement of dissent shows, the Indian judge went further. He presented a distinctly positive view of wartime Japan as a country where “the public retained complete freedom in respect of their own creeds, belief and behaviour”, and contrasted this to the condition of prewar and wartime China, which he depicted as a failed state “hopelessly involved in anarchy” (p. 41). Little wonder, then, that Judge Pal has become something of an icon to those on the Japanese Right who seek to justify the history of Japan's wartime expansionism. He was invited to return to Japan for much-publicized speaking tours in 1952, 1953 and 1966, and is one of the very few individuals to be commemorated with a personal monument in the Yūshūkan, the museum attached to Japan's controversial Yasukuni Shrine.

There can be no doubt that the content of Pal's judgment fits very nicely with the revisionist views of the Pacific War that have gained increasing traction in Japan over the past decade or so. At the same time, Nakazato persuasively demonstrates that the Japanese nationalist depictions of Pal contain a good deal of mythology. As the title of this book suggests, the author's core aim is to deconstruct that mythology by unravelling fact from fiction. The image of Pal projected in much revisionist historiography in Japan is of a passionate Indian nationalist who courageously sided with his fellow Asians in the face of Western bias and arrogance. In this depiction, Pal is often seen as representative of wider anti-colonial opinion in the newly independent India, and even as a representative of the Indian government's views of the Tokyo war crimes trials. Interestingly, a rather similar view has also been put forward by some scholars in the US and elsewhere, who see Pal as a precursor of the postcolonial critique of Western arrogance towards Asia.

Nakazato's study, though, suggests something different and more complex. His biographical account of Pal's career paints a picture of a man who had largely avoided political pronouncements or active engagement in nationalist causes, at least until the period immediately before his appointment to the IMTFE. On the other hand, Pal had an indirect personal link to Subhas Chandra Bose, whose Indian National Army (INA) fought in a somewhat uncomfortable and conflict-ridden alliance with Japanese forces during the war. Pal had been a fellow student and was long-time friend of Bose's brother Sarat Chandra Bose, and showed sympathy for the plight of INA soldiers who were put on trial by the British colonial authorities after Japan's defeat. He also had a deep interest in traditional Indian legal ideas, and this made him sympathetic to those in Japan who revered and sought to revive traditional cultural values. Nakazato's re-examination of Pal's life and ideas points to the conclusion that the judge held conservative and profoundly anti-communist nationalist views, but it also demonstrates that Pal was far from being a representative of the views of the Indian government. On the contrary, the Nehru government was deeply embarrassed by the Pal judgment, but (given the principles of judicial independence) felt powerless to do anything about it.

The exploration of Pal's life and ideas presented in Neonationalist Mythology in Postwar Japan makes a very valuable contribution to the ongoing debates about the IMTFE and its legacies. Starting from the story of the Pal judgment and its impact, the narrative goes back to trace Pal's upbringing in rural Bengal and then in Calcutta, his work as a practicing advocate and as a legal scholar at the University of Calcutta, and his life and activities in India after the Tokyo Trials. Nakazato examines Pal's legal and political thought in this biographical context before returning in the final chapters to the question of the mythology that has developed around the man and his ideas. Given the aims and focus of the book, this structure makes sense, though it does mean that the reader is sometimes forced to flip back and forth between different chapters in order to connect the chronological train of events. There are also a few places where the text could have benefited from more careful editing to remove the occasional stylistic or typographical slips and awkward sentences that have managed to creep into the published version.

Overall, though, this 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. Yet questions, perhaps inevitably, remain. How fully was Pal aware of the impact that the “Pal myth” was having within postwar Japan? When he visited Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, and was lionized by a range of figures mostly (though not exclusively) on the political right, how far did he understand and play along with the political currents swirling around him, and how far was he simply being used? Nakazato's account gives an impression of Pal as a man at times out of his depth, whose political views were elusive and sometimes contradictory. In the end, despite all the debates and research, Judge Pal remains, and perhaps always will remain, something of an enigma.