Political repression in Imperial Japan

Political repression in Imperial Japan lasted from the Meiji period to the fall of the Empire of Japan after the end of World War II. Throughout this period, dissidence was curtailed by laws, and police, and dissidents became political prisoners.

Several laws were passed to curtail dissidence in Imperial Japan, including the Public Peace Police Law in 1900, and the Peace Preservation Law in 1925.[1]

The earliest secret police in Imperial Japan was the Danjodai, established in May 1869. The Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu (Tokko) was established in 1911 following the Great Treason Incident of 1910.[2]

By the late 1930s, political repression had also reached cultural fields, including Surrealist publishing and artists' associations. In 1939, the police banned the Nagoya Surrealist journal Yoru no Funsui, launched the previous year by Kansuke Yamamoto.[3][4] The 10 March 1941 revision of the Peace Preservation Law further expanded the reach of ideological policing and made artistic associations and groups subject to police control.[5] On 5 April 1941, the painter Ichiro Fukuzawa and the art critic Shūzō Takiguchi were detained on suspicion of violating the law; the 2024 catalogue treats the detentions as an early case in the wartime repression of Japanese Surrealism.[5]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Tipton 1990, pp. 18–73.
  2. ↑ Tipton 1990, p. 45.
  3. ↑ Stojković, Jelena (2020). Surrealism and Photography in 1930s Japan: The Impossible Avant-Garde. Bloomsbury Visual Arts. p. 4.
  4. ↑ D'Alessandro, Stephanie; Gale, Matthew, eds. (2021). Surrealism Beyond Borders. The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Tate Modern. pp. 82–83. ISBN 9781588397270.
  5. 1 2 Hayami, Yutaka; Hironaka, Tomoko; Shimizu, Tomoyo, eds. (2024). Surrealism and Japan 『シュルレアリスム宣言』100年 シュルレアリスムと日本 (in Japanese). Seigensha. p. 170. ISBN 978-4-86152-941-2.

Works cited

Further reading

  • Mitchell, Richard H. (1992). Janus-Faced Justice: Political Criminals in Imperial Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-1410-6.
This page is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.