nations approve no legal system save such as they are accustomed to themselves. True, there was a party almost from the beginning which said: "Japan for the Japanese. Our laws must suit our people. They must not be mere handles for obtaining political recognition. Wait to codify until the national courts, interpreting national needs, shall have evolved precedents of their own. French and German codes are alien things, mechanically super imposed on our Japanese ways of thought and modes of life, which are not in touch with foreign civilisations and the laws that have sprung from them." But this national party lost the day. Possibly, in time to come, modifications dictated by national needs may creep in. It is noticeable that (perhaps as a result of the healthy reaction of the last sixteen or seventeen years) the Civil Code, the most recently published of all, does to a not inconsiderable extent take into account the existing fabric of Japanese society,—a fabric differing widely in many essential points from that of the West; for in Japan the family is the social unit, not, as with us, the individual.
The new codes resulting from the legislative activity of the pre sent reign are: (1) the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, drafted by Monsieur Boissonade de Fontarabie on the basis of the Code Napoleon, with modifications suggested by the old Japanese Criminal Law; these were published in 1880, and came into force in 1882; the Code of Criminal Procedure was, however, revised in 1890,[1] in order that it might be uniform with the Code of Civil Procedure, according to the provisions of (2) the Law of the Organisation of Judicial Courts, promulgated in the month of February, 1890, and put into force on the 1st November of the same year"; (3) the Code of Civil Procedure which went into effect at once, and the Civil Code and the Commercial Code which were put into force in 1898. Though
- ↑ In 1901, a radical revision of the Criminal Code was proposed. But such opposition was raised by members of the legal profession that the bill had to be put off to the next session of the Diet, when a further bill for the revision of the Code of Criminal Procedure is expected to be submitted.
