Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the 1969 'Tokyo University Incident Trials' as battles over the moral evaluation of the social positions and identity structures of New Left students in a process of challenging and reinforcing what it meant to belong to the Japanese nation.

Paper long abstract:

After the fall of Yasuda Auditorium in January 1969 around 600 student activists were arrested. Of this number, 178 students opted to be tried in small groups and their cases were resolved quickly. The remaining 428 students, however, held out for a unified trial. Against the students' wishes small group hearings started in late May. Chaos ensued. Defendants failed to appear, observers interrupted by chanting slogans, and the defence team repeatedly walked out of the building. In the end, the judges took the unprecedented decision to invoke Article 286 section 2 of the Criminal Procedure Code to try and sentence the students in absentia.

In this paper I focus on the trial as a moral and ethical process through which the social positions and identity structures of New Left students were evaluated in a process of challenging and reinforcing what it meant to belong to the Japanese nation. The trial was more than a formalistic legal process of prosecute and punish as a warning to others: it was also an attempt to dissolve nascent New Left communities to create individuals ready for reintegration into the nation. This process involved prosecutors, the state and even judges themselves constructing narratives of the movement as antithetical to the rights and freedoms guaranteed by Japan's postwar Constitution, while intervening into the emotions of students to re-naturalise the nation as their primary community of belonging. It was a process with eerie historical resonances that called, through the mechanism of confession and repentance, for the students to split themselves in two, drawing a line between the old self who was misled by the movement and a new self who embraced their ascribed position in Japanese society. And as I will show through the letters of activists in detention, student resistance was to the fragmentation of their community and the sense of belonging it produced, and to the imposition of those narratives of redemption and the 'feeling rules' that accompanied them.