“Yukichi Fukuzawa and the Civil Code Controversy”

When it comes to research on Fukuzawa, the cliché is “kangyu-jutou” (an immense collection of books). Countless achievements are crowded together. There, I found a strange gap: the relationship between Fukuzawa and legislation during the Meiji era.

In particular, history textbooks state that the “Civil Code Controversy” was a dispute in the 1890s between the Postponement Faction and the Enforcement Faction over Western-style legal codes, and that the conservative Postponement Faction won with the slogan “The Civil Code appears, and loyalty and filial piety perish.” I turned the pages of the Complete Works of Yukichi Fukuzawa, thinking that surely our Yukichi Fukuzawa would be in the Enforcement Faction, but in fact, he was in the “Postponement Faction.” I had a simple question: Why?

On the other hand, since international society is a collection of sovereign states, I had an early awareness that I must first study international politics. I believed that without understanding this, no matter how much I researched a problem, it would be difficult to consider its practical solution. That was the reason I enrolled in an undergraduate program where I could study international relations and a graduate school where I could study political science.

Looking back now, I didn't understand anything at that time. Since it was a “Civil Code Controversy,” I had made the arbitrary assumption that the dispute was over whether the code itself was good or bad, but the scale of the controversy was much larger.

Fukuzawa's argument for postponement was a way of saying “wait” to the government's method of having foreign advisors draft codes in foreign languages and suddenly imposing translations that were completely unintelligible to the general public. Above all, he disliked the government's intention to use Western-style codes as props to show foreign countries in order to get them to agree to the abolition of extraterritoriality. This was because, in exchange for the politicians' achievement of revising the unequal treaties, the public would be greatly inconvenienced, and it would leave behind the seeds of misfortune in the form of foreign government intervention in Japanese legislation. In that case, the essence of the matter was not the quality of the content of the code.

However, this does not mean that Fukuzawa lacked legal knowledge. Suffering from pirated editions of his own books, Fukuzawa studied British and American copyright through books, translated “copyright” as “hanken,” and fought against pirate publishers by applying the regulations against pirated editions of the time.

Furthermore, Fukuzawa had the bitter experience of losing a lawsuit. When he held shares in Maruya Bank in his sons' names, the bank went bankrupt, and he was sued by depositors who demanded that “shareholders return the deposits on behalf of the bank.” His legal battle was in vain, and a Supreme Court ruling imposed unimaginable unlimited liability (not limited liability) on shareholders. This misfortune became the background for public opinion calling for the development of company law.

What I glimpsed through the gaps in the immense collection of research was the figure of Fukuzawa leading the world of law through his thoughts and actions. The establishment of the Law Department in the college in 1890 was no mere coincidence.

“Yukichi Fukuzawa and the Civil Code Controversy”

Haruhito Takada

Keio University Press

336 pages, 3,740 yen (tax included)