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

Chapter 1

From Ōoka Tadasuke to Hozumi Yatsuka

The Emergence of a Legal Crisis in Japan

Legal Fictions and the Emergence of Law-and-Society Study in Japan

The disjunctures and slippages that arise from legal transplants have been a part of the Japanese legal landscape from the beginning of recorded Japanese history. Japan adopted a revised version of the ritsuryō legal system from Tang China in the late sixth century, and the Taika Reforms of 645 were a culmination of the Japanese government’s attempt to incorporate the Tang legal and political system. But Japanese society was radically different from that in Tang China, and so a modus operandi that modulated the strictures of the ritsuryō system while also mediating between Japanese society and the modified code began to develop. The compromise was that law in early Japan remained largely formal. It borrowed from China the highly refined hierarchies of courtly ranks and bureaucratic administrations, providing a trellis upon which the increasingly complex Japanese state could climb and spread out. However, the court and society continued to function at the personal level according