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

changed altogether. Japanese governments were successively humiliated, and Japan’s legal profile was held in derision among the powers that, for her own survival, she was striving to join.

The wholesale importation of an alien legal code,⁸ from one episteme wherein law had been abstracted out of society to another episteme wherein legal fictions had long been employed to bridge the gap between social reality and philosophical ideal, shook the fledgling Meiji experiment to its core. At stake was Japan’s continued existence as a sovereign power. One by one, Japan’s Asian neighbors—Qing strongholds, Hong Kong, Vietnam, the Philippines, Mongolia, India, Indonesia, Burma, and the Korean Peninsula, to name a few—had fallen under Western influence, if not outright mercantilism or colonialism. It was of crucial importance, therefore, that, whatever the social reality in Japan, the law conceive of society as unified, state-centric, and readily interlockable in platoons for the waging of war. This urgent need to retool the very foundations of Japanese life led increasingly to an acceptance of a social and legal Darwinism that provided pseudo-scientific justification for the ruthlessly competitive geopolitics of the nineteenth-century world order. Equity as the apolitical pursuit of justice was giving way to a view of society, not as an ideal of harmonious cooperation, but rather as a struggle for survival. The iriai were disappearing, and the labor strike was being born. The loose, socially expansive boulevards of the Edo law should give way to the hard-edged Darwinian absolutism of the Western order.

Hozumi Nobushige and the Rise of Legal Darwinism

This new legal order in Japan was typified by the writings of legal scholar Hozumi Nobushige (1855–1926). In June of 1876, Hozumi had gone to study in England. Three years later, after becoming the first Japanese person to earn a law degree at the University of London, he transferred to Humboldt University in Berlin and finally returned to Japan two years after that, in 1881.⁹ While in England, Hozumi had become convinced of the evolutionary theories he found in the works of Charles Darwin (1809–1882),