Empire’s Little Helpers: Juvenile Delinquents and the State in East Asia, 1880–;1945

Abstract

This chapter explores the historical image and issue of Japanese juvenile delinquency as it specifically relates to pre-1945 East Asia. In the West, such behaviour was often easily labelled under the rubric of “juvenile delinquency” but as we will see, such a simple classification does not allow for the sort of historical investigation that is required when looking at the issue of empire and youth in East Asia. Unfortunately, while acknowledging this heuristic problem, we have precious little other vocabulary in our lexicon to describe the situation. Thus, I will retain the term “juvenile delinquency” but offer specific commentary on new ways of linking delinquency with politics and Japanese imperialism in China and Korea, concerning the symbols and rhetoric of pre-war and wartime Japanese youths on the Chinese mainland. Such an examination should hopefully bring to the forefront some of the pitfalls in too liberally appropriating the same terms across geography and history. The history of juvenile delinquency has often been written from a purely national perspective, or criminological orientation, with less in the way of comparative or transnational studies.¹ In other areas such scholarship attempts to reveal a pattern of Westernization, where non-Western nations learn from the West. Particularly lacking are studies which explore the construction and understanding of juvenile delinquency in the cultural sphere of East Asia and, equally important, how this delinquency was woven into the fabric of empire.