The Tokyo University Trial and the Struggle Against Order in Postwar Japan

This book explores the trial of over 600 students arrested at the University of Tokyo in 1969 after thousands of riot police had flooded the campus to end the students’ year-long occupation of the university. The trial, which was the largest in Japanese legal history and was remarkable for being the first to hear cases in the absence of defendants and their lawyers, quickly turned into a divisive struggle over legal process that spilled out of the courts into the media, and in so doing raised troubling questions about the legitimacy of the courts themselves. In making the case for the significance of this trial, this book places it within the context of the Japanese state’s attempts to manage social order, arguing that the Tokyo University trial was a moment in which a range of postwar themes – legal process and rights, courtroom order and authority, the proper role of lawyers, the social position of students, and the legitimacy of forms of policing – crystalised in a courtroom battle that pushed at the limits of Japan’s postwar sociolegal order. The book also sheds new light on the students' experiences of the trial, exploring their time spent in detention and demonstrating how tensions internal to the student movement manifested during the trial process.

Christopher Perkins is Senior Lecturer in Japanese at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He has written on the pre- and post-war student movement in Japan and his work has appeared in journals including The European Journal of Social Theory, Global Society, Television and New Media, The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, and Asiatische Studien, as well as in numerous edited collections. His previous book on Japan’s radical left and the media, The United Red Army on Screen, was published by Palgrave in 2015.