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Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan
In Thought Crime Max M. Ward explores the Japanese state's efforts to suppress political radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ward traces the evolution of an antiradical law called the Peace Preservation Law, from its initial application to suppress communism and anticolonial nationalism--what authorities deemed thought crime--to its expansion into an elaborate system to reform and ideologically convert thousands of thought criminals throughout the Japanese Empire. To enforce the law, the government enlisted a number of nonstate actors, who included monks, family members, and community leaders. Throughout, Ward illuminates the complex processes through which the law articulated imperial ideology and how this ideology was transformed and disseminated through the law's application over its twenty-year history. In so doing, he shows how the Peace Preservation Law provides a window into understanding how modern states develop ideological apparatuses to subject their respective populations.
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Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan
In Thought Crime Max M. Ward explores the Japanese state's efforts to suppress political radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ward traces the evolution of an antiradical law called the Peace Preservation Law, from its initial application to suppress communism and anticolonial nationalism--what authorities deemed thought crime--to its expansion into an elaborate system to reform and ideologically convert thousands of thought criminals throughout the Japanese Empire. To enforce the law, the government enlisted a number of nonstate actors, who included monks, family members, and community leaders. Throughout, Ward illuminates the complex processes through which the law articulated imperial ideology and how this ideology was transformed and disseminated through the law's application over its twenty-year history. In so doing, he shows how the Peace Preservation Law provides a window into understanding how modern states develop ideological apparatuses to subject their respective populations.
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Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan

Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan

by Max M. Ward
Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan
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Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan

Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan

by Max M. Ward

Overview

In Thought Crime Max M. Ward explores the Japanese state's efforts to suppress political radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ward traces the evolution of an antiradical law called the Peace Preservation Law, from its initial application to suppress communism and anticolonial nationalism--what authorities deemed thought crime--to its expansion into an elaborate system to reform and ideologically convert thousands of thought criminals throughout the Japanese Empire. To enforce the law, the government enlisted a number of nonstate actors, who included monks, family members, and community leaders. Throughout, Ward illuminates the complex processes through which the law articulated imperial ideology and how this ideology was transformed and disseminated through the law's application over its twenty-year history. In so doing, he shows how the Peace Preservation Law provides a window into understanding how modern states develop ideological apparatuses to subject their respective populations.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781478001652
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 03/15/2019
Series: Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society
Pages: 314
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Max M. Ward is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College and coeditor of Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy.

Table of Contents

Preface: Policing Ideological Threats, Then and Now  ix
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction. The Ghost in the Machine: Emperor System Ideology and the Peace Preservation Law Apparatus  1
1. Kokutai and the Aporias of Imperial Sovereignty: The Passage of the Peace Preservation Law in 1925  21
2. Transcriptions of Power: Repression and Rehabilitation in the Early Peace Preservation Law Apparatus, 1925-1933  49
3. Apparatuses of Subjection: The Rehabilitation of Thought Criminals in the Early 1930s  77
4. Nurturing the Ideological Avowal: Toward the Codification of Tenkō in 1936 123
5. The Ideology of Conversion: Tenkō on the Eve of Total War  145
Epilogue. The Legacies of the Thought Rehabilitation System in Postwar Japan  179
Notes  185
Bibliography  261
Index  281

What People are Saying About This

Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan - Louise Young

“Max M. Ward's illuminating new book examines the dynamics of left-right political conversions—tenkō—during the era of Japanese fascism. Moving beyond the conventional focus on the individual as the site for moral responsibility and political repression, Ward directs our attention to the operations and logic of the imperial state. By examining the nexus of political ideology, state form, and security apparatus, Ward reenergizes debates about Japan's ‘emperor-system’ and injects new life into the practice of political history more broadly. A must read for scholars of interwar and wartime Japan.”

Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II - Takashi Fujitani

“No one in English or Japanese has written on the Peace Preservation Law with the conceptual sophistication that Max M. Ward brings to the topic. He deftly considers Japan's national body politic and the phenomenon of ideological conversion in their imbrications with the problems of sovereignty, the monarchy, colonialism, and national territory like nobody else. Thought Crime will be required reading for scholars and students of modern Japanese history.”

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Related Subjects

History
Asian History
Japanese History
Japanese History - General & Miscellaneous
History
Asian History
Japanese History
Japanese History - General & Miscellaneous

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