| In Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, a brief flowering of democratic, populist spirit began to give way to a state-centric imperial episteme in which all politics was warped to fit the gravity field of the kokutai, or indefinable national essence. This dissertation examines how the Japanese law-and-society movement, founded in the 1920s by a small coterie of scholars recently returned from studying with legal pragmatists and "living law" sociolegal advocates in Europe and the United States, eventually came to drop its fundamental opposition to positivism and statism and participate in the expansion and administration of the Japanese empire. My dissertation focuses on Suehiro Izutaro---who, along with Hozumi Shigeto, pioneered the law-and-society movement in Japan---and his gradual turn, under intense criticism from kokutai advocates such as Minoda Muneki for not sufficiently following the dictates of the state at the time of Japan's "national emergency" of the early 1930s, from champion of a separate legal sphere for the proletariat to a leader in the fusing of the people and the state into one imperial phalanx.;One of the keys of my dissertation is its indexing of the Japanese law-and-society's movement into greater cooperation with the imperial state against the movement's inherent turn away from the natural law. As Catholic legal philosopher Tanaka Kotaro pointed out, both positivism and legal realism were, ultimately, equally adaptable to statist projects because both lacked any real intellectual equipment for taking into account the justice---as expressed either in state-centric or society-centric terms---of a given body of laws. Insofar as the United States, which conquered occupied Japan in the denouement of the Pacific War and which imposed its own version of anti-natural law liberalism on Japan in the postwar phase, purged Suehiro for his statism, the United States, too, failed to take into account the distinction between justice and power. Thus, the many ways in which the Japanese legal system emerged from the war years substantially unchanged is a testament to the overall failure of modern legal orders to reckon with the strictures of the natural law. |
