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...