Law and Society in Imperial Japan: Suehiro Izutaro and the Search ...

of the liberal democracies, apolitical solutions to societal fracturing became less and less tenable, and, ultimately, impossible. The empire needed to put as much of society as it could on a war footing in order to meet the threats looming in from abroad. Native equity, which Suehiro advanced as a solution to social discord caused by abstractions such as freedom and rights, succumbed to politics of a different order as the empire recast, with increasing urgency, the relationship between the individual and the state. Equity under empire turned out to be a mirage. By the middle of the 1930s, Suehiro had transitioned away from his earlier, bottom-up individualism and embraced the statism of empire, autarky, and military expansion.

This is the first monograph on Suehiro in the English language, so the questions may be asked, Why Suehiro? Why now? As the representative figure of the law and society movement in Japan, a study of Suehiro helps us go much deeper into the often-neglected jurisprudential aspects of Japanese history. Far from being a matter of poring over dusty lawbooks and parsing legalese, law-and-society studies helps us see the kaleidoscopic interaction among elites and common people in the roiling 1920s and 30s, greatly complicating and enriching our view of Japanese society (and law) as a whole. Also, Suehiro is our entrepôt into an intellectual history of law-and-society study in Japan. He was in the thick of the social changes of the mid-to-late Taishō and early Shōwa periods and was able to translate what he saw around him into the theoretical and legal planes with great fluency. He could translate in the other direction with equal facility. For his time as well as for ours, Suehiro was, and is, an adroit interpreter between society and law, and the addition of his voice to the pageant of Japanese history in English is long overdue.

Historiographically, the study of Suehiro changes the way we should view Japanese law, and also the way we should periodize twentieth-century Japanese history. Legal histories on Japan very often understand the introduction of Western ideas as having fundamentally changed the practice of Japanese law. This holds true for the Meiji Period, as