| Chapter : | Introduction |
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which doing justice in the case before the judge takes precedence over political or philosophical distortions, “menschlich trials” (ningen aji no aru saiban).6 In his return to Ōoka, Suehiro Izutarō, and the law-and-society movement that blossomed worldwide and in Japan in the years following World War I, recognized the damage done by conceptual jurisprudence (Begriffsjurisprudenz) and legal idealism. The Pandekten system, the German species of jurisprudential idealism especially ascendant in Japan during Suehiro’s time, was proving unable to address Japan’s many social problems, and Suehiro looked back to a native legal philosophy that was much more human in scope.
This human-sized, human-centric vision of law was the essence of Suehirian jurisprudence. For example, in a famous essay from “Yakunin no atama” (“The mind of the bureaucrat”), Suehiro rejected the bureaucratic disregard of people in favor of the “nation,” which Suehiro, early in his career, saw as a distortion of the people:
When they [bureaucrats] represent ‘the nation’, they forget human sentiment entirely and divorce themselves from the ‘taste of humanity’. They think it is enough to become the very personification of ‘fairness and impartiality’—or so they say. But they’re wrong.7
In “Uso no kōyō” (“On the efficacy of lies”), first written for the magazine Kaizō in 1917, Suehiro again rejected the inhumanness of jurisprudence, arguing for the recentralization of the human person within the life of the law:
To my way of thinking, the fundamental defect in prevailing ‘law’ and ‘jurisprudence’ is a neglect in researching ‘human beings’, who are the objects of jurisprudence and law. What’s more, there are even points at which law and jurisprudence indiscriminately hypothesize human beings as ‘someone’. In other words, I think these are points at which law and jurisprudence frivolously change the values of basically ‘unknown quantities’