What question did this study set out to answer?

The research aims to challenge the simplistic view of the Japanese prison system as purely oppressive by examining its complexities and contradictions during colonial rule.

April 16, 2026Open Access

Discipline, Punishment, and Buddhist Chaplaincy at Lüshun Prison During Japan’s Colonial Rule, 1905–1945

Key Points

The research aims to challenge the simplistic view of the Japanese prison system as purely oppressive by examining its complexities and contradictions during colonial rule.
Analyzed official prison documents and archival sources from the True Pure Land Buddhist Honganji sect.
Reviewed local Chinese publications and conducted oral histories from the 2000s.
Conducted interviews with descendants and fieldwork at Lüshun Prison.
The prison system combined disciplinary manipulation with corporeal punishment to shape prisoners.
Buddhist chaplains' depoliticized teachings failed to instill repentance and loyalty among prisoners.
Ahn Jung-geun's case illustrated that prison chaplains were themselves transformed by their interactions with prisoners.

Abstract

This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power to examine the history of penal punishment and Buddhist chaplaincy at Lüshun Prison in Dalian during Japan’s colonial rule (1905–1945). The goal is to call into question the dominant understanding of Japanese prison system as simply an apparatus of naked colonial oppression by exploring the contradictions and limitations in the penitentiary system of Japan as an empire and a modern nation-state. The research is based on official prison documents, True Pure Land Buddhist Honganji sect archival sources, local Chinese publications, oral testimonies from the 2000s, interviews with descendants, and fieldwork at Lüshun Prison. The first part introduces the history of Lüshun Prison and the second explains the prison as a modern criminal justice institution embodying the Benthamian panopticon principle and modern disciplinary power. The third part examines the brutal corporeal punishment at Lüshun Prison and explores how the prison combined deliberate strategies of disciplining manipulation with bodily punishment to (re)create disciplined and subjected individuals. The fourth and fifth parts focus on Buddhist chaplaincy at Lüshun Prison as a disciplining practice. The fourth considers the limits of Buddhist chaplaincy by showing the depoliticized Buddhist doctrine deployed by chaplains was unable to discipline prisoners as it failed to make them repent and be loyal subjects of imperial Japan. The notion of public good used to justify Buddhist chaplaincy in Japan loses its political meaning when applied to the colonial penitentiary setting of Lüshun Prison. The fifth part further explores this ambiguity in Buddhist chaplaincy by focusing on examining the case of Ahn Jung-geun, the Korean independence activist who assassinated the Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi and was imprisoned and executed at Lüshun Prison in 1910. Rather than transforming Ahn, prison chaplains ended up being transformed by him. This reversion betrays not just a tension between the private and the public, or the individual and the social, but at the same time a tension between the supposedly homogenized nation-state and the multi-ethnic empire.

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