The appeals trial brought by relatives seeking to clear the names of five now-deceased men convicted in the 'Yokohama Incident,' one of the worst cases of repression of journalistic freedom during the war, was held Thursday at the Tokyo High Court.</PARAGRAPH> <PARAGRAPH>Presiding Judge Fumihiro Abe indicated the trial will be concluded without reinvestigating evidence presented in the court of first instance, a move likely to lead to the rejection of the appeal.</PARAGRAPH> <PARAGRAPH>Defense lawyers are expected to make their case in the next session, on Dec. 7.</PARAGRAPH> <PARAGRAPH>The five, who were convicted of promoting communism in violation of the now-abolished Peace Preservation Law, had demanded a retrial, arguing they were falsely charged after investigators tortured them to gain confessions.</PARAGRAPH> <PARAGRAPH>Their relatives submitted a petition for a retrial in 1998, prompting the Yokohama District Court to reopen the case in April 2003, a decision upheld by the Tokyo High Court in March 2005. But the district court then terminated the trial in a Feb. 9 ruling, saying the five had been given a general amnesty after the war and that the anticommunist law had been abolished.</PARAGRAPH> <PARAGRAPH>The relatives appealed the ruling, with their lawyers claiming the decision undermines the purpose of retrials, which is to give redemption to the wrongly convicted.</PARAGRAPH> <PARAGRAPH>Since the judge indicated the high court will engage only in legal interpretations, the court is thus expected to let the lower court ruling stand.</PARAGRAPH> <PARAGRAPH>The Yokohama Incident involved the arrests, on suspicion of promoting communism, of more than 60 journalists and magazine editors from 1942 to just before the end of the war in 1945.</PARAGRAPH> <PARAGRAPH>About 30 of them were tried under the former Code of Criminal Procedure and found guilty of violating the anticommunist law, and four people died during investigations, apparently as a result of torture.</PARAGRAPH> <PARAGRAPH>The five men named in the retrial -- Toru Kimura, Eizaburo Kobayashi, Hiroshi Yoshida, Kenjiro Takagi and Toshio Hiradate -- were each given suspended two-year prison sentences, in August and September 1945 for publishing procommunist articles in the magazine Kaizo –

during the war.