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This chapter conducts a case study of spreads on sovereign bonds issued by Japan and Russia, two countries that introduced the gold standard in 1897. It is shown that Japanese spreads were relatively unaffected by the establishment of some of Japan’s most important institutions, including the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889, which explicitly guaranteed the protection of property rights and the rule of law. The only institutional reform that led to an immediate improvement in Japan’s ‘credit rating’ was the adoption of the gold standard. Japan’s war with Russia (1904-1905) and its successful outcome had a far more visible impact on spreads than most institutional reforms. The chapter also conducts a case study of the British-Dutch interest differential around the Glorious Revolution. It shows that developments regarding war and peace had a far greater impact on borrowing costs than institutional reforms.

The chapter provides an overview of the historical development of politics as a profession from the time of Japan's opening to the West until today. It looks at the polity dimension of Japanese politics and discusses the political class under four aspects: size, scope, political recruitment, and political careers. It addresses specific features of the Japanese political class such as the relatively little importance of political parties for recruitment, the comparatively high percentage of hereditary seats in the parliament, the strong position of the bureaucracy, the great influence of advisory bodies, and the frequent occurrence of economic scandals.

The modern era in Japan is normally considered as beginning in 1868 when the feudal age, or Edo era, finally ended. The Emperor Meiji declared the restoration of Imperial rule in January 1868 (the Meiji restoration) and he and his entourage transferred the capital from Kyoto to Edo / Tokyo (Edo was renamed Tokyo) in September 1868. The new and globally ambitious Meiji government quickly realized the importance of science and technology. A major problem was the shortage of teachers capable of teaching advanced courses. So Japanese sought Kelvin's involvement in the appointment of teaching staff. This chapter discusses Kelvin's protégés in Tokyo and Japanese scholars in Glasgow.

Chapter 1 summarizes the modern scholarly opinion that throughout its history, the Zen tradition rejected religious ritual as a legitimate means of carrying out its unique Buddhist mission, and subjects this view to a contemporary historical critique. The author's thesis is that modern Japanese Zen scholars constructed the anti‐ritual theme in Zen in order to make Zen more relevant to the modern age in the eyes of both the ruling elite in Meiji/Taisho Japan and Western intellectuals who tended to be dismissive of religious ritual. Pushed in this direction by their own historical circumstances, modern Zen scholars portrayed the entire Zen tradition as anti‐ritual in basic intent and practice in spite of the historical record that belies this view. The author proceeds to describe the history of Zen ritual and presents a catalog description of ritual activities that are practiced in contemporary Sōtō Zen.

This chapter traces the development of Japanese death penalty policy in order to arrive at a historically informed understanding of how contemporary policy-makers came to believe that at least one execution should occur each year, and in order to discern why conflict persists around the issue of executions. The first half of the chapter describes and explains key capital punishment developments during four periods of Japanese history: the de facto abolition of the death penalty in premodern Japan; the dramatic decline of executions during the Meiji restoration of the late 19th century; the retention of capital punishment during the American-led occupation of Japan after the Pacific war; and the steady decrease in executions in the first four decades following the occupation. The chapter's fifth section shows that change is ongoing by examining the causes and consequences of the resurgence of capital punishment since the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks of 1995. The two concluding sections identify lessons from Japanese history and explore alternative futures of the death penalty in Asia's most developed nation.

This chapter traces the evolution of Japan's systems of household and land registration from c.1600 to the period of early Meiji reforms in the 1870s and 1880s, with due attention to the distinction between a system designed by the state and local forms of registration practice. In the section on the pre-Meiji period, one such local practice of having people ‘disowned’ and its consequence — registerlessness — is examined. The section on the Meiji reforms and the section that follows turn to the issue of continuity and discontinuity, and the question of whether any progress was made by those reforms. In order to illustrate the actual changes that took place at the local level, the chapter begins with an eighteenth-century story about a peasant woman and ends with a case of a family dispute that another village woman brought before the court some 120 years later.

The ‘European miracle’ needs to be compared to an East Asian development path. In East Asia efficient institutions fostered great use of labour, an ‘industrious revolution’ path entailing extensive use of family labour and systems of double cropping. The result was a ‘labour-intensive industrialization’ such as occurred in Meiji Japan. That labour-intensive path now shapes the centres of most of the world's manufacturing employment, currently situated in East, South-east and South Asia. The challenge for Japan and other East Asian economies has been to develop resource- and energy-saving technologies.

A Japan-centred world vision lay behind the government's attempt to frame a constitution for itself. The year 1881 was a turning-point in Japanese politics, because the initiative in preparing a constitution was taken away from the Minken movement and was assumed by the government, equipped with the imperial decree of 12 October in which the emperor expressed his hopes for convening a national assembly in 1890. Ito Hirobumi was to be sent to Europe to study constitutions there. A counter-offensive by the hanbatsu government began, and emperor-centred nationalism, itself the cause of the Meiji Restoration, was to be reaffirmed and given a modern form in a constitution learned from Europe. This chapter also deals with constitutional foundations; Inoue Kaoru and the unequal treaties; the Constitution of the Empire of Japan; the rise of Meiji nationalism; Okuma, Mutsu, and Treaty revision; and the Civil Code of 1890. Efforts to compile a civil code began as early as 1870 and resulted in the adoption in 1890 of one modelled after French law and consisting of sections dealing with property rights, obligations, mortgages, and other related matters. The chapter then addresses the constitutional politics in practice.

This chapter examines the rise of Japan to global visibility during the Meiji Restoration after 1868, and the ways that the almost simultaneous collapse of the French in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871 leads to a re-ordering of civilizations in the late 19th century. Organized around the contract marriage in Pierre Loti's popular story Madame Chrysanthème (similar to Madame Butterfly), the question of whether the Japanese are capable of emotion becomes central to debates about what constitutes an advanced society. French commentaries insisting on Gallic passion are contrasted to Japanese material and political developments that rapidly transform the tea-house vision of Japan into a picture of the imperialist “Yellow Prussians” of Asia, both fascinating and threatening to increasingly uncertain European powers.

This chapter argues that prior to the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century, both Qing China and Tokugawa Japan were familiar with the principle of personal jurisdiction and the existence of ethnic and social groups that had separate legal existences prior to the Opium War. In the Qing legal order, the Manchu conquest élite enjoyed extensive legal privileges, which placed them outside the criminal jurisdiction of the local Chinese administration. Similarly, the Tokugawa shogunate was accustomed to devolving jurisdiction to local domains and different status groups.

This chapter examines how legal pluralism and extraterritoriality contributed to shape the public debate in China and Japan in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It contrasts official Chinese and Japanese responses to a series of widely publicized consular courts cases and shows that the Japanese authorities were much more successful in mobilizing public opinion against extraterritoriality than the Qing Empire was. The chapter argues that one of the reasons for the Japanese success was the fact that the Japanese state had created a relatively unified citizenry by abolishing all traces of legal pluralism.

Not only did larger wealth and longer lives make the life insurance industry focus more on life instead of death, these elements, along with deregulation, have led to the development of new products, new market niches, and more participants in the market. Simultaneously on the supply side, market segmentation was lessened while mergers and affiliations became widespread. This chapter looks at Meiji Seimei Hoken, one of Japan's prominent life insurance companies and a Level 2 IT user, and Nationwide Financial Services Inc., one of the leading providers of life insurance in certain market niches in the US, and a Level 3 IT user, and how these companies, although with different strategies, have integrated IT into their operations to their competitive advantage.