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

of society and law that was lacking in the bureaucratic blindness of Civil Code courts.

Ōoka’s courage in defying the law was what made him so good at preserving it. For instance, in one court case brought before Magistrate Ōoka, a woman had plotted to murder a bandit in revenge for his having murdered her husband. Mistakenly, though, she killed the bandit’s partner in crime, and only wounded the man actually guilty of her husband’s murder. Ōoka, instead of condemning her to death (as the law strictly prescribed, since the woman had not, in fact, been able to avenge her husband’s death, which would have been legal, but had instead killed an unrelated party), found that the woman had actually performed a great service to the state. The man the woman killed was guilty of a host of other capital crimes, while the wounded man—the one really guilty of killing the woman’s husband—was able to be tried by the state instead of being murdered for blood guilt. This, Ōoka pointed out, was the far more just course of action all around.⁶ In setting the law to one side, Ōoka had fulfilled its spirit to overflowing.

By the time of the arrival of Matthew Perry’s expeditionary force to Uraga Bay in 1853—the event that would set in motion the forces that would topple the Tokugawa shogunate fifteen years later—the Edo legal system had developed into an extraordinary mix of martial law, affiliated remnants of samurai privilege, status law, the continuously re-kneaded ritsuryō system from the Tang, longstanding village practice often differing by location, daimyō prerogative, merchant control of much of the political economy, daimyō control over various aspects of foreign policy and diplomacy, the prerogatives of the cloistered emperors separate from, yet dependent upon, those of the shogunate in Edo, iriai rights, trade and fisheries rights, the racketeering activities of the crime syndicates, and the piecemeal adoptions of the newer continental law as prevailing under the Ming and Qing. This arrangement worked very well for Japanese society, but it was also doomed in the new geopolitical context in which Japan found herself. By 1868, the year of the Meiji