Caught between nostalgia and modernisation: The history of criminal justice and punishments in Japan

Abstract

Building upon the literature review of crimes and punishments in Japan from the Middle Ages to modern times, this paper highlights the contradictory forces driving the evolution of criminal law and criminal justice. Individual versus State, human rights versus government powers – these are some of the struggles Japanese rulers and legal thinkers have been facing. After an initial period of isolation during the Tokugawa Era, the country's criminal justice system, although it embraced a comparative approach, has nevertheless developed by constantly switching between nostalgia for traditional values and demand for the acknowledgement of universal rights. By tracing the fragmented process that led to a modern criminal justice system, the present research shows the effect of legal transplants on national criminal policies and, in particular, on the struggle between the conservatives, who claim wider government powers in the name of traditional values, and the progressivists, who warn against the threat of human rights violations.