Asia Pacific. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019. xviii, 294 pp. (Figures, illustrations.) US$26.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0165-2.
Japanologists have explained how the behaviour of the Japanese people during the years leading up to and including the World War II was distinctive by comparison with the rest of the world, especially Europe and North America. The most fascinating and perplexing of these behaviours was the phenomenon of tenkō or “ideological conversion” (4), in which individuals, after their arrest by Japan’s right-wing governments of the 1920s and 1930s, switched their political allegiances from the political left to the right. Because these conversions were so sudden, so seemingly sincere, and so widespread, scholars have identified them as unique to the Japanese people, explanations for which can only be found via a close analysis of Japanese culture. Max Ward argues against this paradigmatic historiography. Ward’s contribution to the relatively massive corpus of works focused on prewar and wartime Japanese history is both compelling and convincing, which makes his book the most authoritative treatment of tenkō produced over the last several decades.
Concerned with the threat of communism and anti-colonialism (especially in Korea), Japanese political leaders passed the first version of the notorious Peace Preservation Law (Chian iji hō) in 1925, which they used to suppress left-wing political activity (22). Rather than rely on the outright ban on Marxian political organizations—chiefly the Japanese Communist Party (JCP)—the government decided to articulate the specific legal transgression of which left-wing activists were allegedly guilty. Officials concluded, after a spirited and fascinating debate, the particulars of which Ward narrates for his readers: that it was kokutai (“national polity/essence”) that left-wingers threatened to undermine (47). Like tenkō, a term that made its first appearance in 1932 (73)—one that was so distinctive and closely associated with prewar and wartime Japan that Japanologists, even those outside of Japan, generally use the Japanese term rather than its translation—kokutai is another term with a similar historiographical significance. Ultimately, officials agreed that kokutai signified the sovereignty of the imperial institution and its “unbroken line” going back to the supposed founding of the Japanese (Yamato) state in 660 BCE. With the law in place, the government rounded up these “thought criminals” with the intention of punishing them for the dangers they posed to kokutai, but within a few years, they found themselves overwhelmed by the number of people they had arrested, which soared into the tens of thousands (136). For this reason, those charged with enforcing the Peace Preservation Law pivoted away from punishing thought criminals to rehabilitating them via the encouragement of their tenkō (51). The upside of this policy change was more than merely practical, as it had a profoundly ideological dimension to it at the same time, since it was “couched in terms of imperial benevolence, [and] aimed to reform political criminals based on the norm of the productive and loyal subject” (55). In fact, Japanese leaders assessed the success of the Peace Preservation Law based on the number of thought criminals who underwent tenkō to become model imperial subjects in the process (108). Ward ends his analysis with the outbreak of war with China in 1937, when Japanese leaders began to uphold the individuals who had undergone tenkō as exemplary imperial citizens for the rest of the Japanese population to emulate (125).
Ward frames his analysis with the theoretical concepts of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, two of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. From Foucault, he borrows the “tripartite schema of sovereign-juridical power, disciplinary power, and governmentality,” which he uses to conceptualize the enforcement of the Peace Preservation Law—first as punishment, followed by the support for tenkō (12), and then the identification of ideological converts as ideal imperial subjects. From Althusser, he takes his famous concept of ideological state apparatus (ISA), and applies it to an analysis of the Imperial Renovation Society (Teikoku Kōshinkai), the chief institution charged with the rehabilitation of thought criminals (88). Ward also draws heavily from Althusser’s insights regarding ideology, specifically the ways in which it “provides a lens through which to understand the material practices and institutional forms in which the phenomenon of ideological conversion was generated and managed in interwar Japan” (89).
The successful application of concepts, from the writings of Foucault and Althusser to the analysis of Japanese political history from the 1920s and 1930s, is one of the many strengths of Ward’s work. Another major strength, one that is related to the use of ideas associated with Foucault and Althusser, is that Ward seeks to undermine what I refer to as exceptionalist explanations of Japanese history. Although Ward himself does not make this observation, the use of Japanese terms like kokutai and tenkō, rather than their translations in Western-language works, invites the reader to conclude that these terms do not have conceptual equivalents outside of Japan. Instead of analyzing the Peace Preservation Law and tenkō as “a question unique to Japan’s modern intellectual history” (181), Ward chooses to “situate [its] particular history in a wider conversation about modern forms of state power” (52).
However, Ward does not actually provide his readers with a discussion of this “wider conversation.” For this reason, what is an intellectual strength of Ward’s study is also a conceptual weakness. Another drawback is his use of the word shisō to signify both “thought” and “ideology,” even though the Japanese language has a borrowed word for ideology, ideorogii. Interestingly, the Mandarin reading of shisō, sixiang, does more often signify “ideology,” and less often “thought,” but the situation in Japanese is the reverse. The word, shisō, is more like the French word, pensée, as opposed to idéologie. This issue seems to indicate a casual attitude toward language-related issues more generally, as the absence of a Chinese character (kanji) list of terms and names, standard within the field, also indicates.
These minor weaknesses notwithstanding, Ward’s study is a major contribution to the field of modern Japanese history. It should become a must-read for scholars of modern Japanese history and graduate students, and even sophisticated undergraduates will find it interesting and informative.
Mark McNally
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu