Chris Perkins

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.

I work on history of the Japanese student movement. I have also published on Japanese television, film, and on Japanese studies pedagogy.

Research activity

I am currently working on understanding state responses to the Japanese New Left movement. I am particularly interested in the network of conservative intellectuals involved in the Policy Science Research Group (政策科学研究会) and the impact their activities had on shaping Japanese politics in the 1970s.

I am happy to consider PhD students working on modern Japanese history with a focus on the 1960s and early 1970s.

Postgraduate Teaching

• ASST11075 State, Society and National Identity in Japan after 1989
• ASST11084 East Asian International Relations
• ASST11069 MSc Dissertation

As Undergraduate Course Organiser

• ASST10127 Japanese Language 3 (Year Abroad)
• ASST10131 Contemporary Japanese Cinema
• ASST10112 Modern Japanese Society
• ASST08007 Researching Japan
• ASST08040 Thinking Through Japan
• ASST10139 Radical Japan: Culture, Politics and Protest in Japan's Long 1960s

Other Undergraduate Teaching

• ASST10134 Approaches to Translation from and into Japanese
• ASST08042 Modern East Asian History A