The Changing Discourse of Criminal Rehabilitation in 20th-Century Japan

From Home Ministry experiments with reforming “delinquent youth” (furyō shōnen) in the 1910s, to Justice Ministry effort to “ideologically convert” (tenkō) political criminals in the 1930s, the ideals of reform and rehabilitation informed a diverse range of penal, welfare and political policies in prewar Japan. Under the rubric of imperial benevolence, an empire-wide network of agencies had emerged by the 1930s that worked to reform delinquents and political activists into loyal and productive imperial subjects. In the 1940s, these policies were extended to the general public in order to mobilize them for total-war. And while many aspects of the prewar justice system were dismantled in the democratic reforms following Japan’s defeat in 1945, criminal and delinquent rehabilitation was retained, and continues to be touted as expressing imperial benevolence today.

This paper explores the transformation of political culture in Japan through the lens of penal rehabilitation policy, with specific emphasis on the continuities and transformations between the interwar and early postwar periods. It asks: How should we interpret this close association of the emperor, benevolence and criminal rehabilitation during the rise of militarism and fascism in the 1930s as well as the democratic liberalism of the 1950s? How do official postwar histories of rehabilitation represent the policy to ideologically convert political criminals in the 1930s? And what does it mean that the extensive welfare services provided to parolees today continue to be linked to the “symbolic” emperor?