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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. 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