WITHIN hours of victory in his party presidential race Shinzo Abe, Japan’s right-wing incoming prime minister, suffered a heavy legal blow to his nationalist agenda when a Tokyo court ruled that it was unconstitutional to force patriotism on school teachers.

The ruling will undermine Mr Abe’s plans to revise Japan’s basic education law and was described by one of the teachers’ victorious lawyers as “a blow to government high-handedness” in the sphere of education.

In the largest such legal action in Japan’s postwar history, 401 school teachers sued the Tokyo metropolitan education board over its insistence that they should stand, visibly respect the flag and audibly chant the words to Japan’s national anthem, Kimigayo, at school ceremonies. The original idea behind the scheme was that teachers should set a clear example to pupils — a generation that Japan’s political old guard regard as lacking the sort of patriotism that supposedly drove Japan’s economic growth.

Teachers who failed to comply were sent to a humiliating series of “re-education” classes.

The teacher plaintiffs, of whom 370 have been reprimanded by their schools and about a dozen sacked over “anthem infractions”, have been fighting the case since 2004 and yesterday, after two years in court, were told that the education board’s behaviour was an infringement of freedom of thought as guaranteed by Japan’s constitution.

Judge Koichi Namba said that the metropolitan government — itself under the control of Tokyo’s strongly nationalist governor Shintaro Ishihara — had been wrong to punish teachers for their failure to sing the anthem. The court ordered the board to pay 30,000 yen (about £150) to each of the teachers.

The ruling said that teachers were constitutionally under no obligation to stand, sing or even play the piano as an accompaniment to the anthem.

Yoko Adachi, who has been teaching history for 35 years and was punished for failing to stand for the anthem, said: “The Hinomaru flag and Kimigayo anthem are things you should never be forced to respect. If I simply followed the directive and bowed to pressure from the education board, then I wouldn’t be able to teach real Japanese history in class.”

Sawa Kawamura, a teacher in a school for the disabled, said that the education board’s directive had produced a bizarre situation where wheelchair-bound children were not allowed to collect their graduation certificates until they had been pulled up on to the school stage where the national flag was displayed.

The teachers’ court battle has become the cause célèbre of liberal Japanese who regard patriotism drives in schools as a return to dark episodes of the country’s history. Patriotism is the chief strut of the incoming prime minister’s platform.

Next week Mr Abe assumes the leadership role being vacated by Junichiro Koizumi. He won the presidency of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on an overtly right-wing ticket — promoting the view that Japan’s problems could be solved by a surge of countrywide nationalism. His core position has been badly damaged by the ruling in favour of the teachers.

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