Between Patriotism and Terrorism: The Policing of Nationalist Movements in 1930s Japan

This essay examines the challenges faced by government experts in thought crimes as they attempted to combat radicalized nationalist organizations during the 1930s. The established system of containing subversive political movements, organized around the Peace Preservation Law (1925), was built on the premise that challenges to the government would come from the ideological left. The fact that activists were now attacking political and financial leaders in the name of patriotism presented ideological and procedural difficulties and reveals a destabilization in the discourse of nationalism enabled by the advent of patriotic terrorism that threatened the state's monopoly over the mantra of nationalism.