Paper short abstract:

Despite the progressive activism of their youths, many former Tōkyō University Settlement members fully embraced ethnic nationalism and state power in the 1930's as policy advisers to the wartime state. This paper reveals the surprising degree of continuity of reformist ideals among these thinkers.

Paper long abstract:

'Once bathed in the inspiration of the just rule of the Emperor, the various regions of Asia must absolutely not be spiritually, materially or economically divided… As Japan's classical culture is broadly embraced, Asia is for the first time united.'

The poet Asano Akira, who had once devoted himself to teaching Marxist economics to factory workers at the Tōkyō University Settlement labor school, wrote this passage as a member of a military propaganda unit stationed in Indonesia during the Pacific War. Like many Communist Party members arrested for their political activism, Asano renounced communism and evolved towards a romantic idealism emblematic of an ideological sea-change which left few progressive thinkers untouched. This project will examine the astonishing phenomena of tenkō, or ideological conversion, through two aspects which allowed droves of former professors and students associated with the settlement to contribute to imperialist and militarist policy; namely, the embrace of ethnic nationalism and state power. This project will analyze the process of reorientation but will also expose striking elements of continuity of thought as many thinkers/activists discovered new tools to implement long-held ideals of social reform.

Former Tōkyō University Settlement members reached the highest levels of many policy organs such as the Cabinet Planning Board and its colonial research institute the Tōa Kenkyūjo, which sought to recruit leftists through the influence of communist sympathizer Ozaki Hotsumi. The Tōa Kenkyūjo, in fact, employed the research expertise of three of the central professors of the settlement, Suehiro Izutarō, Hirano Yoshitarō, and Yamada Moritarō, with former students, who utilized many of the same fieldwork methods undertaken at the settlement to understand the 'living law' of Chinese villagers. By placing the later nationalist and statist policies in the social and intellectual context of the guiding ideas of the settlement, this project will show the often conflicted nature and divergent paths and motivations of progressives collaborating with a repressive regime they once sought to confront.