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

rehabilitated him, allowing him to travel to the United States on missions to study labor conditions in America and help reduce labor tensions back in Japan. An AP news article copied into Suehiro’s SCAP file quotes Assistant Secretary of Labor Philipp Kaiser as stating that “Our success in winning genuine friends of democracy through our programs with German labor officials has convinced us that this plan of study for the Japanese officials can go far toward helping the Japanese understand the United States and its institutions.” As a GHQ official scribbled atop Suehiro’s letter to SCAP dated February 20, 1947, “This is a pretty good guy, it seems—he has done a lot of good on certain labor boards set up by ESS Labor Division.”¹¹ The Americans purged Suehiro but then realized they couldn’t do without him. Suehiro’s case thus reminds us that the lines that historians often draw at August 15, 1945, and again with the end of the American Occupation in 1952, were much less distinct to the people living then than those lines appear to us in the present.

At a more philosophical level, this book challenges, and helps us reframe, the way we think about equity. The common law in England developed in the courts of the Norman conquerors, and “equity” in England, which arose as in the Court of Chancery a way to supplement and check the common law, therefore has a precise and historically conditioned definition. But Black’s Law Dictionary does not ground the term in a particular place or time: “In its broadest and most general signification, this term [i.e., ‘equity’] denotes the spirit and the habit of fairness, justness, and right dealing which would regulate the intercourse of men with men.” This is what Suehiro and his legal team sought, and what the Japanese state, in the thrall of Western legal abstractions, could not provide. The question of what equity is and what courts are for runs through the heart of Japanese legal history in the 1920s and 30s, and in this volume I attempt to complicate the use of “equity” as a strictly English common law term of art.¹² Tanaka Kōtarō, the wartime dean of the faculty of law at Tokyo Imperial University (and later Chief Justice of Japan) who recommended to the Occupation authorities that Suehiro be purged, understood equity as part of the natural law, which “recognizes universal