Professor Max Ward just returned from his year-long sabbatical in Tokyo, here is an update on some of his work while he was abroad!

Where did you spend your sabbatical and what were you working on?

I was in Tokyo at Waseda University working on a second book project on the police in modern Japan. Since my first book is on the interwar and the pre-war period, I wanted to do the post-war era for my second. As I looked at my materials, I started to realize that I wanted to write a history of modern Japan through the lens of the police both as a concept and an institution.

What is your favorite memory from your time there?

My fondest memory is just starting a new book project and realizing how many interesting and new things are out there. When you’ve spent ten years working on something, you’re so completely immersed in that. When you start a second project, you find that there are new documents or new historical figures that you discover. Even if they have been written on by other people, discovering them for yourself for the first time is really exciting, and I was very inspired by a lot of the primary documents I was reading. This gave me a little more incentive to expand the project beyond an organizational history, as I’m focused on not just the police as an institution but the conception of it by society.

*Though Professor Ward also noted that the time he spent playing in a punk rock band was pretty nice too*

What is an example of these new documents you found?

Something new I have discovered that was really interesting was this discourse in the 1910s and 1920s by police educators called minshū no keisatsuka, where the state wanted to create a situation in which society policed itself so that the police as a separate institution would no longer need to exist. I think it reveals a lot of things about society-police relations and makes us think about how we distribute police power in society.

How will this new research contribute to your teaching going forward?

This winter term I’m already teaching a course called “Police Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema” and I’m conceiving this as a component of my research project. Thinking about how the police are portrayed within film, and how film shaped conceptions of police in the post-war period is interesting since there is so much post-war Japanese Cinema. I’m also thinking of integrating crime novels and film in my teaching and research. In the future I’d like to propose courses about theories of police and perhaps comparative histories of policing and control over society based on my research.

This sounds like an exciting sabbatical! What did you miss the most about Middlebury while you were away?

I didn’t miss the winters, that’s for sure! I miss the students, though. I enjoyed teaching in small classes where each week everybody has read the book, and you sit down for three hours and try to work through the author’s argument together. I didn’t have that in Tokyo. I participated in some reading groups with colleagues, but these small discussions among scholars is just a different dynamic. I think the students bring a completely different level of energy and new perspectives to the table.