Legislating filial obligations: Property rights and filial piety in shogunate Japan

Abstract

Continental European countries and Japan maintain far larger welfare states than their Anglophone counterparts do, particularly in terms of elderly care. One reason for this difference is the filial obligations of adult children toward their retired parents, as mandated by the family laws of continental European countries and Japan, such that the welfare state and family security are substitutes; a retreat of the state’s role implies an increase in the burden incurred by the family. We investigate Japan’s evolutionary process of filial support, ranging from an encouraged norm to a legal requirement for the protection of property rights in the eighteenth century under the Edo (Tokugawa) shogunate law. Facing its first population aging in the eighteenth century, Tokugawa Japan transformed filial support as a norm into a legal mandate by conditioning the protection of family property rights on the fulfillment of filial obligations by the household head who inherited family property before his parents’ death. Nonfulfillment necessitated the revocation of household head status and devolution of the family property to the new household head, through which the shogunate indirectly enforced filial obligations. While the household head revocation system was not incorporated into the Civil Code of 1896, the Civil Code explicitly defined filial obligations as being enforceable on their own. The current large welfare state of Japan is directly rooted in filial obligations stipulated by its modern family law, and the origin of its filial obligations dates back to a legislation by the shogunate in the late eighteenth century.