Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the process of legislative reform in Japan in the late 19th century, modeled on the laws of Western countries. It clarifies the historical role played by Tomii Masa’akira, one of the authors of the Meiji Civil Code.

Paper long abstract:

In today’s academic discourse it is accepted that legal thought originated from Western countries. This discourse became prominent in the second half of the 20th century and was mainly triggered by research on the colonization of Asia and Africa by Western countries. Already from the second half of the 19th century legislative reforms by some non-Western countries such as Turkey, Japan, Siam and China took place. These countries’ legal reforms originated in European instructors instructing legal thought and evolved into the autonomous compilation of legal codes without involvement of foreign instructors. This was the first step in the transformation of Western legal thought into global legal thought.

Under the new government established in 1868, Japan chose to reform its legal system. Beginning at the end of the 1860s, the government learned the contents of laws and regulations in Western countries with the aid of non-lawyers who had learned foreign languages. Through their translation work, the government was able to learn the contours of Western legal thought and create legal terms in Chinese characters necessary to domesticate Western law. Other key players were foreign legal advisers invited by the government. Their contributions enabled the government to finally complete the first legal codes based on Western law in the early 1880s. However, with the emergence of Japanese lawyers in the 1880s, the window of opportunity for foreign lawyers to control the path of legal development in modernizing Japan, decreased. The Meiji Civil Code (1898) was the first legal code drafted by only Japanese and, as a result, Western law became Japanese law.

This paper offers insight into the process of legislative reform in Japan over nearly 30 years and argues that this process has important implications for the history of law in the world (not in Japan). Moreover, this paper clarifies the historical position of the main character of this panel, Tomii Masa’akira, one of the authors of the Meiji Civil Code, and also imparts knowledge necessary for a deeper understanding of later papers in this panel.