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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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The cite is "Shihō Chōsaka, Shihō Kenkyū 17, Hōkokushū (Judicial Research: No. 17, Collection of Reports), Tokyo: Shihōshō (Mar. 1933), 434 (National Diet Library, Call Number: AZ-771-H26)." I don't know if this would be digitized anywhere.

I took a look - as far as I can tell, it’s available only via their intranet, and I’d have to essentially buy a copy from the national diet library and have it delivered. From what I can see from the table of contents, the entire thing is about Korean-Japanese criminality and its purported reasons (and a hundred something pages on background on Koreans living in Japan at the time), all 500+ pages of it.

Oh well!