Christopher Perkins – författare

This book investigates how films made about the URA since the 1990s have engaged with, reproduced and contested cultural memories of the organisation, discussing how directors have addressed questions of narrativization, trauma, intergenerational connection, and political subjectivity as they engage in the politics of cultural memory on screen.

While the intellectual history of the New Left is dominated by scholarship on western thinkers, Japan's radical theorists developed equally groundbreaking ideas, producing one of the most intense periods of political thought in the global twentieth century. Political Thought and Japan's New Left Movements finally redresses this imbalance by assembling the first comprehensive collection of authoritative essays on the Japanese intellectuals who, by critically rethinking the Marxian legacy, defined their era. Highlighting the connections between these key figures, their historical circumstances and their biographies, this book provides concise, accessible overviews of the theoretical approaches that shaped and were shaped by Japan's 1960s New Left movements, while also evaluating the development and impact of these intellectual contributions. In doing so, it demonstrates the distinctiveness and significance of Japanese left-wing thought, providing an invaluable resource for students of twentieth-century radical politics.

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 – crystalized in a courtroombattle that pushed at the limits of Japan’s postwar sociologic 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.