Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium ed. by Susan L. Burns and Barbara J. Brooks (review)

Legal reforms introduced by the new Meiji government had far-reaching, heterogeneous, and mutually conflicting impacts on men and women in Japan and its colonies. With the late nineteenth century seeing ever-intensifying globalization, disruptive industrialization, and the emergence of the Japanese sovereign nation-state, Japanese law was reinvented to facilitate and accommodate these changes. Hitherto disjoined legal practices had to be unified, systematized, and harmonized (to a degree) with international practices. The consequences were radical discontinuities in some areas, cosmetic refashioning of familiar practices in others, and new forms of freedom and control.

This volume collects nine essays which portray the human and institutional effects of legal reform. The relevant changes extended from the political and social structure to reproductive and productive activities, conjugal relationships, and familial matters. They exposed the tension between communal values and state law, the individual’s changed relationship with the state, and the problems of newly emergent legal identities. The overall impact depicted by this volume is that the effects of legal reform were extremely uneven, in terms of both gender and colonial implementation. Shifting from conventional state-centered legal studies to the social and cultural history of the law, it provides broad and richly textured insights into the impact of the law on the lives of ordinary people.

Douglas Howland discusses the Maria Luz case of 1872 in which a Japanese judge ruled that the Chinese coolies aboard a Peruvian ship should be freed, saying that the coolie trade was a slave trade and illegal. The judgment was hailed in terms of Japan’s compliance with international law, but it also highlighted the question of whether Japanese bonded prostitution should be treated similarly. Although the claim was dismissed by the judge as a solely domestic matter, the Japanese government quickly banned the sale and purchase of women for the sex trade (p. 36). However, freedom of contract and legalization of prostitution had only contributed to the growing numbers of those involved in prostitution at home and abroad, most of whom were from destitute farming families as a result of post-Restoration land reforms, another example of law-enforced change. Howland describes both the Chinese coolies and Japanese prostitutes as “an intermediate category of labor. Neither was free or enslaved” (p. 22) in an era of globalized capital and labor.

Sally A. Hastings focuses on the legislative history of antiprostitution laws shortly after World War II. Using parliamentary, court, and other contemporary records, she exposes the patronizing and profit-motivated opposition from brothel and restaurant owners. Their deep-rooted prejudice against such women was matched by a blatant disregard for the dignity of the individual upheld by the new constitution. Her essay reminds us of the historical significance of the later legislation of 1956, which was made possible by women themselves who now found their place in the national bureaucracy and in parliament.

Susan L. Burns traces abortion and infanticide cases reviewed by the Daishin’in (the present-day Supreme Court) between 1877 and 1882. During this period, the state began to police the reproductive lives of its citizens more directly. Among many illuminating examples introduced by the author is the case of a man who was imprisoned after his common-law wife died as a result of abortion. The new system did not recognize the customary common-law practice and the new law labeled him an illicit sexual partner. From now on, judges and prosecutors would resort to newly framed legal terms in order to categorize both the offense and the criminal more systematically. New ideas of individual legal agency came into being, and abortion and infanticide were shifting their character from “crimes of the family” to “crimes of individuals” (p. 97). Nevertheless, familial considerations continued to have sway.

Harald Fuess traces the development of adultery provisions in both civil and criminal law between 1868 and 1948...