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

it, but he also had to peel away the prevailing socio-legal present to get to the non-Western past if he wanted to find a just resolution to most cases. The Western legal dispensations saw individuals, rights, and the state, but the pre-Meiji Tokugawa legal mode privileged a kind of “substantive due process,” in which the more common-sense administration of equitable judgments took precedence over any insistence on rights. (Indeed, the word “rights” as understood in the Greco-Roman legal sphere of European Christendom did not exist in Japanese (or Chinese or Korean) until Japanese scholars coined a neologism to translate the term in the late nineteenth century.)

At the same time, there was a turn in the 1920s worldwide against the high liberalism that had helped craft the Napoleonic Code and propelled its exportation across national boundaries. There was a break in Japan, too, between early pro-Western reformers and those who wanted to revisit the older Japanese ways and reassess what had been thrown overboard in the zeal to westernize in the earlier generation. Whereas legal and political thinkers in Japan in the Meiji Period (1868–1912) such as Hozumi Yatsuka (1860–1912) and Nishi Amane (1829–1897) largely abandoned the Tokugawa past, dismissing it as “feudal” and heralding the introduction of Western ideas into Japanese discourse, during the Taishō Period and after there was a ressourcement to Japan’s pre-Western phase. In literature, for example, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), once a proponent of Western styles, began to draw on Japanese modes of expression more heavily as he wrote longer and more complex works of fiction. Artist Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1958) was originally interested in Western painting but rediscovered Japanese art later in life and worked on canvases in a Japanese style. Likewise, in law, Suehiro Izutarō, trained in German law, began harkening back to the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868), and in particular to a Tokugawa magistrate, Ōoka Tadasuke, Echizen-no-kami (1677–1752).⁴ For Suehiro, Ōoka exemplified the application of what Suehiro called “natural reason” (dōri) in order to achieve equitable solutions to even the most sensitive or seemingly intractable cases.⁵ Suehiro called trials conducted according to this legal personalism, in