Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (review)

Daniel Botsman provides us with a deft, useful analysis of intellectual and institutional forces at work in transforming Japanese penal systems from their Tokugawa predecessors into their late nineteenth-century, modern counterparts and creating the foundations for early twentieth-century practice. In the process, he gives a forceful reminder that the early Meiji years witnessed considerable experimentation rather than following a direct beeline to a clearly modern or Westernized government and society. In this regard, Botsman's work fits nicely with recent scholarship such as Brian Platt's Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750–1890 (Harvard University Press, 2004) that studies the transformation of a single institution or locality to probe the process of political transformation, not just its final outcome. At the same time, given Western concerns surrounding the Japanese penal system in negotiating away the extraterritoriality provisions of the unequal treaties, Botsman's study represents something of an extension of Michael Auslin's Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Harvard University Press, 2004).

Botsman takes on a number of interpretations prevalent among Japanese students of Tokugawa-Meiji law and penal practice. The common characterization of the penal system paints it as steadily progressing toward more humane and "modern" practice beginning in the Tokugawa period and shows it accelerated in the Meiji era as the national government, erstwhile hero of the story, responded to Westerners who consistently withheld abandonment of extraterritoriality until Japan's penal (and legal) system had been brought into line with European and North American practice. For some studies, this process showed precursors of modern practice in the Tokugawa era. Such overviews, especially in English, do little to consider seriously the potential link between Tokugawa and Meiji practice.

One of Botsman's clear contributions lies precisely in his detailed examination of the degree of continuity and discontinuity in nineteenth-century penal practice. Botsman examines both Tokugawa-era efforts to humanize penal practice and the continuation of "backward" practices in the Meiji era. Taking a cue from Michel Foucault, he argues that each stage in the transformation of penal practice must be examined in its own historical context and not in light of standard (and contemporary mid-nineteenth-century) descriptions that focused on questions of barbarity. Doing so, he argues, reveals not only the broader societal relationships in which the penal system functioned at different times, but also that it was the subject of considerable debate long before Commodore Matthew Perry's arrival. He concludes that while criticisms raised in the Tokugawa period resonated with concerns of later Western critics, the pre-Meiji alternatives proposed were not "modern"; they were Chinese practices or throwbacks to Heian Japan. As such, these ideas and suggestions had little direct influence on the penal system that finally earned Westerners' assent to eliminate extraterritoriality. In this work the early Meiji era is truly a transitional period in which legacies from early imperial Japan and efforts to adapt Chinese practices were tried and then abandoned in the face of practical considerations of implementation, not just the skeptical eye of the European political and diplomatic community.

Considering the way penal practice fit the political and ideological order of the day, Botsman stresses the context provided by the national Tokugawa-era status system, especially the place of outcaste communities. Two broad arguments are particularly notable. First, the clearly brutal Tokugawa system, by frequent use of pardons (among other practices), served to project an image of benevolence. A strict standard was maintained, but beneficence was manifested through the shogun's willingness to be lenient. Second, authorities successfully deflected much of the potential damage to the image of samurai benevolence that excruciating public displays of punishment might cause by having outcastes, fully decorated with the implements of execution, parade convicted criminals through the streets of Edo on their way to their deaths and having those outcastes take responsibility for execution grounds. In other words...