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

guide legal reasoning as it slaloms around the unbending pillars of the positive law. This equity is usually nurtured over time and becomes tied up with local custom. Custom is what the Napoleonic Code needed most, especially in Japan, but is also the thing for which such codes inherently maintain the most inherent contempt.

The search for equity within a legal plurality of code and custom was the leitmotif of the life and career of Suehiro Izutarō (1888–1951). A champion of the ideas of Montesquieu,² Suehiro was the founder of the Japanese law-and-society movement, a pioneer of Japanese labor law, and the main conduit within Japan for Austrian legal theorist Eugen Ehrlich’s (1862–1922) “living law,” or the insight that spontaneous social ordering among common people can exist in fruitful tension with the constituted state.³ Remembered today mainly as the “father of Japanese labor law”—he was involved in the passage of the Trade Union Law, the Labor Relations Adjustment Law, and the Labor Standards Law—Suehiro was, in his earlier career, a protégé, colleague, or mentor of many of the most prominent legal thinkers of Japan of the past century. Briefly a student of Ehrlich’s while studying in Switzerland immediately following the First World War, Suehiro returned to Japan to begin his lifelong attempt to bring equitable solutions to bear on the lives of real Japanese people—and not just legal abstractions—in an attempt to find some modus vivendi between antinomian anarchy and jurisprudential rigidity in the context of Japan’s unique modernity.

This unique modernity, as it turned out, both helped and hampered Suehiro’s search for equity. On the one hand, Japanese law, by the second half of the Taishō Period (1912–1926)—when Suehiro had returned from abroad and began teaching at Tokyo Imperial University—had become a multi-layered arrangement of European legal epistemologies resting uneasily on a much deeper and very different, foundation of older Sino-Japanese understandings of how the law conceptualized individuals within society. Not only did the seeker after equity in interwar Japan have to contend with increasing tension between state and society as he found