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

well as the American Occupation from 1945 and the imposition of the present-day Constitution on the defeated nation in 1947, each of which events is seen as the beginning of an increasingly complex interaction among different forms of Western legal thinking and jurisprudence. But the law-and-society movement in Japan, although it was heavily influenced by Western ideas of law, sociology, and politics (Suehiro, making an important distinction, called this influence, not “adoption,” but “digestion”), also sought to reintroduce native practices and understandings of equity into Japanese courts and the legal academy. The periodization of Japanese history that articulates once at 1853 with the arrival of American Commodore Matthew Perry to Uraga Bay, again at 1868 with the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in the name of anti “feudal” (the Meiji reformers’ favorite adjective for describing the Edo past) Westernization, and, most acutely, at 1945 with the loss of the empire, does not reveal the deeper continuities that run through Japanese law. The Civil Code in effect today, for example, may look very much like a child of the Napoleonic Code and may act very much like the pupil of Anglo-American constitutional theory, but this arrangement has retained much of the Tokugawa-style equity that Suehiro, primarily, preserved and brought forward into today. And the law journal that Suehiro founded, Hōritsu Jihō, has continued publication, with a brief interruption at war’s end, from the early 1920s to the present.¹⁰ Suehiro’s name has remained on the masthead throughout.

Suehiro also underwent, in a very personal way, the tenkō (political conversion), surveillance, deunuciation, purge, and reverse course that historians so often discuss as abstract episodes. Having gone deep into the imperial project—becoming involved in leadership roles in law and society surveys in North China, in the Dai Nippon Butokukai imperial-boosting martial arts society, and in the statist Nippon Hōri Kenkyūkai, to name just a few—Suehiro was denounced to the GHQ authorities in 1946 and removed from his teaching and research positions at the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law. Gradually, though, the Americans realized that Suehiro was too valuable to be put out to pasture, so they quietly