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

The 1925 Peace Preservation Law (Chian Iji Hō) regulated "thought criminals" who were deemed to be against the emperor system and the system of private property, most notably communists in Japan's metropole and anticolonial activists in Korea. Often juxtaposed with the Universal Manhood Suffrage Law (Futsū Senkyo Hō), which was passed at the same time, the law highlights the carrot-and-stick strategy used in interwar Japan of guaranteeing expanded political participation for imperial subjects on the one hand while arresting those deemed "dangerous elements" on the other. Public historians and journalists have well documented the suffering of individuals who were persecuted and even tortured under the Peace Preservation Law, which previous scholarship has situated as unique to Japan in its incorporation of a mixture of modern legal discourse and the concept of kokutai (national polity or essence).

Max M. Ward's Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan sets itself apart from these rather fixed perceptions of the law, however. Ward traces the transformation of the Peace Preservation Law and the ideological conversion (tenkō) initiatives associated with it, in the process revealing how institutional practices formulate Althusserian ideological state apparatuses and how changing modes of state power in general operate against political criminals driven by perceived "dangerous foreign thought" at times of national crisis.

Chapters 1 and 2 describe the complex and contested formation of the law's terms and its immediate effects. The implementation of the law in 1925 not only precipitated the arrest of thousands of communists in the metropole and anticolonial activists in Korea, but also generated the categories "thought crime" and "thought criminal." The law responded to heightened political unrest and fear of the spread of imported "dangerous thought," or, in other words, communism. Yet Ward's examination of the debate to define the targets of the law as those affiliated with groups aiming to "alter the kokutai" reveals that the meaning of kokutai was only ambiguously shared even among lawmakers and judicial officials. Indeed, the elusive and malleable nature of the concept affected both the judicial language regulating "thought criminals" and broad perceptions of the relationship between imperial sovereignty and its ideal subjects.

Chapters 3 and 4 compellingly illustrate an example of the ideological state apparatus by focusing on institutional efforts to convert thought criminals. Whereas conventional studies often discuss the level of "sincerity" in the ideological conversion of persecuted individuals, emphasizing the physical violence employed by the Special Higher Police, Ward sheds new light on efforts made by state and nonstate actors surrounding ideological conversion as an "extensive institutional apparatus that provided the models through which the individual experienced and practiced conversion" (p. 12). Particularly notable among these actors was the Imperial Renovation Society (Teikoku Kōshinkai), a semiofficial organization that mediated between the state and political criminals by reforming criminal detainees in suspension programs, monitoring their ideological conversion, and assisting converts' reintegration as productive members of society. Its activities effectively tell us that it was rehabilitation initiatives by nonstate actors, including former communist Kobayashi Morito, the head of the society's Thought Section, that convinced many thought criminals to denounce their communist affiliation and eventually accept their position as faithful Japanese imperial subjects. Kobayashi initially characterized ideological conversion as an individual religious inspiration received through the teachings of True Pure Land Buddhism and leading to an awareness of one's Japanese imperial subjectivity. After the mass conversion of communists that took place in 1934, though, he came to discuss conversion beyond individuals, defining it as a uniquely Japanese way to reform capitalism and claiming that "capitalism itself was 'going through a total, Japanese tenkō,'" a transformation that included state-controlled production (p. 125). At this point, the meaning of ideological conversion expanded to subsume the reform of the grand public sphere by and for Japanese imperial subjects.

Such a shift to a criticism of capitalism by means of Japanese imperial ideology was made possible...