Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan

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...