Before its ruling concerning same-sex marriages, the Fukuoka District Court ordered visitors to remove or cover up anything showing rainbow colors, the symbol for the LGBT rights movement.

The court on June 8 ended up ruling that Japan’s legal system that does not recognize same-sex marriages was in a “state of unconstitutionality.”

Sexual minorities and their supporters lauded the decision, but the order against wearing rainbow colors in the courtroom left them frustrated.

“We have caused no problem by wearing rainbow colors,” a supporter of the plaintiffs said. “The court’s instruction was too strict.”

Judges have the discretion to take necessary measures to maintain order in their courtrooms and prevent visitors from swaying judgments.

But Fukuoka District Court officials did not disclose the reason for the instruction against rainbow colors issued by Presiding Judge Hiroyuki Ueda.

According to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, around one hour before the court session started on June 8, a court clerk told them, “People who are wearing rainbow colors and will enter the courtroom are required to cover them.”

Ken Suzuki, a 63-year-old university professor, came to the court wearing socks with rainbow colors. He was stopped at the entrance of the courtroom.

A court worker, offering adhesive tape, asked the professor to cover the rainbow colors on his socks.

Inside the courtroom, another man was asked by a court worker to remove the rainbow-colored watch from his wrist. After some exchanges with the worker, the man took off the watch.

Suzuki was allowed to enter the courtroom after folding his socks to hide the rainbow colors.

“The rainbow colors are the symbol of the solidarity of sexual minorities,” he said in frustration. “It’s crazy that a court would give instructions even about the design of socks, which judges cannot see.”

An official of the district court confirmed that the presiding judge issued the instruction to prevent people from showing rainbow colors in the courtroom.

According to the Supreme Court, judges have the power to take measures about the behavior of the audience in a courtroom in the cases before them. Such power is called the “right to police a courtroom.”

In addition, the Court Law says judges have the power to “issue orders or take measures as necessary for the maintenance of order in the court.”

Rules prescribed by the Supreme Court forbid visitors from showing placards or wearing message-bearing clothing in courtrooms.

In a previous civil court case, the presiding judge asked a defendant and some visitors to remove badges shaped like blue ribbons, a symbol of efforts to rescue people abducted by North Korea.

In the case, a South Korean living in Japan sued her employer, an Osaka-based real estate company, for distributing materials within the workplace that she said included discriminatory expressions.

Later, the chairman of the real estate company and his supporters filed a lawsuit against the government over the instruction to remove the blue-ribbon badges, saying it was an infringement of freedom of expression.

But in May, a court ruled the instruction was an appropriate execution of the “right to police a courtroom.”

Atsushi Hosono, a lawyer and a former judge at the Tokyo High Court, explained that such instructions are intended to “guarantee a fair and neutral trial.”

“If audience members in a courtroom are allowed to express their own views, bickering by both the plaintiff’s and defendant’s sides in the courtroom might escalate,” he said.

But Satoshi Kinoshita, professor of constitutional studies at the law school of Kansai University, disagreed with the June 8 instruction against rainbow colors.

“(The colors) weren’t something that would interrupt the court proceedings, so there was no basis to ban them,” Kinoshita said.

He also noted that June 8 was the day for giving a ruling, not to hear complicated arguments for or against the ban on same-sex marriages.

Kinoshita said the Fukuoka District Court “should not have excessively restricted behavior of audience members in the courtroom. It needs to make clear why it prohibited (wearing rainbow colors). Otherwise, similar instructions might alienate people from visiting courts.”

(This article was written by Tetsuhiro Toyoshima, Satoko Onuki and Ryo Ikeda.)