Globalization of legal cultures in the 19th century. Criminal trials, gender, and the public in Meiji Japan

Abstract

On a rainy summer night in 1887 a murder took place in one of Tokyo’s entertainment districts. A geisha known as Hanai Oume stabbed her lover to death. Oume’s open trial—shortly before the courts were opened to the general public for the first time—attracted widespread interest and caused a sensation. This article focuses on the courtroom as a place of encounter between the law and the public. The public trials of the Meiji period are a good starting-point for describing the implementation of Western law in Japan. It thereby addresses the problem of the globalization of legal cultures in the 19th century, a topic which has been largely ignored in global history.

Moreover, a new cultural history of law that genuinely accounts for popular responses to legal reforms can give us a much more comprehensive picture of Japanese society in the mid-Meiji years. In summary, the convergence of fast-changing practices and omnipresent public interest in trials marks a short and specific moment in modern Japanese history. The open trials of the 1880s are best understood as rituals that sought to address and finally to resolve the social crises triggered by the Meiji Revolution. They were social dramas that unfolded in the new public sphere of the courtroom. This space was never under the state’s absolute control and trials were not mere engines of repression; in fact, in many ways the courtroom represented an arena in which state and society were able to negotiate with one another. Therefore, through Oume’s case we can glimpse the beginnings of the notion of public space in Meiji Japan.