Law's Logistical Media
The Installation of the File System in the Postwar Japanese Prosecutor's Office
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2109374 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Miyako Inoue (Stanford University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 66 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 612-642 |
| Publication date | 2024-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Comparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0010417524000112 |
| OpenAlex | W4393942417 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 43 |
This article traces the fraught history of the file system's adoption by the Japanese Public Prosecutor's Office (PPO) from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, when the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ), the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, decentralized the PPO's power and transformed it into a 'democratic' judicial agency. This is also a postwar history of the introduction of Taylorism-derived scientific management to white collar office work and Weberian visions of bureaucratic rationality into government offices, as part of the democratization of public administration steered by various sections within GHQ. Among the key changes was a guarantee of the right to receive a 'speedy trial.' The essay argues that, while that guarantee was meant to secure human-rights protections for the accused, the file system introduced to the PPO translated the constitutional imperative of the rights of the accused into the pursuit of efficient scientific management, in which democracy was an operationalized socio-technical achievement. This logistical channel led to the co-emergence of democracy and modern rational bureaucracy, with each evincing mutual cause and effect. American reforms invested technicality with the promise of 'democracy,' but as this essay shows, senior Japanese officials envisioned it as a means to rebuild a centralized information network
Computer security · Political science · Computer Science · Criminal Law and Evidence · Law · Law in Society and Culture
Science in action
Control through Communication
The Closed World
Document Raj
Paper Machines
Documents and Bureaucracy
Indexing – The politics of invisibility
The Government of Things
Reassembling the Social
From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Michel Foucault
The Fragile Force of Law
The Legal Case File as Border Object
The Materiality of What
Speaking Into the iPhone
Cultural Techniques
The Container Principle
Files Circulation and the Forms of Legal Experts
Documents
Cultural Techniques and Logistical Media
"The "Paper Case
Stenography and ventriloquism in late nineteenth century Japan
Coded Vanilla
The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical
Government of Paper
Introduction
Cultural Techniques
Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty
After Kittler
Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo
Enemies, Parasites, and Noise
Inscribing Subjects to Citizenship
The Powers in PowerPoint
The Post-it Note Economy
The Memo and Modernity
Promising information
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |