JEA Lecture Series, November 5th at 6:45pm
JEA Lecture Series: “Ideological Conversion as Catachresis: Towards a Conceptual History of Tenkō”
Speaker: Max Ward (Associate Professor, Department of History, Middlebury College, US)
Date: Tuesday November 5, 2019
Location & Time: KIBER 110 18:45-20:30
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. As is well-known, in the 1930s the term was used by officials to refer to the “ideological conversion” of hundreds of detained political activists and intellectuals who either defected from political affiliations or began to proactively support the imperial state, although the state’s measure of the degree of “conversion” kept changing throughout the decade. Then, in the early postwar period, activists and intellectuals returned to the question of tenkōin order to consider a form of subjectivity adequate to the postwar political situation. In this paper, I begin by questioning the basic assumptions that have informed our received understanding of tenkō, and then propose a way for understand in the long conceptual history of tenkōthat accounts for both the continuing centrality of the term as well as its shifting meanings across the prewar wartime and postwar periods.
Biography
Max Ward is Associate Professor of Japanese History at Middlebury College and author of Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019). He is currently working on a second book project tentatively titled Police Power in Modern Japan.