A publisher asks me to make excerpts from Judge Radhabinod Pal's "dissentient judgment" and write an introduction to the selection. The Indian jurist Pal was one of 11 judges who sat on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the Tokyo Trial). He found Japan not guilty, the only one to do so.
So I write to my historian friend Richard Minear, who back in 1971 published "Victors' Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial," the first book to deal with that subject in a Western language. In the ensuing exchange, Minear, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, remembers to tell me that someone named Masaaki Tanaka has recently "mass-distributed" to members of the Association for Asian Studies a book called "What Really Happened in Nanking: The Refutation of a Common Myth." In describing the book, Minear adds that on its back cover Tanaka shows himself standing by a portrait of Pal.
I acquire and read the book. It is an embarrassment.