It is symptomatic of the ultra-nationalistic indoctrination of China under Xi that news of the attack on former Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, was greeted with celebrations on their internet social media. Shinzo Abe had reversed two of Japan’s self-inflicted restraints or flagellation. Shinzo Abe had visited the Yakusuni Temple and he was instrumental in changing the pacifist constitution of Japan that permitted the Japanese military to again venture out of the country. It was Shinzo Abe who had first visited the Yakusoni Temple in Tokyo where the ashes of former Japanese soldiers fighting in the Second World War had been kept. Until then, for the Japanese Prime Minister, the Temple was out of bounds. It was similar to the pacific constitutional set-up of the country which even prevented a permanent military setup. This was slowly overcome and Japan came to have its military. But the military was kept confined with the country and could not venture out under any circumstances. These were the leftover guilt consciousness from Japan’s role during the Second World War. It was remorse on national consciousness and a feeling of war guilt. However, Japan was defeated and hence the guilt consciousness was imposed upon it.
Justice Radha Binod Pal, who was invited to seat on the tribunal which was trying the Emperor Hirohito of Japan as a war criminal, in parallel to the Nuremberg trials in Europe, was faced with the choice of maintaining his integrity as a judge and following the majority of Western judges in indicting the Japanese Emperor. Justice Pal followed his conscience and refused to sign on the dotted lines of the criminal verdict. Instead, he pointed out that Japan had followed the same course of action that the victories Allied Powers had. The difference was only between the victors and the vanquished. There were pressures on Justice Pal, in fact, immense pressures from the then supreme authorities, the Americans, to do otherwise. Various incentives were dangled. However, the Indian judge refused to budge. This had endeared Justice Pal to the Japanese.
India and Japan were both democracies in Asia and they should form a coalition for democratic forces. In 2006, it was not that fashionable to talk of an India-Japan formation, coming close from the nuclear tests in 1998 under the first Vajpayee Government. Japan had reacted furiously to India’s nuclear tests which marked the country’s emergence as a nuclear power. Japan has experienced the devastation of a nuclear bomb that had developed an ingrained Opposition to all things nuclear. It is a measure of the transition from that position that Japan today embraces a nuclear doctrine for self-preservation, which translates, “It has come to accept that some form of nuclear capability for the country was the preferred course in the immediate future.” And Abe had a significant role in that transition by breaking some taboos in force from the end of the Second War. In this context, the QUAD formation among India, Japan, Australia, and the United States has a demonstrative relevance in Asian affairs. The Quad came out directly of Abe’s Arc of Democracies. In many ways, India could not have gotten a better friend than Shinzo Abe in 2006 when he had just begun his initiatives with south Asia.
