Max Ward is an associate professor of history at Middlebury College. He is the author of Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke 2019) and coeditor of Transwar Asia: Ideology, Practices, and Institutions, 1920–1960 (Bloomsbury 2022) and Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (Brill 2017). He is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled Police Power in Modern Japan, 1870–1970.
In Thought Crime Max M. Ward explores the Japanese state's efforts to suppress political radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ward traces the evolution of an antiradical law called the Peace Preservation Law, from its initial application to suppress communism and anticolonial nationalism—what authorities deemed thought crime—to its expansion into an elaborate system to reform and ideologically convert thousands of thought criminals throughout the Japanese Empire. To enforce the law, the government enlisted a number of nonstate actors, who included monks, family members, and community leaders. Throughout, Ward illuminates the complex processes through which the law articulated imperial ideology and how this ideology was transformed and disseminated through the law's application over its twenty-year history. In so doing, he shows how the Peace Preservation Law provides a window into understanding how modern states develop ideological apparatuses to subject their respective populations.
This volume considers the possibilities of the term 'transwar' to understand the history of Asia ... more This volume considers the possibilities of the term 'transwar' to understand the history of Asia from the 1920s to the 1960s. Recently, scholars have challenged earlier studies that suggested a neat division between the pre- and postwar or colonial/postcolonial periods in the national histories of East Asia, instead assessing change and continuity across the divide of war. Taking this reconsideration further, Transwar Asia explores the complex processes by which prewar and colonial ideologies, practices, and institutions from the 1920s and 1930s were reconfigured during World War II and, crucially, in the two decades that followed, thus shaping the Asian Cold War and the processes of decolonization and nation state-formation.
With contributions covering the transwar histories of China, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan, the book addresses key themes such as authoritarianism, militarization, criminal rehabilitation, market controls, labor-regimes, and anti-communism. A transwar angle, the authors argue, sheds new light on the continuing problems that undergirded the formation of postwar nation-states and illuminates the political legacies that still shape the various regions in Asia up to the present.
Confronting Capital and Empire inquires into the relationship between philosophy, politics and ca... more Confronting Capital and Empire inquires into the relationship between philosophy, politics and capitalism by rethinking Kyoto School philosophy in relation to history. The Kyoto School was an in uential group of Japanese philosophers loosely related to Kyoto Imperial University's philosophy department, including such diverse thinkers as Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, Nakai Masakazu and Tosaka Jun. Confronting Capital and Empire presents a new perspective on the Kyoto School by bringing the school into dialogue with Marx and the underlying questions of Marxist theory. The volume brings together essays that analyse Kyoto School thinkers through a Marxian and/or critical theoretical perspective, asking: in what ways did Kyoto School thinkers engage with their historical moment?... See More Readership This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social theory, philosophy, Asian studies, postcolonial theory, East Asian History and Marxism.
This essay focuses on the police protagonists in David Peace's Tokyo Trilogy and the historical m... more This essay focuses on the police protagonists in David Peace's Tokyo Trilogy and the historical mediations they perform in the worlds of the novels. It argues that these mediations are generated by the way Peace subverts the conventional narrative structure of historical detective fiction: rather than moving toward resolution—solving a crime—the object of detection is continually displaced to conspiracies with historical and political implications, thereby constituting different temporalities that do not move forward but rather repeat, circulate, or are perpetually delayed. Underlying these repetitions, transmissions, and premonitions are historical‐political legacies of Japanese empire, war, and American anti‐communist conspiracies, which open toward a critical‐conspiratorial understanding of postwar Japan.
Max Ward, “Thinking Like a State: Policing Dangerous Thought in Imperial Japan, 1900-1945,” Posit... more Max Ward, “Thinking Like a State: Policing Dangerous Thought in Imperial Japan, 1900-1945,” Positions: Asia Critique, Vol. 30, No. 1 (February 2022), pp. 35-60.
This article explores one of the primary ways the Japanese police increasingly intervened into everyday life in prewar Japan: the policing of so-called “dangerous thought” (kiken shisō). The article traces the process in which the objective of policing politics transformed from an emphasis on political organizations, their activities, publications, and assemblies in the 1900s to the policing of individuals ostensibly harboring “dangerous ideas” that were deemed threatening to state and capital—what the police came to categorize as “thought crime” (shisō hanzai) by the late 1920s. Once “dangerous thought” was identified as a target of policing in the late 1920s, police agencies began to develop a kind of intellectual history - what I call "thinking like a state" - to explain the origin of dangerous ideas and their spread in the changing socioeconomic conditions in imperial Japan. In the process, the police also reflected on their unique function between Japanese society and the imperial state, and continually invoked something they called the “spirit of the police” (keisatsu seishin) as the prime mover of police power, although what this spirit symbolized changed over time.
Max Ward, “Reproducing the ‘Emperor-System Within:’ Transwar Criminal Rehabilitation and Imperial... more Max Ward, “Reproducing the ‘Emperor-System Within:’ Transwar Criminal Rehabilitation and Imperial Benevolence in Japan, 1920-1960” in Transwar Asia: Ideology, Practices, and Institutions, 1920-1960, edited by Reto Hofmann and Max Ward. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), pp. 169-194.
This chapter explores the development of the criminal reform system in Japan between the 1920s and 1960s, focusing on transwar institutional developments as well as the continuing symbolic association of criminal reform with the emperor system (tennōsei) and its ideology of imperial benevolence (jikeishugi). I seek to challenge a conventional approach to Japanese history in which Japan’s military defeat in 1945 demarcates both a historical rupture between Japan’s prewar empire and postwar nation formation as well as a clear political demarcation between interwar militarism/fascism and postwar liberal democracy. I demonstrate how an interwar ideology associating criminal rehabilitation with the imperial sovereign was translated into the postwar idiom of liberal reform, creating affective identifications with the symbolic emperor.
This article explores how Japanese officials and others conceptualized police power at particular... more This article explores how Japanese officials and others conceptualized police power at particular junctures in imperial Japanese history (1868-1945). It does so by synthesizing prior scholarship on the Japanese police into a broader genealogy of the police idea in prewar Japan, beginning with the first translations and explanations of police in the Meiji period, the changing perceptions of the police in the 1910s, and the evolution from the "national police" idea in the 1920s to the "emperor's police" in the late 1930s. The essay proposes that the police idea in Japan (and elsewhere) can be read as a boundary concept in which the changing conceptions of police power demarcate the shifting relationship between state and society. Indeed, it is the elusiveness of this boundary that allows for police power, and by extension state power, to function within society and transform in response to social conditions. Approached in this way, the essay argues that the different permutations of the police idea index the evolving modality of state power in prewar Japan, and thus allows us to reconsider some of the defining questions of imperial Japanese history.
Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan, edited by Irena Hayter, George Sipos and Mark Williams (Routledge), 2021
Max Ward, "Ideological Conversion as Historical Catachresis: Coming to Terms With Tenkō," in Iren... more Max Ward, "Ideological Conversion as Historical Catachresis: Coming to Terms With Tenkō," in Irena Hayter, George T. Sipos, Mark Williams, eds., Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan (New York : Routledge, 2021), 3-22.
No other term has come to symbolize the vexed decades of interwar Japan—if not also the myriad contradictions of Japanese modernity— more than tenkō. The combination of the term’s two Chinese characters—転向—innocuously means a “change of direction,” but in the political history of interwar Japan, tenkō assumed on a much more insidious significance. There the term referred to the “ideological conversion” of hundreds of political activists and intellectuals, beginning with incarcerated Japanese Communist Party (JCP) members who publicly defected from the party in 1933-1934, to later in the decade, leftist thinkers, academics as well as anti-colonial nationalists in colonial Korea who either abandoned political activism or began to proactively support the imperial state. Then, in the early postwar period, Japanese scholars returned to the question of tenkō in order to pursue a variety of problems related to primarily Japanese intellectual history, including: theories of modern subjectivity, the paradigmatic shifts in modern Japanese intellectual history, the politics of writing, or, as revealing the constitutive dynamics of Japanese modernity or modernity more generally. As we see here, scholars expanded the meaning of tenkō far beyond the political defections of interwar political activists and, in doing so, opened the term to a variety of analytical and theoretical investments.
In this chapter, I consider how we might construct a conceptual history tenkō that can account for all the diverse practices, political positions and theoretical investments the term accrued across the twentieth century. I begin by questioning the basic assumptions that have informed our received understanding of tenkō. Then I will propose the idea of “historical catachresis” theorized by Tani Barlow as providing a way to account for the many articulations of tenkō across a variety of ideological, historical and institutional domains.
This essay analyzes Ōshima Nagisa's 1968 film Death by Hanging by reading it with Franz Kafka's 1... more This essay analyzes Ōshima Nagisa's 1968 film Death by Hanging by reading it with Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial, approaching both works as positing distinct theories of state power and ideological subjection. Many critics have noted the "Kafkaesque" quality of Death by Hanging: e.g., that the film centers upon an indicted protagonist who is subjected to the legal machinations of the state in a series of absurd and theatrical situations, leading to his eventual execution. Beyond these formal similarities, I foreground the two works' shared concern with the operations of the modern state, putting them in conversation with critical theorists including Althusser, Butler and Žižek. In doing so, I argue that Death by Hanging reveals the limits of what Žižek theorized as the "Kafkaesque subject," opening into questions about political possibility and gesturing towards what Althusser called " bad subjects. "
This is an introduction to our book, <<Confronting Capital>>, where we discuss various interpreta... more This is an introduction to our book, <<Confronting Capital>>, where we discuss various interpretations of the Kyoto School and analyze the consequences of approaching the Kyoto school philosophers from the standpoint of philosophy or intellectual history. In addition to introducing the various essays in the volume, we deal with how to contextualize thought in relation to global capitalist modernity. I am uploading this version since, we are not allowed to upload the published version because of copyright issues.
Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy, 2017
Tanabe Hajime’s 1946 _Philosophy as Metanoetics_ (Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku, 1946) is a bold ... more Tanabe Hajime’s 1946 _Philosophy as Metanoetics_ (Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku, 1946) is a bold and complicated text in which Tanabe reflects on his experiences during the last years of the Pacific War in order to rethink the project of philosophy as a metanoetic process of self-negation, repentance, conversion and resurrection, inspired by True Pure Land Buddhism (Jōdo shinshū). This chapter focuses on the status of history in the text, and in particular, the narratival function of Tanabe’s uncharacteristically personal Preface. The sense of history that emerges from the Preface and which is inherited by subsequent studies is that history remains an external reality to Tanabe’s thought, which, depending on one’s evaluation, Tanabe was either bravely standing up against, or unable to resist its determinations. In contrast, I draw upon Fredric Jameson's idea of the political unconscious, and locate history and the ideological significance of _Philosophy as Metanoetics_ internal to the text itself; namely, at the level of its formal structure and how history is formally displaced from philosophical reflection. I argue that once Tanabe begins to develop the temporal and historical logic unique to metanoesis, he does not bring metanoesis back to bear upon what initially threw him into penitent self-reflection in the first place; i.e., history.
Addressing the organizing question of the volume, this chapter explores the many ways that Marxis... more Addressing the organizing question of the volume, this chapter explores the many ways that Marxism’s historical and political significance outside of Europe has been dismissed by portraying it as an inherently western import alien to the cultural milieus of the periphery. The essay begins with a brief analysis of how area studies has approached Marxist praxis in Japan as a vexed process of intellectual “adaptation” taking place during rapid modernization. This serves to introduce the second and more substantial portion of the essay, which analyzes Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theory of modernity developed in his influential book Provincializing Europe (2000). I argue that, although informing a very different politics, Chakrabarty ends up reproducing many of the cultural assumptions that informed area studies' approaches to Marxism. The result is that rather than provincializing Europe per se, Chakrabarty has provincialized Marx specifically. The essay concludes by considering the continuing challenges of studying Marxist thought and movements in East Asian history.
Death by Hanging (Kōshikei) is one of Ōshima Nagisa’s most complex political films of the 1960s, ... more Death by Hanging (Kōshikei) is one of Ōshima Nagisa’s most complex political films of the 1960s, both for its innovative experiments with film form, as well as how it addresses a variety of political issues, including capital punishment, nationalism, and colonial legacies in postwar Japan, to name just a few. At the center of this constellation of issues is the question of ideological subjection by the state and its inherent connection to state violence. In this essay, I read Ōshima’s Death By Hanging as a cinematic exposition of state power and ideology, and will read it along with Louis Althusser’s contemporaneous notes from 1969-1970 outlining what he called Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and ideological interpellation. Ultimately, this is an exercise in reading Althusser and Ōshima alongside each other, in order to see what their respective — and contemporaneous — analyses allow us to ask about ideology, state power, and political possibility.
Max Ward, “Ideology and Subjection in Oshima Nagisa’s Koshikei (1968)” in “Perspectives on Oshima Nagisa” UTCP-Uehiro Pamphlet No. 7 (2015), pp. 33-59.
This essay explores an imperial state exhibition held in Tokyo in 1938 and explains how the exhib... more This essay explores an imperial state exhibition held in Tokyo in 1938 and explains how the exhibition displayed a fascist worldview of historical crisis and national regeneration that was taking shape in Japan in the late 1930s. The exhibition – entitled the Thought War Exhibition (Shisosen tenrankai) – was curated by the Japanese state’s newly formed Cabinet Information Division (Naikaku johobu) and held in Takashimaya Department Store in downtown Tokyo. Comprised of materials related to the Communist International, the Spanish Civil War, the national liberation struggle in China, and the communist and anti-colonial movements inside the Japanese Empire, the Exhibition portrayed Japan’s invasion of the Chinese mainland in 1937 as an extension of a global thought war against communism, requiring all imperial subjects to purify themselves of foreign influences and mobilize for national thought defense. While on the surface this Exhibition was an example of prewar state propaganda, it also expressed a fascist worldview that was coalescing in the Japanese state in the late 1930s. This essay investigates how this fascist worldview was exhibited in a sequence of displays, including dioramas, panoramas, illuminated maps, and display cases, and how these displays revealed constitutive contradictions that underwrote the formation of fascism in Japan.
Max Ward, “Displaying the Worldview of Japanese Fascism: The Tokyo Thought War Exhibition of 1938” Critical Asian Studies Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sept 2015), pp. 414-439.
In early 1938, the newly formed Cabinet Information Division (Naikaku johobu) held a closed-door ... more In early 1938, the newly formed Cabinet Information Division (Naikaku johobu) held a closed-door Thought-War Symposium (Shisosen koshukai) in Tokyo with over 100 bureaucrats, military officers, media executives and academics in attendance. While the ostensible purpose of the symposium was to discuss propaganda following Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in July of 1937, the presentations had very little to do with the practical coordination of information. Rather, the symposium participants brought their specific areas of expertise to bear on elaborating the curious term ‘thought war’ (shisosen), a term that had only recently been used with any regularity but which had become invested with critical urgency following the invasion of China.
In the conventional literature, the term ‘thought war’ is understood as marking a new modality of state propaganda as Japan moved towards a total war system. However, this reading overlooks the ideological investments in thought war discourse, as well as how ‘thought war’ inherited a multivalent sense of crisis that had crystallized around thought and culture earlier in the 1930s. In this article, I explore how the 1938 symposium revealed a combined sense of historical crisis and an urgent call for the total overhaul of Japanese state and society, a combination which, I argue, underwrote the development of fascism in Japan. I trace how three earlier discourses of crisis - the ‘Manchurian Problem’, the ‘thought problem’ and the ‘movement to clarify the kokutai’ - converged within thought war discourse, thus investing it with fascist urgency.
Max Ward, "Crisis ideology and the articulation of fascism in interwar Japan: the 1938 Thought-War Symposium" Japan Forum Vol. 26, No. 4 (Dec 2014), pp. 462-485. DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2014.924545
In this dissertation I explore how a vision of national regeneration and world transformation was... more In this dissertation I explore how a vision of national regeneration and world transformation was formulated in 1930s Japan through the discourse of the “thought-problem” (shisō mondai ). Initially, the term thought-problem was used to signify an ostensible threat posed to Japan's national essence by foreign ideologies – most notably communism and anarchism – thus requiring state intervention to protect cultural tradition. However, as state officials and intellectuals struggled to define this elusive national essence into the early 1930s, the thought-problem was reconceived as Japan's inability to manifest its unique essence into modern forms. As a result, the determination of the thought-problem shifted from a conservative politics of protection, to a fascist agenda of spiritual rehabilitation and national regeneration by the mid-1930s.
Review of: The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan. By... more Review of: The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan. By Charlotte Eubanks. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2020. xviii, 314 pages. $72.00.
Review of: Eiichiro Azuma. _In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism i... more Review of: Eiichiro Azuma. _In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire_. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019. 353 pp. $75.00 (hardcover).
Max Ward. "Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shū sui and Japan's First AntiImperialist Mov... more Max Ward. "Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shū sui and Japan's First AntiImperialist Movement by Robert Thomas Tierney (review)." The Journal of Japanese Studies 45, no. 2 (2019): 406-411
In Thought Crime Max M. Ward explores the Japanese state's efforts to suppress political radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ward traces the evolution of an antiradical law called the Peace Preservation Law, from its initial application to suppress communism and anticolonial nationalism—what authorities deemed thought crime—to its expansion into an elaborate system to reform and ideologically convert thousands of thought criminals throughout the Japanese Empire. To enforce the law, the government enlisted a number of nonstate actors, who included monks, family members, and community leaders. Throughout, Ward illuminates the complex processes through which the law articulated imperial ideology and how this ideology was transformed and disseminated through the law's application over its twenty-year history. In so doing, he shows how the Peace Preservation Law provides a window into understanding how modern states develop ideological apparatuses to subject their respective populations.
This volume considers the possibilities of the term 'transwar' to understand the history of Asia ... more This volume considers the possibilities of the term 'transwar' to understand the history of Asia from the 1920s to the 1960s. Recently, scholars have challenged earlier studies that suggested a neat division between the pre- and postwar or colonial/postcolonial periods in the national histories of East Asia, instead assessing change and continuity across the divide of war. Taking this reconsideration further, Transwar Asia explores the complex processes by which prewar and colonial ideologies, practices, and institutions from the 1920s and 1930s were reconfigured during World War II and, crucially, in the two decades that followed, thus shaping the Asian Cold War and the processes of decolonization and nation state-formation.
With contributions covering the transwar histories of China, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan, the book addresses key themes such as authoritarianism, militarization, criminal rehabilitation, market controls, labor-regimes, and anti-communism. A transwar angle, the authors argue, sheds new light on the continuing problems that undergirded the formation of postwar nation-states and illuminates the political legacies that still shape the various regions in Asia up to the present.
Confronting Capital and Empire inquires into the relationship between philosophy, politics and ca... more Confronting Capital and Empire inquires into the relationship between philosophy, politics and capitalism by rethinking Kyoto School philosophy in relation to history. The Kyoto School was an in uential group of Japanese philosophers loosely related to Kyoto Imperial University's philosophy department, including such diverse thinkers as Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, Nakai Masakazu and Tosaka Jun. Confronting Capital and Empire presents a new perspective on the Kyoto School by bringing the school into dialogue with Marx and the underlying questions of Marxist theory. The volume brings together essays that analyse Kyoto School thinkers through a Marxian and/or critical theoretical perspective, asking: in what ways did Kyoto School thinkers engage with their historical moment?... See More Readership This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social theory, philosophy, Asian studies, postcolonial theory, East Asian History and Marxism.
This essay focuses on the police protagonists in David Peace's Tokyo Trilogy and the historical m... more This essay focuses on the police protagonists in David Peace's Tokyo Trilogy and the historical mediations they perform in the worlds of the novels. It argues that these mediations are generated by the way Peace subverts the conventional narrative structure of historical detective fiction: rather than moving toward resolution—solving a crime—the object of detection is continually displaced to conspiracies with historical and political implications, thereby constituting different temporalities that do not move forward but rather repeat, circulate, or are perpetually delayed. Underlying these repetitions, transmissions, and premonitions are historical‐political legacies of Japanese empire, war, and American anti‐communist conspiracies, which open toward a critical‐conspiratorial understanding of postwar Japan.
Max Ward, “Thinking Like a State: Policing Dangerous Thought in Imperial Japan, 1900-1945,” Posit... more Max Ward, “Thinking Like a State: Policing Dangerous Thought in Imperial Japan, 1900-1945,” Positions: Asia Critique, Vol. 30, No. 1 (February 2022), pp. 35-60.
This article explores one of the primary ways the Japanese police increasingly intervened into everyday life in prewar Japan: the policing of so-called “dangerous thought” (kiken shisō). The article traces the process in which the objective of policing politics transformed from an emphasis on political organizations, their activities, publications, and assemblies in the 1900s to the policing of individuals ostensibly harboring “dangerous ideas” that were deemed threatening to state and capital—what the police came to categorize as “thought crime” (shisō hanzai) by the late 1920s. Once “dangerous thought” was identified as a target of policing in the late 1920s, police agencies began to develop a kind of intellectual history - what I call "thinking like a state" - to explain the origin of dangerous ideas and their spread in the changing socioeconomic conditions in imperial Japan. In the process, the police also reflected on their unique function between Japanese society and the imperial state, and continually invoked something they called the “spirit of the police” (keisatsu seishin) as the prime mover of police power, although what this spirit symbolized changed over time.
Max Ward, “Reproducing the ‘Emperor-System Within:’ Transwar Criminal Rehabilitation and Imperial... more Max Ward, “Reproducing the ‘Emperor-System Within:’ Transwar Criminal Rehabilitation and Imperial Benevolence in Japan, 1920-1960” in Transwar Asia: Ideology, Practices, and Institutions, 1920-1960, edited by Reto Hofmann and Max Ward. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), pp. 169-194.
This chapter explores the development of the criminal reform system in Japan between the 1920s and 1960s, focusing on transwar institutional developments as well as the continuing symbolic association of criminal reform with the emperor system (tennōsei) and its ideology of imperial benevolence (jikeishugi). I seek to challenge a conventional approach to Japanese history in which Japan’s military defeat in 1945 demarcates both a historical rupture between Japan’s prewar empire and postwar nation formation as well as a clear political demarcation between interwar militarism/fascism and postwar liberal democracy. I demonstrate how an interwar ideology associating criminal rehabilitation with the imperial sovereign was translated into the postwar idiom of liberal reform, creating affective identifications with the symbolic emperor.
This article explores how Japanese officials and others conceptualized police power at particular... more This article explores how Japanese officials and others conceptualized police power at particular junctures in imperial Japanese history (1868-1945). It does so by synthesizing prior scholarship on the Japanese police into a broader genealogy of the police idea in prewar Japan, beginning with the first translations and explanations of police in the Meiji period, the changing perceptions of the police in the 1910s, and the evolution from the "national police" idea in the 1920s to the "emperor's police" in the late 1930s. The essay proposes that the police idea in Japan (and elsewhere) can be read as a boundary concept in which the changing conceptions of police power demarcate the shifting relationship between state and society. Indeed, it is the elusiveness of this boundary that allows for police power, and by extension state power, to function within society and transform in response to social conditions. Approached in this way, the essay argues that the different permutations of the police idea index the evolving modality of state power in prewar Japan, and thus allows us to reconsider some of the defining questions of imperial Japanese history.
Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan, edited by Irena Hayter, George Sipos and Mark Williams (Routledge), 2021
Max Ward, "Ideological Conversion as Historical Catachresis: Coming to Terms With Tenkō," in Iren... more Max Ward, "Ideological Conversion as Historical Catachresis: Coming to Terms With Tenkō," in Irena Hayter, George T. Sipos, Mark Williams, eds., Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan (New York : Routledge, 2021), 3-22.
No other term has come to symbolize the vexed decades of interwar Japan—if not also the myriad contradictions of Japanese modernity— more than tenkō. The combination of the term’s two Chinese characters—転向—innocuously means a “change of direction,” but in the political history of interwar Japan, tenkō assumed on a much more insidious significance. There the term referred to the “ideological conversion” of hundreds of political activists and intellectuals, beginning with incarcerated Japanese Communist Party (JCP) members who publicly defected from the party in 1933-1934, to later in the decade, leftist thinkers, academics as well as anti-colonial nationalists in colonial Korea who either abandoned political activism or began to proactively support the imperial state. Then, in the early postwar period, Japanese scholars returned to the question of tenkō in order to pursue a variety of problems related to primarily Japanese intellectual history, including: theories of modern subjectivity, the paradigmatic shifts in modern Japanese intellectual history, the politics of writing, or, as revealing the constitutive dynamics of Japanese modernity or modernity more generally. As we see here, scholars expanded the meaning of tenkō far beyond the political defections of interwar political activists and, in doing so, opened the term to a variety of analytical and theoretical investments.
In this chapter, I consider how we might construct a conceptual history tenkō that can account for all the diverse practices, political positions and theoretical investments the term accrued across the twentieth century. I begin by questioning the basic assumptions that have informed our received understanding of tenkō. Then I will propose the idea of “historical catachresis” theorized by Tani Barlow as providing a way to account for the many articulations of tenkō across a variety of ideological, historical and institutional domains.
This essay analyzes Ōshima Nagisa's 1968 film Death by Hanging by reading it with Franz Kafka's 1... more This essay analyzes Ōshima Nagisa's 1968 film Death by Hanging by reading it with Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial, approaching both works as positing distinct theories of state power and ideological subjection. Many critics have noted the "Kafkaesque" quality of Death by Hanging: e.g., that the film centers upon an indicted protagonist who is subjected to the legal machinations of the state in a series of absurd and theatrical situations, leading to his eventual execution. Beyond these formal similarities, I foreground the two works' shared concern with the operations of the modern state, putting them in conversation with critical theorists including Althusser, Butler and Žižek. In doing so, I argue that Death by Hanging reveals the limits of what Žižek theorized as the "Kafkaesque subject," opening into questions about political possibility and gesturing towards what Althusser called " bad subjects. "
This is an introduction to our book, <<Confronting Capital>>, where we discuss various interpreta... more This is an introduction to our book, <<Confronting Capital>>, where we discuss various interpretations of the Kyoto School and analyze the consequences of approaching the Kyoto school philosophers from the standpoint of philosophy or intellectual history. In addition to introducing the various essays in the volume, we deal with how to contextualize thought in relation to global capitalist modernity. I am uploading this version since, we are not allowed to upload the published version because of copyright issues.
Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy, 2017
Tanabe Hajime’s 1946 _Philosophy as Metanoetics_ (Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku, 1946) is a bold ... more Tanabe Hajime’s 1946 _Philosophy as Metanoetics_ (Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku, 1946) is a bold and complicated text in which Tanabe reflects on his experiences during the last years of the Pacific War in order to rethink the project of philosophy as a metanoetic process of self-negation, repentance, conversion and resurrection, inspired by True Pure Land Buddhism (Jōdo shinshū). This chapter focuses on the status of history in the text, and in particular, the narratival function of Tanabe’s uncharacteristically personal Preface. The sense of history that emerges from the Preface and which is inherited by subsequent studies is that history remains an external reality to Tanabe’s thought, which, depending on one’s evaluation, Tanabe was either bravely standing up against, or unable to resist its determinations. In contrast, I draw upon Fredric Jameson's idea of the political unconscious, and locate history and the ideological significance of _Philosophy as Metanoetics_ internal to the text itself; namely, at the level of its formal structure and how history is formally displaced from philosophical reflection. I argue that once Tanabe begins to develop the temporal and historical logic unique to metanoesis, he does not bring metanoesis back to bear upon what initially threw him into penitent self-reflection in the first place; i.e., history.
Addressing the organizing question of the volume, this chapter explores the many ways that Marxis... more Addressing the organizing question of the volume, this chapter explores the many ways that Marxism’s historical and political significance outside of Europe has been dismissed by portraying it as an inherently western import alien to the cultural milieus of the periphery. The essay begins with a brief analysis of how area studies has approached Marxist praxis in Japan as a vexed process of intellectual “adaptation” taking place during rapid modernization. This serves to introduce the second and more substantial portion of the essay, which analyzes Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theory of modernity developed in his influential book Provincializing Europe (2000). I argue that, although informing a very different politics, Chakrabarty ends up reproducing many of the cultural assumptions that informed area studies' approaches to Marxism. The result is that rather than provincializing Europe per se, Chakrabarty has provincialized Marx specifically. The essay concludes by considering the continuing challenges of studying Marxist thought and movements in East Asian history.
Death by Hanging (Kōshikei) is one of Ōshima Nagisa’s most complex political films of the 1960s, ... more Death by Hanging (Kōshikei) is one of Ōshima Nagisa’s most complex political films of the 1960s, both for its innovative experiments with film form, as well as how it addresses a variety of political issues, including capital punishment, nationalism, and colonial legacies in postwar Japan, to name just a few. At the center of this constellation of issues is the question of ideological subjection by the state and its inherent connection to state violence. In this essay, I read Ōshima’s Death By Hanging as a cinematic exposition of state power and ideology, and will read it along with Louis Althusser’s contemporaneous notes from 1969-1970 outlining what he called Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and ideological interpellation. Ultimately, this is an exercise in reading Althusser and Ōshima alongside each other, in order to see what their respective — and contemporaneous — analyses allow us to ask about ideology, state power, and political possibility.
Max Ward, “Ideology and Subjection in Oshima Nagisa’s Koshikei (1968)” in “Perspectives on Oshima Nagisa” UTCP-Uehiro Pamphlet No. 7 (2015), pp. 33-59.
This essay explores an imperial state exhibition held in Tokyo in 1938 and explains how the exhib... more This essay explores an imperial state exhibition held in Tokyo in 1938 and explains how the exhibition displayed a fascist worldview of historical crisis and national regeneration that was taking shape in Japan in the late 1930s. The exhibition – entitled the Thought War Exhibition (Shisosen tenrankai) – was curated by the Japanese state’s newly formed Cabinet Information Division (Naikaku johobu) and held in Takashimaya Department Store in downtown Tokyo. Comprised of materials related to the Communist International, the Spanish Civil War, the national liberation struggle in China, and the communist and anti-colonial movements inside the Japanese Empire, the Exhibition portrayed Japan’s invasion of the Chinese mainland in 1937 as an extension of a global thought war against communism, requiring all imperial subjects to purify themselves of foreign influences and mobilize for national thought defense. While on the surface this Exhibition was an example of prewar state propaganda, it also expressed a fascist worldview that was coalescing in the Japanese state in the late 1930s. This essay investigates how this fascist worldview was exhibited in a sequence of displays, including dioramas, panoramas, illuminated maps, and display cases, and how these displays revealed constitutive contradictions that underwrote the formation of fascism in Japan.
Max Ward, “Displaying the Worldview of Japanese Fascism: The Tokyo Thought War Exhibition of 1938” Critical Asian Studies Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sept 2015), pp. 414-439.
In early 1938, the newly formed Cabinet Information Division (Naikaku johobu) held a closed-door ... more In early 1938, the newly formed Cabinet Information Division (Naikaku johobu) held a closed-door Thought-War Symposium (Shisosen koshukai) in Tokyo with over 100 bureaucrats, military officers, media executives and academics in attendance. While the ostensible purpose of the symposium was to discuss propaganda following Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in July of 1937, the presentations had very little to do with the practical coordination of information. Rather, the symposium participants brought their specific areas of expertise to bear on elaborating the curious term ‘thought war’ (shisosen), a term that had only recently been used with any regularity but which had become invested with critical urgency following the invasion of China.
In the conventional literature, the term ‘thought war’ is understood as marking a new modality of state propaganda as Japan moved towards a total war system. However, this reading overlooks the ideological investments in thought war discourse, as well as how ‘thought war’ inherited a multivalent sense of crisis that had crystallized around thought and culture earlier in the 1930s. In this article, I explore how the 1938 symposium revealed a combined sense of historical crisis and an urgent call for the total overhaul of Japanese state and society, a combination which, I argue, underwrote the development of fascism in Japan. I trace how three earlier discourses of crisis - the ‘Manchurian Problem’, the ‘thought problem’ and the ‘movement to clarify the kokutai’ - converged within thought war discourse, thus investing it with fascist urgency.
Max Ward, "Crisis ideology and the articulation of fascism in interwar Japan: the 1938 Thought-War Symposium" Japan Forum Vol. 26, No. 4 (Dec 2014), pp. 462-485. DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2014.924545
In this dissertation I explore how a vision of national regeneration and world transformation was... more In this dissertation I explore how a vision of national regeneration and world transformation was formulated in 1930s Japan through the discourse of the “thought-problem” (shisō mondai ). Initially, the term thought-problem was used to signify an ostensible threat posed to Japan's national essence by foreign ideologies – most notably communism and anarchism – thus requiring state intervention to protect cultural tradition. However, as state officials and intellectuals struggled to define this elusive national essence into the early 1930s, the thought-problem was reconceived as Japan's inability to manifest its unique essence into modern forms. As a result, the determination of the thought-problem shifted from a conservative politics of protection, to a fascist agenda of spiritual rehabilitation and national regeneration by the mid-1930s.
Review of: The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan. By... more Review of: The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan. By Charlotte Eubanks. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2020. xviii, 314 pages. $72.00.
Review of: Eiichiro Azuma. _In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism i... more Review of: Eiichiro Azuma. _In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire_. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019. 353 pp. $75.00 (hardcover).
Max Ward. "Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shū sui and Japan's First AntiImperialist Mov... more Max Ward. "Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shū sui and Japan's First AntiImperialist Movement by Robert Thomas Tierney (review)." The Journal of Japanese Studies 45, no. 2 (2019): 406-411
Uploads
From the Duke website:
In Thought Crime Max M. Ward explores the Japanese state's efforts to suppress political radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ward traces the evolution of an antiradical law called the Peace Preservation Law, from its initial application to suppress communism and anticolonial nationalism—what authorities deemed thought crime—to its expansion into an elaborate system to reform and ideologically convert thousands of thought criminals throughout the Japanese Empire. To enforce the law, the government enlisted a number of nonstate actors, who included monks, family members, and community leaders. Throughout, Ward illuminates the complex processes through which the law articulated imperial ideology and how this ideology was transformed and disseminated through the law's application over its twenty-year history. In so doing, he shows how the Peace Preservation Law provides a window into understanding how modern states develop ideological apparatuses to subject their respective populations.
With contributions covering the transwar histories of China, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan, the book addresses key themes such as authoritarianism, militarization, criminal rehabilitation, market controls, labor-regimes, and anti-communism. A transwar angle, the authors argue, sheds new light on the continuing problems that undergirded the formation of postwar nation-states and illuminates the political legacies that still shape the various regions in Asia up to the present.
[Download book widget here: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/61e0633b5f150300016f10cb]
https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/issue/51/3
This article explores one of the primary ways the Japanese police increasingly intervened into everyday life in prewar Japan: the policing of so-called “dangerous thought” (kiken shisō). The article traces the process in which the objective of policing politics transformed from an emphasis on political organizations, their activities, publications, and assemblies in the 1900s to the policing of individuals ostensibly harboring “dangerous ideas” that were deemed threatening to state and capital—what the police came to categorize as “thought crime” (shisō hanzai) by the late 1920s. Once “dangerous thought” was identified as a target of policing in the late 1920s, police agencies began to develop a kind of intellectual history - what I call "thinking like a state" - to explain the origin of dangerous ideas and their spread in the changing socioeconomic conditions in imperial Japan. In the process, the police also reflected on their unique function between Japanese society and the imperial state, and continually invoked something they called the “spirit of the police” (keisatsu seishin) as the prime mover of police power, although what this spirit symbolized changed over time.
This chapter explores the development of the criminal reform system in Japan between the 1920s and 1960s, focusing on transwar institutional developments as well as the continuing symbolic association of criminal reform with the emperor system (tennōsei) and its ideology of imperial benevolence (jikeishugi). I seek to challenge a conventional approach to Japanese history in which Japan’s military defeat in 1945 demarcates both a historical rupture between Japan’s prewar empire and postwar nation formation as well as a clear political demarcation between interwar militarism/fascism and postwar liberal democracy. I demonstrate how an interwar ideology associating criminal rehabilitation with the imperial sovereign was translated into the postwar idiom of liberal reform, creating affective identifications with the symbolic emperor.
No other term has come to symbolize the vexed decades of interwar Japan—if not also the myriad contradictions of Japanese modernity— more than tenkō. The combination of the term’s two Chinese characters—転向—innocuously means a “change of direction,” but in the political history of interwar Japan, tenkō assumed on a much more insidious significance. There the term referred to the “ideological conversion” of hundreds of political activists and intellectuals, beginning with incarcerated Japanese Communist Party (JCP) members who publicly defected from the party in 1933-1934, to later in the decade, leftist thinkers, academics as well as anti-colonial nationalists in colonial Korea who either abandoned political activism or began to proactively support the imperial state. Then, in the early postwar period, Japanese scholars returned to the question of tenkō in order to pursue a variety of problems related to primarily Japanese intellectual history, including: theories of modern subjectivity, the paradigmatic shifts in modern Japanese intellectual history, the politics of writing, or, as revealing the constitutive dynamics of Japanese modernity or modernity more generally. As we see here, scholars expanded the meaning of tenkō far beyond the political defections of interwar political activists and, in doing so, opened the term to a variety of analytical and theoretical investments.
In this chapter, I consider how we might construct a conceptual history tenkō that can account for all the diverse practices, political positions and theoretical investments the term accrued across the twentieth century. I begin by questioning the basic assumptions that have informed our received understanding of tenkō. Then I will propose the idea of “historical catachresis” theorized by Tani Barlow as providing a way to account for the many articulations of tenkō across a variety of ideological, historical and institutional domains.
Max Ward, “Ideology and Subjection in Oshima Nagisa’s Koshikei (1968)” in “Perspectives on Oshima Nagisa” UTCP-Uehiro Pamphlet No. 7 (2015), pp. 33-59.
Max Ward, “Displaying the Worldview of Japanese Fascism: The Tokyo Thought War Exhibition of 1938” Critical Asian Studies Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sept 2015), pp. 414-439.
In the conventional literature, the term ‘thought war’ is understood as marking a new modality of state propaganda as Japan moved towards a total war system. However, this reading overlooks the ideological investments in thought war discourse, as well as how ‘thought war’ inherited a multivalent sense of crisis that had crystallized around thought and culture earlier in the 1930s. In this article, I explore how the 1938 symposium revealed a combined sense of historical crisis and an urgent call for the total overhaul of Japanese state and society, a combination which, I argue, underwrote the development of fascism in Japan. I trace how three earlier discourses of crisis - the ‘Manchurian Problem’, the ‘thought problem’ and the ‘movement to clarify the kokutai’ - converged within thought war discourse, thus investing it with fascist urgency.
Max Ward, "Crisis ideology and the articulation of fascism in interwar Japan: the 1938 Thought-War Symposium" Japan Forum Vol. 26, No. 4 (Dec 2014), pp. 462-485.
DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2014.924545
From the Duke website:
In Thought Crime Max M. Ward explores the Japanese state's efforts to suppress political radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ward traces the evolution of an antiradical law called the Peace Preservation Law, from its initial application to suppress communism and anticolonial nationalism—what authorities deemed thought crime—to its expansion into an elaborate system to reform and ideologically convert thousands of thought criminals throughout the Japanese Empire. To enforce the law, the government enlisted a number of nonstate actors, who included monks, family members, and community leaders. Throughout, Ward illuminates the complex processes through which the law articulated imperial ideology and how this ideology was transformed and disseminated through the law's application over its twenty-year history. In so doing, he shows how the Peace Preservation Law provides a window into understanding how modern states develop ideological apparatuses to subject their respective populations.
With contributions covering the transwar histories of China, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan, the book addresses key themes such as authoritarianism, militarization, criminal rehabilitation, market controls, labor-regimes, and anti-communism. A transwar angle, the authors argue, sheds new light on the continuing problems that undergirded the formation of postwar nation-states and illuminates the political legacies that still shape the various regions in Asia up to the present.
[Download book widget here: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/61e0633b5f150300016f10cb]
https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/issue/51/3
This article explores one of the primary ways the Japanese police increasingly intervened into everyday life in prewar Japan: the policing of so-called “dangerous thought” (kiken shisō). The article traces the process in which the objective of policing politics transformed from an emphasis on political organizations, their activities, publications, and assemblies in the 1900s to the policing of individuals ostensibly harboring “dangerous ideas” that were deemed threatening to state and capital—what the police came to categorize as “thought crime” (shisō hanzai) by the late 1920s. Once “dangerous thought” was identified as a target of policing in the late 1920s, police agencies began to develop a kind of intellectual history - what I call "thinking like a state" - to explain the origin of dangerous ideas and their spread in the changing socioeconomic conditions in imperial Japan. In the process, the police also reflected on their unique function between Japanese society and the imperial state, and continually invoked something they called the “spirit of the police” (keisatsu seishin) as the prime mover of police power, although what this spirit symbolized changed over time.
This chapter explores the development of the criminal reform system in Japan between the 1920s and 1960s, focusing on transwar institutional developments as well as the continuing symbolic association of criminal reform with the emperor system (tennōsei) and its ideology of imperial benevolence (jikeishugi). I seek to challenge a conventional approach to Japanese history in which Japan’s military defeat in 1945 demarcates both a historical rupture between Japan’s prewar empire and postwar nation formation as well as a clear political demarcation between interwar militarism/fascism and postwar liberal democracy. I demonstrate how an interwar ideology associating criminal rehabilitation with the imperial sovereign was translated into the postwar idiom of liberal reform, creating affective identifications with the symbolic emperor.
No other term has come to symbolize the vexed decades of interwar Japan—if not also the myriad contradictions of Japanese modernity— more than tenkō. The combination of the term’s two Chinese characters—転向—innocuously means a “change of direction,” but in the political history of interwar Japan, tenkō assumed on a much more insidious significance. There the term referred to the “ideological conversion” of hundreds of political activists and intellectuals, beginning with incarcerated Japanese Communist Party (JCP) members who publicly defected from the party in 1933-1934, to later in the decade, leftist thinkers, academics as well as anti-colonial nationalists in colonial Korea who either abandoned political activism or began to proactively support the imperial state. Then, in the early postwar period, Japanese scholars returned to the question of tenkō in order to pursue a variety of problems related to primarily Japanese intellectual history, including: theories of modern subjectivity, the paradigmatic shifts in modern Japanese intellectual history, the politics of writing, or, as revealing the constitutive dynamics of Japanese modernity or modernity more generally. As we see here, scholars expanded the meaning of tenkō far beyond the political defections of interwar political activists and, in doing so, opened the term to a variety of analytical and theoretical investments.
In this chapter, I consider how we might construct a conceptual history tenkō that can account for all the diverse practices, political positions and theoretical investments the term accrued across the twentieth century. I begin by questioning the basic assumptions that have informed our received understanding of tenkō. Then I will propose the idea of “historical catachresis” theorized by Tani Barlow as providing a way to account for the many articulations of tenkō across a variety of ideological, historical and institutional domains.
Max Ward, “Ideology and Subjection in Oshima Nagisa’s Koshikei (1968)” in “Perspectives on Oshima Nagisa” UTCP-Uehiro Pamphlet No. 7 (2015), pp. 33-59.
Max Ward, “Displaying the Worldview of Japanese Fascism: The Tokyo Thought War Exhibition of 1938” Critical Asian Studies Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sept 2015), pp. 414-439.
In the conventional literature, the term ‘thought war’ is understood as marking a new modality of state propaganda as Japan moved towards a total war system. However, this reading overlooks the ideological investments in thought war discourse, as well as how ‘thought war’ inherited a multivalent sense of crisis that had crystallized around thought and culture earlier in the 1930s. In this article, I explore how the 1938 symposium revealed a combined sense of historical crisis and an urgent call for the total overhaul of Japanese state and society, a combination which, I argue, underwrote the development of fascism in Japan. I trace how three earlier discourses of crisis - the ‘Manchurian Problem’, the ‘thought problem’ and the ‘movement to clarify the kokutai’ - converged within thought war discourse, thus investing it with fascist urgency.
Max Ward, "Crisis ideology and the articulation of fascism in interwar Japan: the 1938 Thought-War Symposium" Japan Forum Vol. 26, No. 4 (Dec 2014), pp. 462-485.
DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2014.924545