JAPAN: Thought Control

The Imperial Japanese Government, acting upon a bill passed by the Japanese Diet, announced that next week it will establish 22 Thought Control Offices in such leading Japanese cities as Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Sendai, Sapporo and Fukuoka, with Thought Control Substations in 15 other cities.

Hitherto Japanese police have performed the greater part of Japanese thought control upon political prisoners. As in Imperial Russia before the revolution, Japanese sons and daughters of the highest aristocracy have been caught in the dragnet of police raids on radical gatherings.

In the new 1936-style Thought Control Offices, several hundred Japanese instructors will gravely impart to Japanese subjects in batches what they are to think and are not to think. In Japan this is only a re-introduction of such measures as were taken in 1649 when the State issued an edict minutely instructing peasants upon such points as the imperative necessity of divorcing a gadabout wife. Since 1928, police have arrested some 60,000 Japanese on the charge of “thinking Dangerous Thoughts.” The 22 Thought Control Offices came as a kind of relief, providing centres more comfortable than jails in which docile Japanese may learn what thoughts to have.