Shaping Families, Shifting Lives: Law in the Japanese Empire

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel explores the role of family law in reordering family relations and gender norms in the Japanese Empire. Recent scholarship has identified the law as a set of discourses and practices amenable to contestation, interpretation, and negotiation. Building upon this conception, this panel will study family law in the Japanese Empire as a fluid and changeable instrument for imperial governance and an interactive space of confrontation. Two broad lines of inquiry unite the panel’s individual papers. First, how did the contradictory impulses of custom and change manifest on the ground? Jooyeon Hahm shows how the compromises made by the Japanese Civil Code in enforcing monogamy marginalized unwed mothers and out-of-wedlock children. Ji Young Jung reveals how household head rights of the Japanese Civil Code clashed with the Korean custom of family head authority. Our second line of inquiry explores the conflicts and negotiations engendered in colonial settings by the adoption of the Japanese Civil Code. Tadashi Ishikawa probes how the Japanese regulation of bride prices redefined this established practice and transformed marital relationships in Taiwan. Sungyun Lim examines debates over implementation of the Japanese custom of son-in-law adoption in Korea. These four papers together capture the shifting dynamics of power relations among individual family members as the Japanese Civil Code was introduced into colonial settings. The panel will explore the legal development of the Japanese Empire not as a unilateral process from center to periphery but as a multi-directional negotiation of colonial policy and local custom.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Jooyeon Hahm, University of Pennsylvania

Chair

• David Ambaras, North Carolina State University

Individual Presentations

• On the Margins of Family: Unwed Mothers and Illegitimate Children in Modern Japan, 1868–1945 - Jooyeon Hahm, University of Pennsylvania

• The Dilemma of Household Head: Debates over Patriarchal Rights in Colonial Korea - Ji Young Jung, Ewha Womans University

• Imperial Patchwork for Bride Prices: Visions of Family Reform and Civil Courtrooms in Colonial Taiwan, 1910s–1936 - Tadashi Ishikawa, Binghamton University

• Assimilation for Daughters: Son-in-Law Adoption and the Debate over Daughters’ Inheritance Rights in Colonial Korea - Sungyun Lim, University of Colorado Boulder

Discussant

• David Ambaras, North Carolina State University