New York: Routledge, 2022. xiv, 222 pp. (B&W photos.) US$45.00, paper. ISBN 9781032046266.
Japan’s Prisoners of Conscience is a terrific book. It analyzes prosecutions targeting opponents of Japan’s involvement in the Iraq War and Japan Communist Party (JCP) supporters from 2003 to 2012. The crime here was expressing political views by posting flyers through letter boxes. These cases were sparked by a 2003 decision by the Koizumi administration to deploy Japanese Self Defence Forces (SDF) to support the US in the Iraq War: Japan’s first post-World War II entry into armed conflict. It was billed as “humanitarian and reconstruction assistance” (2) to parry domestic concern that it violated Japan’s constitution—the Article 9 renunciation of war, which limits the use of armed capability to self-defence.
The book opens with the arrests of three members of a tiny anti-war protest group, the “Tent Village.” They posted flyers in the letterboxes at apartments owned by Japan’s SDF and housing staff from the nearby military base. The flyers urged SDF personnel to reconsider their participation in the Iraq War and provided a contact number for responses. The accused assumed that Article 21 of Japan’s 1947 Constitution, which guarantees “freedom of…speech, press, and all other forms of expression” would protect them. Instead, they were arrested at home by SWAT teams in early 2004, in front of television crews, and charged with criminal trespass, jailed, and interrogated for 75 days, becoming Japan’s first prisoners of conscience.
The accused refused to participate in the ritual of confession and contrition that contributes to Japan’s 99 percent conviction rate (Silvia Croydon, The Politics of Police Detention in Japan: Consensus of Convenience, Oxford University Press, 2016). They were denied visits except by their attorneys, verbally abused and threatened, and subjected to spartan routines.
Trial evidence revealed that Tent Village had been under surveillance and the SDF worked with police to plan the arrests (153). The complaint was written by the police (81) while the trial focused on the trespass: whether the premises were guarded, the entry intentional and without just cause, and violation of the interests of residents or the building manager. The defence was that just cause included the right to free speech.
The trial court found no criminal harm occurred (118); the prosecutors appealed. The high court reversed the verdict, imposing small fines rather than the requested six-month jail terms. The supreme court summarily dismissed the defendants’ appeal in 2008, ruling that free speech is subject to “necessary and reasonable restrictions for the public welfare” (57). Meanwhile, no court addressed the legality of the SDF surveillance and the police actions.
The next example is the Arakawa Case, in which a Buddhist monk distributed public information printed by the JCP in a low-income Tokyo neighbourhood. The monk was jailed for 23 days.The district court dismissed the charges in 2006, yet prosecutors succeeded on appeal. The supreme court summarily dismissed Arakawa’s appeal in 2009, in a cut-and-paste version of its Tent Villagedecision.
The other prosecutions are variations of prosecutors’ attempts to quash distribution of so-called political flyers. In Horikoshi, a public servant and member of the JCP delivered the JCP’s newspaper outside work hours. The 1947 National Public Employees Law prohibits government employees from engaging in political activity; the Supreme Court’s 1974 Sarufutsu Decision prohibits all political speech by government employees. This was the first such prosecution since 1974. In 2008, the district court found no harm in Horikoshi’s actions, and that there had been some excessive police surveillance. The verdict was guilty, with a small fine. In 2010 the Tokyo High Court overturned the verdict, finding no “danger to … maintaining neutrality of the administration and the trust of the people” (167). Prosecutors tried again in the Ujihashi Case in 2005, targeting a more senior government employee. In 2012 the Supreme Court heard both appeals, reaffirming Horikoshi’s innocence but also upholding Ujihashi’s guilty verdict.
This is a meticulous bottom-up account of Japanese policing, prosecution strategies, and criminal trials process using original contemporaneous sources. Repeta’s translation of constitutional law scholars’ commentary is particularly valuable; it reflects deep and ongoing intellectual debates in Japan about the precariousness of free speech. It shows how mundane offences are instrumentalized to curb free speech, chill anti-government protest, and encourage self-censorship. The opening chapter is particularly effective in placing these cases on a historical continuum of political struggle about the legality of Japanese militarism and military bases in Japan, including the US forces in Okinawa, and conservative efforts to revise the Peace Constitution and put Japan on a fully armed footing.
In the short conclusion, Repeta invites reflection on how the political nature of a legal system is revealed when national security is invoked. The Japanese state has been hypervigilant about limiting criticism of government action during war. The supreme court complied by treating constitutional guarantees of human rights such as free speech, privacy, and non-discrimination as subordinate to government policy. The lower courts—the finders of fact—largely averted their gaze from security sector surveillance of peaceful citizens. For readers of the Japanese language, the cover image of a banner saying “Acquitted” may be misleading: the prosecutions analyzed here overwhelmingly succeed.
The range and resilience of civilian networks in Japan seeking to prevent state overreach also emerges strongly. A key element here is a free press, particularly the Asahi Shimbun and progressive publishing houses. The independence of the legal profession (37–38) also matters: while the Tent Village and the JCP defendants are very differently resourced, they draw on the Tokyo Bar Association and the Japan Lawyers’ Association for Freedom (32). The chapter on “Recruiting a Defense Team” (33–43) provides a rare analysis in English about the profiles and relationships that enable such advocacy.
Read alongside Carol Lawson (“Reforming Japanese Corrections: Catalysts and Conundrums” in L. Wolff, et al., Who Rules Japan? Popular Participation in the Japanese Legal Process, Edward Elgar, 2025) and Silvia Croydon (above), this deep dive into government attacks on peaceful political speech should permanently displace existing accounts of the Japanese justice system as being rule of law compliant, benignly restorative, and accountable to citizens.
Veronica L. Taylor
Twhe Australian National University, Canberra