Tanaka Kōtarō, Korea, and the Natural Law

Tanaka Kōtarō 田中耕太郎 (1890–1974) was one of the most important jurists of modern Japan. A widely travelled globalist intellectual, he is generally seen as culturally oriented toward the West. Yet his own contribution to international jurisprudence, his theory of World Law, is essentially globalist and critical of the Western imperialism implicit in the dominant strain of modern international law. In spite of the globalist implications of Tanaka's jurisprudence, there has been no attention to his relationship with Korea. This paper pioneers a study of Tanaka and Korea, focusing on two visits he made there in 1932 and in 1943. Outlining Tanaka's key ideas on world law and the Natural Law, the subjects of lectures he gave at Keijō Imperial University, it raises the question about whether Tanaka might have influenced faculty and students of law at Keijō Imperial University and possibly laid the groundwork for Korea's greatest Natural Law theorist Hwang Sandŏk 黃山德 (1917–1989). It also introduces, through Tanaka's ideas on World Law, an alternative to the "colonialist/nationalist" paradigm that influences much of historical writing about the Korean-Japanese historical relationship.