Chris Perkins

Senior Lecturer in Japanese

Biography

Background

I'm a Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies and Head of Japanese at the University of Edinburgh, where I joined as a lecturer in 2011. I also serve as Chief Editor of Japan Forum and sit on the council of the British Association for Japanese Studies. I'm a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. My research examines the history of Japanese student politics, media representation, and state policing responses, with particular focus on Japan's New Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

My recent work includes The Tokyo University Trial and the Struggle Against Order in Postwar Japan (Springer, 2024), which explores how the largest trial in Japanese legal history became a battleground over legal process and social order in the postwar period. I also co-edited with Ferran de Vargas Political Thought and Japan's New Left Movements: Transformations in Radical Theory (Bloomsbury, 2025), the first comprehensive collection examining the radical theorists who shaped Japan's 1960s intellectual landscape. My earlier book, The United Red Army on Screen (Palgrave, 2015), analyses media memory of Japan's radical left.

My 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. I have supervised seven PhD students to completion and welcome enquiries from prospective doctoral researchers working on modern Japanese history, particularly the 1960s-70s, postwar media, and political movements.

I hold a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, an MSc (distinction) in International Relations from Royal Holloway, and a BA in Japanese Language and Contemporary Society with Education Studies from Oxford Brookes University.

Responsibilities & affiliations

Director of Learning and Teaching, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures.

Undergraduate teaching

Dr Perkins teaches courses on contemporary Japanese society, Japanese cinema, the radical politics of the 1960s, and research methods.

Research summary

I work on the history of Japanese student politics, Japanese media, and HE pedagogy. I am also interested in social and political theory (both Japanese and beyond), memory, international relations and borders.

Current research interests

I am currently researching state responses to the New Left in Japan with a focus on the law, police, intelligence services, and the media. This project builds on my previous research on the trial of Tokyo University students in 1969, which was published as The Tokyo University Trial and the Struggle Against Order in Postwar Japan and published by Palgrave in 2023.

Past research interests

Please see my Pure profile for past projects and publications.

Project activity

I am currently working on a monograph about the trial of Tokyo university students in 1969.

After the student occupations of Tokyo University in 1968/69, around 600 activists were arrested and put on trial. Over the following year the courtroom fell into disarray as 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, producing volumes of commentary in the national press, student publications, and specialist legal journals. Using the trial as a window into the complex politics of Japan's 1968, this project asks what made the trial so divisive? What was at stake for the students, the state, and the legal profession? And what can the trial tell us about the complex politics of 1968 in Japan as they spilled out of the campus and into the courts?

Current project grants

Co-recipient with Daniel Hammond of a Principal's Teaching Award Scheme (PTAS) Grant for a project titled: 'Ways of Thinking and Practising in Chinese and Japanese Studies' (2012)

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