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Unlock This CourseTenko is a Japanese word meaning "conversion" or "changing direction". In the 1930s it came to mean a communist giving up their beliefs, usually in public. A communist wants a society with no private ownership of land and factories, and in Japan most communists looked to the Soviet Union for leadership. The government feared them. They threatened the kokutai, the idea that Japan was a special nation under a sacred emperor. The Japan Communist Party was founded in 1922 and was illegal from the start.
By the early 1930s Japan was in the grip of the Depression, and some workers and students did turn to the left. The government's answer was not only to punish communists, but to make them change their minds.
Key terms:
The crackdown came in waves. On 15 March 1928 the police arrested about 1,600 communists and supporters across Japan. This was just after the first election held under the new vote for all men over 25. In April 1929 hundreds more were arrested. The Public Security Preservation Law of 1925 gave the police their power, and in 1928 the death penalty was added for its worst offences.
The arrests went on through the early 1930s, and thousands were jailed. Police questioning could be brutal. In February 1933 the novelist Kobayashi Takiji, who wrote about workers and the 1928 arrests, was arrested by the Special Higher Police and died the same day. His death shocked many writers. The message to others was clear: the state was ready to use force.
In June 1933 two of the party's best-known leaders, Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, both in prison, issued a joint statement. They broke with the Comintern, the Soviet-led organisation that directed communist parties abroad. They said Japanese communists should serve their own nation under the emperor, and they backed Japan's role in Asia.
This was a huge blow. It reached the press in June, was printed in magazines in July 1933, and many other prisoners followed. Some changed their minds, some were worn down by years in a cell, and some hoped for an earlier release. By the mid-1930s a large majority of jailed communists had "converted". Officials praised the converts, which made it harder for those who held out.
The Communist Party was crushed inside Japan by the mid-1930s. Its leaders were jailed or had converted, so it could no longer work. Other left-wing groups were weakened or moved closer to supporting the state. With the left weakened, there was less opposition to the army and the nationalists.
Many ordinary people stopped joining protests or reading left-wing books. Writers, teachers and students avoided "dangerous" ideas. Friends and neighbours feared being called "red" and being reported to the police.
Tenko did not stop with communists. The same pressure spread to anyone who seemed to question the nation. In 1933 Professor Takigawa Yukitoki of Kyoto University was forced out of his post after nationalists said his teaching was too left-wing, even though he was not a communist. In 1936 a law set up supervision of released political prisoners, to check that they kept to their new views. Newspapers, schools and teachers were pushed to praise the emperor and the nation, and the state defined what was "Japanese". The effect was a narrower public life, in which open disagreement became risky.
Change: In 1925 the aim was to punish people who joined groups that attacked the kokutai or private property. By 1933 the aim was to change people's minds, and thousands of prisoners were pushed to do so in public. The Communist Party, always illegal, had almost vanished inside Japan.
Continuity: The Public Security Preservation Law stayed in force, the police kept their wide powers, and the government still treated the kokutai as the thing to protect.
Explain TWO ways in which the government's treatment of the left in the years 1928-33 was different from its treatment of the left in 1925. (In 1925 the Public Security Preservation Law set prison terms of up to ten years for those who tried to change the kokutai or abolish private property.) [6 marks]
One way is the aim. In 1925 the law was meant to punish people who joined groups attacking the kokutai or private property, with a ten-year maximum prison term. By 1933 the aim was also to change minds, because leaders such as Sano and Nabeyama were pushed into a public statement renouncing the Comintern, and many other prisoners followed.
A second way is the scale and effect. In 1925 the law set out penalties but there had been no mass round-ups yet, whereas by 1928-33 the Special Higher Police made mass arrests, such as about 1,600 in March 1928, and the death penalty was added in 1928. By contrast, the conversions of 1933 left the party crushed inside Japan, and others felt pressure to conform.
What lifts this to the top level: each way states a fact about 1925 and a fact about the 1930s, so the comparison is explicit.
On a "different from" question, write about both periods in every paragraph. Use words like "whereas" or "by contrast", and give a precise fact on each side.