Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 484, Passion and Prejudice, Part 2.

As we covered last week, Radhabanod Paul's descent at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials,

more formally the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, was a product of many

different contemporary factors, his pan-Asianism, his right-wing

Indian nationalism, his personal relationship with men like Subhaz Chandra Bose, and his personal

antipathy for British colonialism, and by extension for the larger Western apparatus of power

in Asia.

In that sense, it's a historically fascinating text, but the thing is, when it first saw daylight in December 1948, it didn't really make a splash at all.

The Chief Justice of the Tribunal, the Australian William Webb, had at first attempted to head off the issue

of dissents, judgments issued independent of the majority, by getting the justices to swear

secrecy on their actual votes, and agreeing not to publish any opinion but the majority one.

Paul, however, refused to be held to that standard, in part because he arrived too late

for the start of the trial given his last-minute selection and missed Webb's discussion

of the topic, but I suspect he never would have agreed anyway to give up the right to publish

his own views.

Webb had wanted to avoid independent dissents for fear that visible disagreement among the judges would undermine the legitimacy of the tribunal.

Once this option was off the table, he decided to head off the issue completely by simply having every judgment, the majority, Paul's opinion and four other independent opinions submitted by other judges, read aloud at the conclusion of the trial.

Webb's hope was that in doing this he could head off any potential accusations of secretiveness on the part of the judges which would undercut the legitimacy of the trial itself,

and thus would diffuse any criticism.

And the hell of it is, this worked, at least at first.

It did take a while, reading out all of the opinions took from December 4th to 12th, 1948.

Paul's dissent specifically got press coverage on its own, but largely in India.

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