Film Review: Blue Boy Trial

Reviewed by Rachael Page, Kochi JET 2018-2020. Rachael saw Blue Boy Trial at Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle with JETAA North East, as part of the Japanese Film Festival 2026.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Blue Boy Trial is an emotive re-imagining of the eponymous 1965 'Blue Boy trial' that effectively outlawed gender reassignment surgery in Japan for more than 30 years. Directed by Iizuka Kasho, a transgender man, it stars real transgender women in a landmark production of its kind.

The story centres around the trial of one of the doctors who performed gender reassignment surgeries charged with violating eugenics law, however the film does not focus on the doctor, rather the three patients who take to the witness stand to try and prove that these surgeries were legitimate.

The patients depict some of the challenges faced by transgender women at the time in a very sensitive yet revealing way. The main character Sachi, played excellently by Nakagawa Miyu, is just trying to live a normal life as a woman in Japan, and must decide whether to carry on hiding her identity as a trans woman or take to the witness stand and throw away the normalcy she has worked so hard to build.

The most powerful message for me was how transgender women feel they must be what the world expects 'female' to be to justify their existence, even if it does not reflect who they truly are. The film puts forward the argument that trans people do not have to be anyone but themselves to justify their own existence, and that this identity goes beyond the basic notion of male and female; it is something knowable only by each individual person.

The battle for transgender rights to be more widely recognised in Japan is still ongoing today, and Blue Boy Trial effectively reveals the pain and struggle felt by transgender women in Japan in both an empathetic but also entertaining way. There wasn't a dry eye left in the cinema and I highly recommend this film to anyone interested in Japanese film and LGBTQ+ rights.