Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium

Chapter 1: The Maria Luz Incident: Personal Rights and International Justice for Chinese Coolies and Japanese Prostitutes

21 chapter 1 The Maria Luz Incident Personal Rights and International Justice for Chinese Coolies and Japanese Prostitutes Douglas Howland For its handling of the Maria Luz incident in 1872, Japan received international acclaim as a humanitarian supporter of international law. The case concerned the Peruvian transport of Chinese coolies on the Maria Luz into the Japanese port of Yokohama, and invited the participation of Japan in international efforts to suppress the coolie trade. Japan freed the coolies on board the Maria Luz, but in their defense of Peru’s practice of shipping Chinese coolies, Peru’s legal representatives pointed out that indentured prostitution in Japan was an equivalent practice. Since Japan allowed domestic indentured prostitution, how could it disallow Chinese coolie bondage in Peru? In the wake of his ruling in the Maria Luz case, Kanagawa assistant governor Ōe Taku (1847– 1921) agreed that the two practices were similar violations of personal rights and represented a common subversion of the justice anticipated by the international civilization to which the new Japan aspired. Ōe subsequently promoted the first of Meiji laws intended to rectify the conditions of prostitutes in Japan. Accordingly, the Maria Luz incident has been routinely presented as a beginning for the reform of prostitution in modern Japan.1 This essay downplays such a reading of the prostitution reform laws of 1872, which invariably criticizes the laws as insufficient. Instead, this essay returns attention to the parallel drawn between coolies and prostitutes in order to stress the point of justice that prompted Ōe to instigate a reform of prostitute contracts. In that context, the conclusions drawn by the three most prominent readings of the Maria Luz incident seem to miss the point of international justice. First, the work of anti-prostitution reformFOR PERSONAL USE ONLY 22 Douglas Howland ers in the 1880s and ’90s, many of whom joined the movement out of Christian goodwill, argued that the law had simply not done enough to eradicate a social evil subversive of public morality.2 A second interpretation , which starts with the assumption that prostitution is a natural and lasting element of human society, seems to apologize for prostitution in that it argues that laws like those of 1872 could have little effect on what was so profound a social custom; such scholars believed that change could arise not by means of laws decreed from on high but only through popular reform of Japanese customs.3 And a third interpretation is the more recent one offered by scholars of Japanese women and prostitution, who criticize the 1872 laws as simply inadequate and see a cynical government doing as little as possible to change the situation.4 My own position is closest to this third perspective—as I will argue, the 1872 laws offer evidence of a paternalistic state safeguarding the institution of prostitution. The peculiar similarity between the male Chinese coolie and the female Japanese prostitute was the fact that, in the context of nineteenthcentury capitalist development, both were an intermediate category of labor. Neither was free or enslaved; rather, each was a captive group placed in a specific site of productivity.5 Both the plantation, where the coolie was usually bonded, and the brothel, where the prostitute was bonded, were sites outside of the patriarchal (and increasingly nuclear) family structure strongly encouraged by national government sanctions. While this was true of many categories of labor at the time—sailors, miners, and certain factory employees—the coolie was marked racially, for Chinese coolies as a group differed from the rest of the population of their tropical host country.6 Likewise, prostitutes were a marked population located in brothel districts segregated to some degree from so-called respectable Japanese society. Feminist scholars have pointed out that the colonial state and its legal regimes in the nineteenth century ensconced paternal authority at the head of the state, which attempted to reproduce itself within the family by sponsoring a legal form of the patriarchal family. In the same way that the patriarch protected his wife and offspring by managing their persons and property, as well as their labor contribution to the wellbeing of the family, the state too guaranteed the profitability of entrepreneurs in plantations and brothels with its structure of laws. For both Chinese coolie and Japanese prostitute, the legal regime of property relations dominated their labor, and the two fundamental principles of FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY The Maria Luz...