Robert A. Jones '59 Conference Room
148 Hillcrest Road
Middlebury, VT 05753
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Open to the Public

International and Global Studies Colloquium “Between Repression and Rehabilitation: Reforming Political Criminals in 1930s Japan” by Max Ward, assistant professor of Japanese history.

Between 1925 and 1945, the Japanese imperial state utilized an anti-radical law called the Peace Preservation Law (Chianijih”ï) to arrest tens of thousands of people for purportedly threatening Japan’s “national polity,” or kokutai. Initially applied to communists and anti-colonial activists, by the mid-1930s the law was used to arrest anyone perceived to be challenging imperial orthodoxy, including religious groups, leftist scholars, and lawyers. As the police were extending the application of the law, other officials were developing procedures to rehabilitate detainees. Indeed, by the mid-1930s, the Justice Ministry had instituted a policy to “ideologically convert” (tenk”ï) thousands of political criminals as loyal imperial subjects, a policy that became the cornerstone of the Peace Preservation Law for the rest of the decade. This talk considers the unique configuration of repression and rehabilitation in the interwar Japanese Peace Preservation Law. It will focus on a small Tokyo-based parolee support group, the Imperial Renovation Society (Teikoku k”ïshinkai), and how it developed many of the protocols that were used in the state’s later ideological conversion policy.

Lunch is free for current Middlebury College students/faculty/staff; suggested $5 donation for others; RSVP by 10/31 to rcga@middlebury.edu. Sponsored by the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs.

Sponsored by:
Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs

Contact Organizer

Tate, Charlotte
tate@middlebury.edu
(802) 443-5795