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

In Thought Crime, Ward traces the history of Japan's 1925 Peace Preservation Law (ppl), designed "to suppress communism and anticolonial nationalism" and explores the program of rehabilitation of political criminals ("thought criminals") to which it gave birth (ix). The phenomenon of state-induced ideological conversion (tenkō) from the 1930s to the 1940s has been studied widely in Japan and by a number of Anglophone scholars. Rather than continue to treat it as a problem of Japanese culture (coded as premodern or irrational) or as a matter of individuals' intellectual and moral choices, Ward focuses on what this history tells us about the nature of modern state power in Japan and, importantly, more generally. (His opening discussion of the judicial treatment of Somali Americans who attempted to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [isil] makes the comparative case effectively.) He argues that the law and its ancillary agencies constituted an apparatus through which different modalities of power could be applied, according to changing conditions and the needs of the state, to individuals who represented "foreign" ideological threats to imperial sovereignty.

Drawing on Althusser's concepts of repressive and ideological state apparatuses, Ward shows how—in response to the phenomenon of "mass tenkō" triggered by the conversion of Japanese Communist Party leaders Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika in 1933—the ppl apparatus shifted from a punitive emphasis on detention to a focus on rehabilitation via individualized guidance and family interventions using a network of agencies outside the formal institutions of the state.¹ Ward asserts that this apparatus gave substance to the legally nebulous ideology of the emperor-centered "national polity" (kokutai) that the ppl was written to defend, and to its corollary, the "loyal imperial subject," formed through concrete practices such as writing reflective memoirs according to specific narrative conventions. In Foucauldian terms, Ward sees power working through sovereign/juridical, disciplinary, and governmental modalities. Rather than treat these aspects as elements in a linear evolutionary framework, however, he emphasizes their contemporaneous interplay, noting that the ppl maintained and reasserted its repressive features as needed.

The passage of the 1936 Thought Criminal Protection and Supervision Law extended this system across the Japanese empire. Moreover, leading figures in the ppl apparatus came to envision tenkō as a model for the national spiritual-mobilization campaign that followed the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937—a process through which all Japanese were to "convert" to "national thought" or "Japanese spirit" and offer themselves up selflessly to the defense of the kokutai and the advancement of Japan's aims. The apparatus evolved differently under colonial conditions, however. In Korea, state efforts tended more toward repression than ideological reform, since authorities believed that even if colonial activists could be induced to abandon Marxism, they could never truly abandon the goal of colonial independence and that, in any case, their Korean-ness prevented them from converting to true Japanese imperial subjecthood. Nonetheless, by the mid-to-late 1930s, officials did seek to produce more ideological converts; Korean converts did mobilize in support of the war effort (though their motivations require further analysis); and Japanese officials publicized their endeavors.

Thought Crime offers a lucid reflection on theories of power and the modern state while refusing to fetishize the particularities of the Japanese case. Some engagement with Stoler's concept of imperial formations might have enabled more comparative reflections on colonial power.² Moreover, the concluding discussion of the afterlife of prewar and wartime ppl apparatus under Cold War "democracy" could have been connected to the theorization of 1930s—1970s "total war systems" by historical sociologists such as Yamanouchi.³ Scaling down, whether or not the much-vaunted low-recidivism rates among converts had any validity beyond their value on paper (that is, as justifications for the apparatus to reproduce itself) remains an open question, as does the extent of rehabilitation organizations' actual surveillance capabilities and the nature of their...