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Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes a new approach to the conceptual history of tenkō in modern Japan, one that can account for all the diverse practices, political positions and theoretical investments the term accrued across Japan's transwar history.

Paper long abstract:

No other term has come to symbolize the vexed decades of interwar Japan—if not also the myriad contradictions of Japanese modernity— more than tenkō. The combination of the term’s two Chinese characters—転向—innocuously means a “change of direction,” but in the political history of interwar Japan, tenkō assumed on a much more insidious significance. There the term referred to the “ideological conversion” of thousands of political activists and intellectuals, beginning with incarcerated Japanese Communist Party (JCP) members who publicly defected from the party in 1933-1934, to later in the decade, leftist thinkers, academics as well as anti-colonial nationalists in colonial Korea who either abandoned political activism or began to proactively support the imperial state. Then, in the early postwar period, Japanese scholars returned to the question of tenkō in order to pursue a variety of problems related to Japanese intellectual history, including: theories of modern subjectivity, the paradigmatic shifts in modern Japanese intellectual history, the politics of writing, or, as revealing the constitutive dynamics of Japanese modernity or modernity more generally. As we see here, scholars expanded the meaning of tenkō far beyond the political defections of interwar political activists and, in doing so, opened the term to a variety of analytical and theoretical investments.

In this paper, I consider how we might construct a conceptual history tenkō that can account for all the diverse practices, political positions and theoretical investments the term accrued across the twentieth century. I begin by questioning the basic assumptions that have informed our received understanding of tenkō. Then I will propose the idea of “historical catachresis” theorized by Tani Barlow as providing a way to account for the many articulations of tenkō across a variety of ideological, historical and institutional domains.