The ‘Oh, Mistake’ Incident and Juvenile Delinquency in Defeated Japan

Abstract

This article explores the moral panic that erupted in Japan in 1950 over a robbery committed by a Japanese male teenager during the Allied occupation. Labeled by the press as an example of ‘after-war,’ the specific details of the ‘Oh, Mistake’ Incident and the varied public reactions it generated reveals the many ways Japanese people ascribed particular understandings of war, defeat, and occupation through the prism of juvenile delinquency. A close examination of the public outcry illuminates deep-seated Japanese anxieties over not only the future of juveniles traumatized by war and defeat, but also how some of them were able to construct new forms of hybrid identities and even language through Nisei impersonation and broken English during the tumultuous setting of defeated Japan.