Presentation by Max Ward

松坂さんからお知らせを戴きましたので、転載します。

今週金曜日の夜6時から、マックスが、
海外出身の日本研究者によるワークショップで発表するそうです。
（これは、しばらく前にアダムが発表を行ったワークショップでもあります。）

会場は22号館の818教室
(http://groups.google.com/group/modern-japanese-history-workshop/web/directions-2)

アブストラクトは、以下です。行ける方は、是非一緒に参りましょう。

以下、引用

Please join us for the next meeting of the Modern Japanese History Workshop on Friday, *December 4, 2009* from 6 to 8pm at Waseda University:
From Ideological Protection to Subjective Production: The Categorical Function of Kokutai in the Peace Preservation Law
Max Ward, PhD Candidate
Department of History, New York University

The Peace Preservation Law was established in 1925 with the explicit purpose of suppressing the relatively small communist and anarchist movements in Japan. It was initially constructed on a binary logic between dangerous foreign thought (i.e., communism) and domestic objects requiring protection – namely, the kokutai (national polity) and the private property system. However, legislators struggled to clearly define the categories signifying the objects of preservation and thus what exactly constituted a threat against them. As the law expanded into an extensive system of surveillance and unlimited detention in the mid-1930s, legal analysts and Justice Ministry officials continued to deliberate over the substantive meaning of these categories and the law’s ultimate objectives.

In this paper, I explore how the central category identifying the Peace Preservation Law’s ostensible object of preservation – the ‘kokutai’ – was left juridically undetermined, allowing for a transformation in the law’s operation by the late 1930s. Conventionally translated as the ‘national polity,’ kokutai was vaguely understood by legislators as designating both the location of sovereignty in the eternal unbroken line of the imperial household as well as a transcendent ethical value mediating the bond between national subjects and the emperor. I argue that the legal contradiction that the term kokutai initially expressed was not necessarily between these two designations, nor that the term was simply ambiguous, but rather, that the legislative debates on the Peace Preservation Law gesture to a much more fundamental aporia immanent to the question of sovereign power and constitutionalism. I contend that this paradox allowed for the later transformation of the Peace Preservation Law, wherein kokutai shifted from designating an object of ideological protection against dangerous foreign thought, to a mechanism for the production of national subjects in the state’s later tenkô policy. This paper begins with an analysis of the original 1925 Diet deliberations, moves through various legislative and legal analyses of the Law in the mid-1930s, and concludes with a close reading of the writings of thought-guidance officials who were responsible for inducing and maintaining tenkô-consciousness. In each moment, kokutai was conceptualized in radically different ways, indexing the slow transformation of the law’s operation over its twenty-year history.

http://groups.google.com/group/modern-japanese-history-workshop/web/directions-2