Tokkō

Tokkō. ‘If you say “Tokkō”, even a crying child falls silent,’ (Takagi Takeo, 1954). Even today the name of the Tokkō (Special Higher Police) carries a fearful resonance to the Japanese as the words Gestapo does to westerners. In fact, critics of the repressive pre-1945 Japanese political system have frequently made analogies between the Tokkō and its German—and Soviet—counterparts.

The Tokkō played the role of front-line agency in the government's efforts to suppress radical leftist ideologies and organizations, particularly communist ones, during the 1930s and 1940s; it was Tokkō officers who arrested the Soviet agent Richard Sorge, in October 1941. During the war the Tokkō, which worked almost exclusively in the home islands, spread its net to include certain new Buddhist religions, liberals, and any others who did not support the government's policies. Its main legal weapon was the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, which after a 1928 revision made it a capital crime to attempt to form an organization aimed at destroying the kokutai, Japan's unique national polity centred on the emperor. Persecution of new Buddhist religions was sufficiently significant for the 1941 revision of the Peace Preservation Law to include two new clauses aimed at regulating religious groups and individuals seen to be threats to the kokutai or to the sanctity of shrines and the imperial house (see also religion).

In their zeal, Tokkō officers, who numbered about 2,000, frequently violated the procedural rights of suspects and became notorious for brutality and torture. Despite it being illegal since 1879, regular police officers as well as Tokkō officers not uncommonly used torture, which resulted in the deaths of a number of leftist activists during the 1930s and some well-known liberal journalists during the war. Prolonged detentions (even up to two years) also represented abuses of authority which even defenders of the Tokkō admit were widespread.

A number of factors help to explain the brutality and abuses of authority and in addition, throw light on the relationship between the Tokkō and other groups or institutions in wartime Japanese society and politics. The Japanese police in modern times, despite a number of attempts by leaders to professionalize them and improve police–public relations, had had poor relations with the public. Such efforts were hampered by an underlying assumption of the superiority of Japanese bureaucracy over the people. The Tokkō was part of the bureaucracy, being a section of the civil police under the home ministry with designated responsibility for control of so-called social or ideological movements. Under the Meiji constitution ( 1889), government officials remained outside the jurisdiction of the regular courts, which dealt with civil and criminal cases, and only the banning of organizations by the Tokkō could be questioned in the administrative court. Consequently, individual victims of Tokkō abuse had very limited means of redress for their grievances.

Furthermore, because the Tokkō's responsibilities were regarded as the most important among police functions, and this was emphasized by the French-derived name of Special Higher Police, it became the ‘aristocracy’ of the police. Its officers were recruited for their nationalistic fervour and were inculcated with a high sense of mission which was reinforced by wartime conditions. Secrecy and a separate chain of command and appointment of officers also contributed to Tokkō arrogance and insulation from criticism.

Although the Tokkō's application of the Peace Preservation Law widened after the nation began war preparations in the early 1930s, the goal shifted from prosecution and imprisonment of violators to conversion of those harbouring ‘dangerous thoughts’ and the remoulding of converts—by torture or, more often by the appropriate social and/or psychological pressure—into loyal Japanese subjects. In 1936 a system of ‘protection and supervision’ centres was established to keep converts from backsliding. As a result, relatively few prosecutions and no executions occurred for Peace Preservation Law violations, and the Tokkō never established concentration camps. Increased emphasis on ‘guidance of thought into proper channels’ raised the importance of preventing the propagation of illegal ideologies and extended the Tokkō's involvement in the daily lives of Japanese people. However, although wartime pressures to mobilize support for the government's policies elevated the Tokkō's institutional status and expanded its sphere of operations, it neither acted wholly independently nor created a ‘state within a state’, as did the German SS.

Elise K. Tipton

Bibliography

Mitchell, R. , Janus-Faced Justice: Political Criminals in Imperial Japan (Honolulu, 1992).
Tipton, E. K. , The Japanese Police State: The Tokkō in Interwar Japan (Sydney, 1990).