Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium

Chapter 8: Japanese Colonialism, Gender, and Household Registration: Legal Reconstruction of Boundaries

219 chapter 8 Japanese Colonialism, Gender, and Household Registration Legal Reconstruction of Boundaries Barbara J. Brooks The workings of power have always been at the center of the study of colonialism in its diverse manifestations. Much scholarly attention has recently addressed divisions between colonizer and colonized, both within colonial and metropolitan spaces, as a means of better grasping the nature of colonial rule and the culture of colonialism. In an important essay, Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper call attention to the study of “the relationship between knowledge and rule” and “how a grammar of difference was continuously and vigilantly crafted” by empires that rhetorically claimed clear categories separating colonized from metropolitan subjects, while at the same time, in fact, boundaries were porous.1 Studies in the culture of colonialisms have often focused on the nature of boundaries between categories and especially people in imperial spaces who fell between or crossed such boundaries, not so much for the proportions or numbers of people in such places, but for the telltale ways colonial and metropolitan states dealt with them.2 As study of the Japanese Empire matures and grows more complex, more sources for the study of colonial power and knowledge undergo analysis , and within this enterprise, study of the legal classification of metropolitan vs. colonial subjects within the household registration systems of the empire begins to be possible. This essay sketches a broad research agenda by first exploring the general landscape of the imperial population for which the Japanese Empire, beginning in Taiwan in 1895, built systems of laws that divided a large realm of metropolitan law applied to all subjects from the changing colonial realms of “customary law.” It then offers an outline of the FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY 220 Barbara J. Brooks complexities of the movement of peoples, the distinctive gendering, and both discursive and legal complexities concerning the status of different subjects in the Japanese Empire, with particular attention to what can be discerned about cases of mixed-blood offspring. Discussion of mixed-blood offspring (those with both a metropolitan or naichi and a colonial or gaichi parent) has to be brought into the analysis of a vast and unwieldy, and changing, system of management and manipulation of categories of people across the empire. Study of the evolving colonial systems of legal categorization of metropolitan and colonial subjects also demands broad, even international , contextualization. Japanese bureaucratic systems of registration in Japan proper did not arise in a solely domestic or national framework . The Japanese state encountered issues of extraterritoriality and citizenship from at least 1854. Its own modernization of a traditional system of household registration was accomplished with international issues regarding citizenship always lurking and threatening to undermine sovereignty. During the Meiji years, Japan’s bureaucratic system of household registration (koseki seido) evolved, along with its taxation and military draft systems, to focus on the Japanese subjects at the individual and household level in their local jurisdictions. As Japan rose to consequence as a player in Great Power politics in East Asia and as a new colonial power, the state also emerged as a manipulator of categories of citizenship that classified subject peoples in household registration ­ systems of the metropole (naichi) and colonial territories (gaichi). The first Japanese legal specialists went to Korea with the goal to create law codes “on par with the law codes of civilized countries,” in order to ­ abolish extraterritoriality in Korea, but also with the goal of aligning Korea closely with Japan’s national interests.3 Meiji jurists who had developed Japan’s civil code after, but also despite, intense study of French civil law now came to Korea to compile the basis for the new Korean customary law. In both metropole and periphery, the jurists were also working toward modernizing the state in important areas of family law. Recent scholarship, particularly on Korea, has clarified the nature of customary law as “invented” or in any case selectively encoded as law by Japanese legal experts based on Japanese scholarship on “customs ” of the particular colonial society and actual courtroom challenges .4 Customary law was civil law, and within that, law that ordered the Korean family system, including marriage and divorce, succession, FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY Japanese Colonialism, Gender, and Household Registration 221 adoption, and property inheritance in families. In effect, metropolitan Japan, with its household head and household registration system, had a different civil code than the ones that imperial jurists...