The prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, is looked upon with utmost suspicion by China and both Koreas for his attempts to put an end to the one-sided “Tokyo Trials” view of history. It was therefore surprising that the many friends of Beijing and Pyongyang who hold the levers of power in West Bengal did not register a protest against Abe’s decision to pay his respects to the family of Justice Radhabinod Pal during his visit to Calcutta last month.

Radhabinod Pal may have faded from the Indian imagination, but he is revered in Japan’s nationalist circles for his dissenting judgment in the Tokyo trials of Japanese “war criminals” after World War II. There is a small monument to him in Tokyo’s Yasukini shrine — the contentious Shinto temple which houses the spirits of some 2.5 million people who gave their lives for the Emperor. These include the 14 “class A war criminals” who were convicted by the International Military Tribunal in 1948. Regarded by some as a disagreeable memorial to Japanese militarism, the Yasukini shrine has become a pilgrimage point for all those who feel that history cannot be allowed to be written by the winners alone. In his minority verdict, Pal quoted the American Confederate President Jefferson Davis: “When time shall have softened passion and prejudice, when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation, then Justice, holding evenly her scales, will require much of past censure and praise to change places.”

As a grandson of the former prime minister, Nobusuke Kishi, who served as minister of commerce between 1941 and 1945, and was imprisoned and temporarily banned from public life after Japan’s surrender, Abe was probably echoing the sentiments of many of Japan’s post-war generation that it is time to finally end the politics of atonement. “How much longer do we have to be apologetic?” is a question that Germans and Japanese often ask, especially when confronted with expedient invocations of war guilt by the victorious powers.

In South Africa, another country which has been emotionally affected by the burden of guilt, a young folk singer, Bok van Klerk, has triggered Afrikaner exasperation with constantly saying sorry with an elegy to Koos de la Ray, a Boer general who waged a brave guerrilla war against the British. “My generation of Afrikaners want to be proud of who we are, and where we come from, and our language…” van Klerk told Financial Times in July, “We don’t want to say sorry any more. This is a democratic South Africa and we have moved on.”

Both victory and defeat are accompanied by severe impositions. For the victor, the temptations of uninterrupted triumphalism are irresistible. In 1947, the irrepressible Noel Coward mocked the compassion of those who diverted food from an under-nourished Britain to an impoverished Germany with a song: “Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans/ For you can’t deprive a gangster of his gun/ Though they’ve been a little naughty to the Czechs and Poles and Dutch/ But I don’t suppose those countries really minded very much/ Let’s be free with them and share the BBC with them./ We mustn’t prevent them basking in the sun./ Let’s soften their defeat again — and build their bloody fleet again,/ But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun.” During last year’s World Cup, English soccer fans were advised to refrain from dishing out Sieg Heil salutes and taunting their hosts with swastikas — an advisory that led to John Cleese repackaging his Fawlty Towers farce with the song “Don’t mention the War”.

Among the vanquished nations, there is a 60-year-history of post-war angst. This is certainly more pronounced in Germany — which was guilty of truly unspeakable atrocities — than in Japan, which possesses the countervailing power of victimhood in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The force-fed sense of collective guilt has led to profound distortions in foreign policy. An institutionalized pacifism — which is projected as the only acceptable antidote to belligerent militarism — has been responsible for both Germany and Japan abjuring legitimate strategic goals. Japan has been trying to cautiously extricate itself from this troubled inheritance but Germany still has some distance to travel before ghosts from the Third Reich are fully exorcised.

Atonement and self-flagellation have contributed to another insidious distortion: denial. There is, of course, the negationism of pseudo-historians such as David Irving. But equally disturbing is the denial that Katrin Himmler, a grand-niece of the notorious head of the SS, exposed in her recently-published The Himmler Brothers.

Having grown up in post-war Germany with the belief that it was Heinrich Himmler who was the only bad egg in an otherwise distinguished Bavarian family, Katrin dug into the archives for information about the other two Himmler brothers. Contrary to the family version that her grandfather and grand-uncle were minor state functionaries who joined the Nazi party because it was the done thing, she discovered that both were committed National Socialists who benefited enormously from the regime.

Katrin Himmler’s story is not an isolated one. In 1972, a Columbia University historian, Robert Paxman, created convulsions in France by exposing the deep and elaborate network of Vichy France. Paxman revealed that Marshal Petain wasn’t merely propped up by a small band of unsavoury collaborators, but personified a strong French backlash against the politicians of the Third Republic. Since then, there has been a steady stream of histories, including the documentary film, The Sorrow and the Pity, which clearly indicated a seamless but dishonest transition from Petain to Charles de Gaulle.

Interestingly, recent histories of the Home Front in Britain have also indicated that human frailties, particularly greed, in the time of war are not the prerogative of the vanquished alone.

Embarrassment over backing the losing side is an understandable human reaction. However, its denial does grave injustice to a rounded appreciation of history. In India, there are two chapters from the past that trigger wilful falsification by both individuals and communities.

The first centres on the Emergency of 1975 to 1977. Old newspapers will testify that Indira Gandhi’s heavy-handedness was met with widespread acquiescence. But it was not merely the bureaucracy and pillars of civil society that wilted. There was also a strong capitulationist streak among non-Congress activists. Rather than encounter personal hardships, some of them went into political hibernation. A significant minority, however, signed the 20-point programme, denounced their erstwhile colleagues and became active collaborators. In 1977, after the Congress was defeated, they turned turtle once again. Today, the history of that infamy is being selectively doctored.

The second problem area is the Pakistan movement between 1940 and 1947. The extent to which the idea of a separate homeland captured the imagination of the Muslim community has been well documented in Pakistan but expediently glossed over in India. The reason is obvious: keeping alive memories of Muslim League support in the provinces, where Muslims were in a minority, had ramifications on post-Independence politics. The support for Pakistan in the Muslim minority provinces has become something akin to the amnesia over Vichy. The uninhibited ease with which allegiance to Mohammed Ali Jinnah was converted into adulation of Jawaharlal Nehru after August 15, 1947, has led to a serious falsification of popular history.

Reading the past is not about attaching collective guilt or discerning collective virtues. History would become immeasurably poorer if reduced to a simple black and white exercise. It is the grey areas that tickle the imagination — the reason why the Japanese prime minister must be commended for allowing his sense of history to prevail.