Global War and Anti-Radical Legislation: Japan and the Peace Preservation Law of 1925

ABSTRACT

Japan’s military participation in the First World War was relatively brief but the war and the ideas it unlocked exerted an impact up to and after the Second World War. Japan experienced an economic boom during the war resulting in an exponential increase in the cost of rice. This sparked a serious challenge to the Japanese state. The ensuing rice riots of 1918 saw the government forced to deploy more troops to suppress them than it had sent to intervene on behalf of White Russian forces in Siberia in the same year. Further, the ‘Wilsonian Moment’ emboldened the Korean independence movement in 1919. When the war ended on the Western Front in 1918, Japan was involved in military intervention in Eastern Russia, was quelling domestic unrest, and facing a major threat to the stability of its empire. Although enacted in 1925, the Peace Preservation Law grew directly from the events beginning in the final year of the First World War. The law was the instrumental platform for the construction of Japan’s infamous thought control apparatus of the 1930s and the policing of Japan’s formal and informal empires. This paper traces the wartime origins of the Peace Preservation Law in the context of the state of exception and how the First World War and the Russian Revolution forced Japan to rethink its conception of sovereignty.

KEYWORDS:

• Japan
• Peace Preservation Law
• states of emergency
• emergency powers
• martial law

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Zizheng Jiang for his kind help with primary sources.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For recent historiography on Japan and the First World War see, Schmidt, Nach dem Krieg ist vor dem Krieg.

2. Barclay, “Imperial Japan’s Forever War, 1895–1945,” 1.

3. Mitchell, Janus Faced Justice, 165.

4. Nishimura, “関東大震災下における朝鮮人の帰還,” 57–58.

5. Yamamuro, “The First World War and Asian Thought,” 68.

6. Schencking, The Great Kanto Earthquake, 125.

7. Mitchell, “Japan’s Peace Preservation Law of 1925,” 317.

8. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, 60.

9. Ward, Thought Crime, 23.

10. Okudaira, 治安維持法小史.

11. Uchida, 治安維持法と共謀罪; and Uchida, 治安維持法の教訓―権利運動の制限と憲法改正.

12. Ogino, ed., 治安維持法関係史料集, 1–4 vols.

13. Ogino, 治安維持法の「現場」 (治安維持法の歴史).

14. Hagihara, 第一次世界大戦後日本の治安法と外国法.

15. Nakazawa, 治安維持法、なぜ政党政治「悪法」を生んだか.

16. Tipton, The Japanese Police State, 18.

17. Shimamura, “From 1910 to 1920, Japanese Colonialism,” 45.

18. Harper, Underground Asia, 91.

19. Hagihara, “第一次世界大戦後日本の治安法と外国法,” 15.

20. Bach Jensen, The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism, 335–6.

21. Shimizu, “Lessons Learned,” 281.

22. Morely, The Japanese Thrust into Siberia, 212.

23. Uchida, 治安維持法の教訓, 47.

24. Isao, “The Role of the Siberian Intervention,” 162.

25. Ibid., 174.

26. Bayliss, On the Margins of Empire, 144.

27. Ward, Thought Crime, 30.

28. Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 144.

29. Fujino, 都市と暴動の民衆史: 東京1905 − 1923, 250.

30. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention, 200.

31. Lewis, Rioters and Citizens, 27.

32. Ibid., 21.

33. Ono, 韓国「建国」の起源を探る, 200.

34. Tipton, Police State, 20.

35. 過激主義取締法（米、仏、独、白、蘭、伯、英、伊国）「抄録」内務省警保局 (September 1921), in Ogino, ed., 治安維持法関係史料集, 1 vol., 56.

36. 過激主義取締, in Ogino, 治安維持法関係史料集, 1 vol., 56.

37. ”伊國の治安維持法,” 152–3.

38. Ambaras, Bad Youth, 105.

39. Kitaoka, From Party Politics to Militarism in Japan, 70.

40. Ibid., 28.

41. Palariet to Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, 21 June 1923, reproduced in Bourne and Watt (eds), British Documents on Foreign Affairs, 6 vols., 117.

42. Dickinson, World War I, 115.

43. Hasegawa, “The Massacre of Koreans,” 112.

44. Schencking, The Great Kanto Earthquake, 114.

45. Hasegawa, “The Massacre of Koreans,” 116.

46. Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 121.

47. Ishiguro, “The Theory of a Government Plot?,” 119.

48. Tipton, Police State, 20.

49. Palariet to Curzon, 28 October 1923, reproduced in Bourne and Watt (eds.), British Documents, 6 vols., 172.

50. Schencking, The Great Kanto Earthquake, 77.

51. The Bureau of Social Affairs Home Office (ed.), The Great Earthquake of 1923 in Japan, pages unnumbered.

52. Quoted in Mitchell, “Japan’s Peace Preservation Law of 1925,” 339–40.

53. Nakazawa, 治安維持法, 54.

54. Mitchell, “Japan’s Peace Preservation Law of 1925,” 340.

55. Report on Japan for 1925, in Bourne and Watt, British Documents, 7 vols.: Japan, June 1924–December 1925, 367.

56. Ward, Thought Crime, 57–8.

57. Uchida, 治安維持法と共謀罪, 90.

58. 関東州及南洋群島ニ於テハ治安維持ニ関シ治安維持法ニ依ルノ件政府 (8 May 1925), in Ogino, 治安維持法関係史料集, 1 vol., 168.

59. Sebald, The Criminal Code of Japan, 259.

60. Person, Arbiters of Patriotism, 78.

61. Hayter, and Williams, “Introduction: Tenko Modernity, Empire, Japan,” xviii.

62. Esselstrom, Crossing Empire’s Edge, 109.

63. 中国「上海」における治安維持法の適用 上海総領事館（領事館警察）1927–37, in Ogino, 治安維持法関係史料集, 1 vol., 566.

64. Harper, Underground Asia, 280.

65. Crump, The Anarchist Movement in Japan, 36.

66. Jackson, Shaping Modern Shanghai, 117.

67. Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble, 41.

68. Esselstrom Crossing Empire’s Edge, 89.

69. 中国「上海」における治安維持法の適用 上海総領事館（領事館警察）1927–37, in Ogino, 治安維持法関係史料集, 1 vol., 566.

70. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, 76.

71. Uchida, 治安維持法の教訓, 459.

72. Person, Arbiters of Patriotism, 105.

73. Nakazawa, “治安維持法の再検討,” 194.

74. Keller, “Beyond the ‘People’s Community,” 99.