Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will briefly escape the political heat at home next week as he goes to India and pursues one of his passions - trying to restore his nation's blemished World War II image.

Abe, who suffered a major election defeat last month, plans to meet the descendants of Indians lionised by Japanese nationalists, including the judge who dissented in the trials that condemned Japan's wartime leaders.

He will head Sunday on a weeklong trip to Indonesia, India and Malaysia and will also talk business and sign a free-trade agreement with Jakarta, the biggest supplier of natural gas to energy-hungry Japan.

But the conservative leader has always had a special place in his heart for India, repeatedly saying the fellow Asian democracy is a natural ally of Japan, whose ties with closer neighbours are fraught with historical baggage.

Meeting nationalist's relatives

Abe will meet relatives of Subhash Chandra Bose, the Indian nationalist who broke with pacifist icon Mahatma Gandhi to advocate violent resistance against British colonialism - and who sided with imperial Japan.

In the eastern city of Kolkata, Abe also plans to meet the son of the late Radhabinod Pal, the only judge who dissented at the Allied tribunal that condemned to death wartime Japanese leaders.

In a dissent that stretched hundreds of pages, Pal rejected the authority of the tribunal, calling it a "sham employment of legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge."

Abe - whose own grandfather was charged but never tried as a war criminal - dismissed suggestions that meeting Pal's son would anger other Asian nations resentful over Japan's wartime atrocities.