Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan

Irena Hayter, George T. Sipos, Mark Williams, Irena Hayter, George T. Sipos, Mark Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367235796
• eBook ISBN: 9781000397307
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia giapponese

This book approaches the concept of tenk? (political conversion) as a response to the global crisis of interwar modernity, as opposed to a distinctly Japanese experience in postwar debates.

Tenk? connotes the expressions of ideological conversion performed by members of the Japanese Communist Party, starting in 1933, whereby they renounced Marxism and expressed support for Japan's imperial expansion on the continent. Although tenk? has a significant presence in Japan's postwar intellectual and literary histories, this contributed volume is one of the first in Englishm language scholarship to approach the phenomenon. International perspectives from both established and early career scholars show tenk? as inseparable from the global politics of empire, deeply marked by an age of mechanical reproduction, mediatization and the manipulation of language. Chapters draw on a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies, from political theory and intellectual history to literary studies. In this way, tenk? is explored through new conceptual and analytical frameworks, including questions of gender and the role of affect in politics, implications that render the phenomenon distinctly relevant to the contemporary moment.

Tenk?: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan will prove a valuable resource to students and scholars of Japanese and East Asian history, literature and politics.

PART I
Conceptual excursions

1
Ideological conversion as historical catachresis

Coming to terms with tenkō

Max Ward

No other term has come to symbolize the vexed decades of the interwar Japanese Empire – if not also the myriad contradictions of Japanese modernity – more than tenkō.¹ 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 a much more insidious significance. There the term referred to the ‘ideological conversion’ of hundreds of political activists and intellectuals (Steinhoff 1991), beginning with incarcerated Japanese Communist Party (JCP) members who publicly broke from the party in a wave of defections, overseen and managed by a cadre of state officials who specialized in so-called ‘thought crime’ (shisō hanzai), in 1933–4. With tenkō in popular circulation after these sensational defections, the term was then applied to proletarian writers, Marxist intellectuals, anti-colonial activists and thinkers, popular front cultural critics and others who purportedly abandoned political activism or began to proactively identify with the emperor system and to support the aims of the imperial state.² In the postwar period, Japanese scholars studied the tenkō phenomenon in order to understand how intellectuals and activists failed to resist the rise of militarism in the 1930s or so easily succumbed to the ideological allure of fascism’s promise to suture the contradictions of capitalist society. In the process, postwar scholars came to view these interwar apostasies as symptomatic of deeper problems related to the general forms of ‘subjectivity’ (shutaisei) and ‘modernity’ (kindaisei) in Japan, with particular emphasis on the role of intellectuals in modern society. Consequently, tenkō became largely a question of intellectual history, as postwar scholars in Japan and elsewhere pursued a variety of further questions through the interwar tenkō phenomenon, including prompting the so-called subjectivity debates (shutaisei ronsō) in philosophy and literary theory (Honda 1957; Koschmann 1996);³ the paradigmatic shifts in modern Japanese intellectual history (Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai 1959; Tsurumi 1986; Fujita 1997); the intellectual transformations in colonial and postcolonial Korea (Hong 2011; Matsuda 1997); the politics of writing and representation (Lin 1993; Silverberg 1990; Shigeto 2014); the role of the intellectual in modern Japanese society (Tsurumi 1970; Barshay 1988); or, as revealing, the constitutive contradictions of Japanese modernity (Yoshimoto 1986) or of modernity more generally (Takeuchi 2005). As we see here, scholars expanded the meaning of tenkō far beyond the political defections of interwar communists and, in so doing, opened the term to a variety of theoretical investments.

The objective of this chapter is neither to posit a more adequate explanation of why the political defections occurred in interwar Japan nor to extrapolate another theory of modernity – Japanese or otherwise – from the phenomenon of tenkō. Rather, I would like to consider how we might begin to develop a conceptual history of tenkō that can account for all the diverse practices, political positions and theoretical investments that the term accrued across the interwar and postwar periods. Towards this end, my objective will be to question some of the basic assumptions that have informed our received understanding of tenkō in order to open new lines of inquiry and to generate new questions. By extension, then, this is also to remind us to reflect on what exactly we mean by identifying our object of analysis as something called ‘tenkō’ and what we hope to find through an analysis of the phenomenon.

I agree with Tobe Hideaki who recently argued that ‘in its form and content, the “theorizations of tenkō” ’ not only addressed the question of ‘subjectivity’ but also were themselves implicated in the ‘(re)construction of the subject [shutai no (sai)kōchiku] in the wartime, occupation and the postwar’ periods (2006: 309).⁴ Following Tobe’s suggestion, a new conceptual history of tenkō will have to address how both the interwar phenomenon of ideological conversion and the postwar theoretical reflections on the phenomenon were addressing questions of subjectivity, with the important qualification that the ‘subject’ indexed by tenkō in the prewar was the ‘imperial subject’ (shinmin) inscribed in the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education and not the presumed ‘active subject’ (shutai) informing postwar debates on political responsibility.⁵ However, unlike Tobe, who approaches tenkō as a problem primarily of intellectual history, our conceptual history will have to take into account the very different articulations of tenkō across a variety of discursive, historical and institutional contexts, including as an evolving state policy targeting political criminals in the 1930s. As I will demonstrate in this essay, interwar tenkō was not only a question for proletarian writers, JCP theoreticians or other leftist or colonial intellectuals but was also practiced by detained rank and file communists, labourers and rural organizers, as well as continually redefined by state officials who implemented the policy against ‘thought criminals’ (shisō hannin) in the 1930s. The meaning of tenkō becomes even more complicated when we take into consideration the range of postwar theories of tenkō, which abstracted the question from an anti-communist state policy and the experiences of political criminals who purportedly converted, to questions related to subjectivity, representation and modernity more generally.

I contend that the centrality but constantly changing definition of tenkō across the interwar and postwar periods correspond to what Tani Barlow has theorized elsewhere as ‘historical catachresis’ (Barlow 2004). In its most basic sense, catachresis is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the ‘[i]mproper use of words; application of a term to a thing which it does not properly denote; abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor’. However, Barlow follows Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial appropriation of Jacques Derrida’s (1982) theory of catachresis as marking an ‘intermediary status’ between a sign and its purported meaning, revealing the original incompleteness of systems of meaning and how texts open themselves to deconstructive readings.⁶ Spivak turns catachresis into a deliberate, political intervention, in which the postcolonial critic ‘take[s] positions in terms not of the discovery of historical and philosophical grounds, but in terms of reversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding’ (1990: 228). Building from Spivak’s postcolonial intervention, Barlow reorients catachresis towards the practice of historical analysis, in which she defines catachreses as words ‘that stabilize meaning momentarily’ but that ‘lack true referents and thus reveal their manifold analytic inadequacy’ (2004: 30–1). She calls these terms ‘historical catachresis’ and elaborates this theory through an analysis of the shifting meanings and political displacements of the term ‘women’ (funü, furen, nüren and nüxing) in ‘modern Chinese intellectual history’. Barlow turns catachreses’ analytic inadequacy into an interpretive possibility, arguing that ‘[h]istorical catachreses are highly ideated elements of lived experience’ and thus become for the historian ‘legible repositories of social experience’ that were mediated by the specific socio-historical and ideological formations in which they were articulated (ibid.: 1–2).⁷ Furthermore, she argues that historical catachreses can be expressions of political opposition, as well as used to regulate such opposition, a quality that will be important when considering how tenkō was an interwar state policy targeting political crime, a practice negotiated by detained political criminals, as well as a question for postwar scholars to consider political possibility. Ultimately, I believe that Barlow’s emphasis on catachreses’ semantic instability, as well as their centrality in a series of historically specific discourses, provides a framework for bringing together the multiple articulations of tenkō across interwar and postwar Japanese history.

Informed by Barlow’s theory of historical catachresis, my analysis of tenkō will proceed in two parts. First, I will reconsider conventional explanations of the interwar phenomenon of tenkō – namely, the defections of jailed Japanese Communist Party leaders in the summer of 1933 – by surveying the myriad practices and shifting meanings of tenkō in the 1930s and 1940s. I will organize this first part of my analysis under the heading of ‘historical catachresis’ and focus on the activities of state officials and rank and file communists, two important contributors to the tenkō phenomenon that are often overlooked in postwar studies. Then I will turn to the postwar period and will survey postwar theories of tenkō – which I distinguish as ‘theoretical catachresis’. Here I will focus on the influential definition of tenkō posited by Tsurumi Shunsuke of the Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (Institute for the Science of Thought) and question the extent to which it can account for the ideological quality of so-called ‘ideological conversion’.

Although a comprehensive overview of tenkō’s conceptual history throughout the twentieth century is beyond the parameters of this essay, my objective will be to question our received understanding of tenkō both historically and theoretically in hopes that we might produce new questions and open new lines of inquiry into Japan’s modern history.

Interwar tenkō as historical catachresis

The Sano–Nabeyama defection as absent origin

I would like to begin this section by discussing a well known event in interwar Japanese history. On June 10, 1933, the Japanese daily newspapers reported the sensational news that two incarcerated JCP leaders, Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, had renounced the policies of the Communist International (Comintern) as ill suited to the ‘realities’ of Japan and condemned the JCP’s slavish adherence to Moscow’s directives. In a co-authored letter titled ‘A Letter to our Fellow Defendants’ (Kyōdō hikoku dōshi ni tsuguru sho), Sano and Nabeyama (1959, 2005) announced a ‘significant change’ (jūyō na henkō) in their political position and urged their comrades to break with the Comintern, to reconnect the revolutionary vanguard to the Japanese masses and to harness the purported nationalist sentiments of the working class in order to carry out a socialist transformation across the Japanese Empire.⁸ The authorities released the letter to the press on June 10 and distributed the letter to 600 other incarcerated JCP members throughout the country on June 13.⁹ In the weeks following the Sano–Nabeyama announcement, Justice Ministry procurators met in Tokyo to take stock of these defections and to consider methods for inspiring other incarcerated communists to defect.¹⁰ Their efforts paid off and by the end of summer 1933, hundreds of incarcerated JCP members renounced the party and the Comintern.¹¹ In this way, the infamous ‘mass tenkō’ (tairyō tenkō) of 1933–34 was engineered by the state and, building from this success, the state codified tenkō as a central pillar of its ‘thought crime’ apparatus in 1936.¹²

It is generally accepted that the sensational defection of Sano and Nabeyama marked the beginning of the mass tenkō phenomenon of 1933–34. But, recalling Spivak’s warning about seeking to discover ‘the historical and philosophical grounds’ of a term’s essential meaning, I want to problematize the assumption that this defection serves as the historical and semantic origin for tenkō. The entry for tenkō in the authoritative Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan tells us that the ‘term was coined in 1933 by Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika’ when they ‘announced from prison that they had made a political “change of direction” and were breaking their ties with the Communist Party’ (1983: 6–7). However, it is important to note that Sano and Nabey...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Contributor biographies
• Foreword
• Introduction: Tenkō – modernity, empire, Japan
• Part I Conceptual excursions
• Part II Literary possibilities
• Index