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

into ‘known quantities’ even though there has been no sufficient empirical investigation.⁸

And in “Kochie ni torawareta gendai no hōritsugaku” (“Modern jurisprudence under the sway of trivialities”), an essay based on a speech titled “Hōritsugaku ni okeru shin-rōmanshugi” (“New romanticism in jurisprudence”) Suehiro gave in 1921, Suehiro argues for the human person as the foundation of the law:

What if we treated human beings not just as possessors of intellect, but as possessors of all psychological processes, and let those as-is human beings have fully play within the law, with the natural human being regulating the law and scholars explaining things on those terms?⁹

These are calls to return to the human element in society and to let the people as individual human persons form the basis for jurisprudence. These are, in other words, fundamentally apolitical sentiments.

However, in the Meiji Period and after, politics was ascendant and was seen by many as the answer to the problems attendant on modernity—labor disputes, landlord and tenant-farmer strife, urban anonymity, family breakdown, social malaise, and the various other ills that rapid industrialization and social liberalism often bring in their wake. Political activists clamored for political solutions—including, most notably, increased suffrage—to problems understood in terms of Western concepts like liberty and popular rights. Suehiro moved in the opposite direction, seeing politics as both the cause and the effect of social dislocation and calling for apolitical solutions to societal ills that he wanted to work out equitably, through the courts, concretely by means of a modified caselaw system.

Suehiro’s attempt to find an equitable jurisprudence on the margins of politics was doomed by the imperialization of Japanese life. As the Japanese empire expanded in response to geopolitical pressures, especially following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the predatory neo-colonialism