Rumors and Crisis in the Age of Mass Politics and Planning in Japan, 1905–95

This paper explores changes in political culture through the history of rumors in twentieth-century Japan, from the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 to the twin shocks of the 1995 Hanshin Earthquake and sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. During this period, the diversification of the press, the expansion and dismantling of the Japanese Empire, and the development of the social sciences all contributed to the appearance of multiple overlapping discussions of rumors among journalists, the police, government officials, and academics. Different efforts to report, analyze, and suppress rumors reconfigured the boundaries between political and apolitical speech in a new age of mass politics and government planning.

Rumors provide a window into the intersection of politics, entertainment, and the social sciences during times of crisis. At the time of the Russo-Japanese War, newspapers traded heavily in gossip and rumor about Russian intentions in an effort to expand their readership to include migrants to Tokyo from the countryside. In the aftermath of the 1923 Kantō Earthquake, the police encouraged the spread of rumors in order to eliminate a politically suspect group of colonial subjects, resident Koreans. After 1945 journalists, psychologists, and the police discussed rumors in the context of new reforms undertaken during the Allied Occupation. Building upon wartime rumor research, social scientists argued that rumors were an inevitable and normal counterpart to government efforts to promote economic development. Journalists rejected this argument and returned to many of the themes of earlier discussions of rumors and crisis in 1995, after a major earthquake in Kobe and a terrorist attack in Tokyo exposed the "vulnerabilities" (jakuten) of the postwar regime. Taken together, this history of rumors and crisis reveals the contingency and reversibility of the progressive narrative of political development moving hand-in-hand with increasing knowledge of the social world.