This is a specialized study of the organization,ideology and activities of the Japanese Special Higherpolice, the Tokkô, notorious in pre-war and wartime years for its harassment of opponents of the government. Within a comparative framework, this book explains the elements of Tokkô brutality and abuses of authority, analyses police traditions and looks at the Tokkô's interactions with other Japanese institutions and the broader sociopolitical climate. Sources include confidential Tokkô documents and interviews with former Tokkô officials. First published in 1990, this title is part of the Bloomsbury Academic Collections series.
This book examines the complex and paradoxical relationship between authoritarian policing and the social and economic modernization of postwar Germany's largest and most historically "authentic" state, as Bavaria joined the rest of the Federal Republic in a passage from postwar crisis to consumer prosperity.
For more than half a century, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimusho) possessed an independent police force that operated within the space of Japan’s informal empire on the Asian continent. Charged with "protecting and controlling" local Japanese communities first in Korea and later in China, these consular police played a critical role in facilitating Japanese imperial expansion during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Remarkably, however, this police force remains largely unknown. Crossing Empire’s Edge is the first book in English to reveal its complex history. Based on extensive analysis of both archival and recently published Japanese sources, Erik Esselstrom describes how the Gaimusho police became deeply involved in the surveillance and suppression of the Korean independence movement in exile throughout Chinese treaty ports and the Manchurian frontier during the 1920s and 1930s. It had in fact evolved over the years from a relatively benign public security organization into a full-fledged political intelligence apparatus devoted to apprehending purveyors of "dangerous thought" throughout the empire. Furthermore, the history of consular police operations indicates that ideological crime was a borderless security problem; Gaimusho police worked closely with colonial and metropolitan Japanese police forces to target Chinese, Korean, and Japanese suspects alike from Shanghai to Seoul to Tokyo. Esselstrom thus offers a nuanced interpretation of Japanese expansionism by highlighting the transnational links between consular, colonial, and metropolitan policing of subversive political movements during the prewar and wartime eras. In addition, by illuminating the fervor with which consular police often pressed for unilateral solutions to Japan’s political security crises on the continent, he challenges orthodox understandings of the relationship between civil and military institutions within the imperial Japanese state. While historians often still depict the Gaimusho as an inhibitor of unilateral military expansionism during the first half of the twentieth century, Esselstrom’s exposé on the activities and ideology of the consular police dramatically challenges this narrative. Revealing a far greater complexity of motivation behind the Japanese colonial mission, Crossing Empire’s Edge boldly illustrates how the imperial Japanese state viewed political security at home as inextricably connected to political security abroad from as early as 1919—nearly a decade before overt military aggression began—and approaches northeast Asia as a region of intricate and dynamic social, economic, and political forces. In doing so, Crossing Empire’s Edge inspires new ways of thinking about both modern Japanese history and the modern history of Japan in East Asia.
In all major categories of crime, statistics show clearly that Japan has dramatically lower crime rates than the United States. How can this be accounted for, considering that Japan's population is as urbanized, industrialized, and sophisticated as those of the most advanced Western nations? One of the major factors is the very different way that the Japanese police system is viewed and operates compared with police in the U.S. This study examines those differences through direct observation of Japanese police practices combines with interviews of Japanese police officials, criminal justice practitioners, legal scholars, and private citizens. Written by a teaching criminologist, it compares many Japanese police practices side by side with U.S. police practices, and places the role of the police in the broader cultural and historical Japanese framework.
Nonviolent state behavior in Japan, this book argues, results from the distinctive breadth with which the Japanese define security policy, making it inseparable from the quest for social stability through economic growth. While much of the literature on contemporary Japan has resisted emphasis on cultural uniqueness, Peter J. Katzenstein seeks to explain particular aspects of Japan's security policy in terms of legal and social norms that are collective, institutionalized, and sometimes the source of intense political conflict and change. Culture, thus specified, is amenable to empirical analysis, suggesting comparisons across policy domains and with other countries. Katzenstein focuses on the traditional core agencies of law enforcement and national defense. The police and the military in postwar Japan are, he finds, reluctant to deploy physical violence to enforce state security. Police agents rarely use repression against domestic opponents of the state, and the Japanese public continues to support, by large majorities, constitutional limits on overseas deployment of the military. Katzenstein traces the relationship between the United States and Japan since 1945 and then compares Japan with postwar Germany. He concludes by suggesting that while we may think of Japan's security policy as highly unusual, it is the definition of security used in the United States that is, in international terms, exceptional.
This study focuses on the problems that attended the reform of the Japanese police during the American Occupation of Japan (1945-52). Drawing on primary sources Aldous explores the Occupation's programme of 'democratization' and its legacy.
In Japan and the Security of Asia Louis Hayes studies modern Japan's frustrated search for national security. The book charts Japan's attempts to fashion its own place in the sun in the face of Great Power interventionism and national demands for regional hegemony: first through nascent internationalism and later disastrous totalitarianism that culminated in war in the Pacific. Hayes expertly tracks Japan's shifting foreign-policy goals up to the present day, moving from the preservation of the nation-state by force to the drive for economic self-aggrandizement as a Cold War client of the United States. The book reveals to the student of modern Asian history a twenty-first century Japan that has rejected unarmed neutrality and is reasserting its security independence in post-Cold War Asia.
Finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her f loorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * TIME * CHICAGO TRIBUNE * THE GUARDIAN * ESQUIRE * THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS * FINANCIAL TIMES * LIBRARY JOURNAL * THE A.V. CLUB * KIRKUS REVIEWS * LITERARY HUB American Book Award winner
The Japanese mafia - known collectively as yakuza - has had a considerable influence on Japanese society over the past fifty years. Based on extensive Japanese language source material and interviews with criminals, police officers, lawyers, journalists, and scholars, this is the first English language academic monography to analyse Japan's criminal syndicates.Peter Hill argues that the essential characteristic of Japan's criminal syndicates is their provision of protection to consumers in Japan's under- and upper-worlds. In this respect they are analogous to the Sicilian Mafia, and the mafias of Russia, Hong Kong, and the United States. Although the yakuza's protective mafia role has existed at least since the end of the Second World War, and arguably longer, the range of economic transactions to which such protection has been afforded hasnot remained constant. The yakuza have undergone considerable change in their business activities over the last half-century. The two key factors driving this evolution have been the changes in the legal and law enforcement environment within which these groups must operate, and the economic opportunitiesavailable to them. This first factor demonstrates that the complex and ambiguous relationship between the yakuza and the state has always been more than purely symbiotic. With the introduction of the boryokudan (Iyakuza) countermeasures law in 1992, the relationship between the yakuza and the state has become more unambiguously antagonistic. Assessing the impact of this law is, however, problematic; the contemporaneous bursting of Japan's economic bubble at thebeginning of the 1990s also profoundly and adversely influenced yakuza sources of income. It is impossible to completely disentangle the effects of these two events.By the end of the twentieth century, the outlook for the yakuza was bleak and offered no short-term prospect of amelioration. More profoundly, state-expropriation of protection markets formerly dominated by the yakuza suggests that the longer-term prospects for these groups are bleaker still: no longer, therefore, need the yakuza be seen as an inevitable and necessary evil.
