JAPANESE CIVIL CODE 379 



the European, system of legislation. The Japanese law was at that 

 time rapidly passing from the family of Chinese law to the family of 

 European laws. 



From the beginning of the present reign, the Imperial Government 

 was very active in making laws to meet the exigencies of the new 

 state of things. But finding that such fragmentary legislation could 

 not keep pace with the rapid progress of the nation and meet the 

 requirements of the changing circumstances, the Daijokwan, or the 

 Great Council of State, which was then the supreme legislature, 

 issued a law (no. 103 in the eighth year of Meiji, 1875) which pro- 

 vided in art. 3, that judges should decide civil cases according to the 

 express provisions of written law, and in cases where there was no 

 such written law, according to custom. In the absence of both written 

 and customary laws, they were to decide according to the principles of 

 reason and justice. This law flung wide open the door for the ingress 

 of foreign law, and marks an epoch in Japanese legal history. Now 

 by this time, translations of the French codes and other law-books 

 had appeared, and there were some judges on the Bench, though 

 comparatively few at that time, who had studied English or French 

 law. The rapidly changing circumstances of Japanese society brought 

 many cases before the court for w r hich there were no express rules, 

 written or customary, and the judges naturally sought to find out 

 "the principles of reason and justice" in Western jurisprudence. 

 The older members of the Bench, who had not been systematically 

 taught in Western jurisprudence, consulted the translations of the 

 French and other European codes and text-books, while the younger 

 judges who had received systematic legal education in the univers- 

 ities, either at home or abroad, and whose number increased from 

 year to year, consulted Western codes, statute-books, law-reports, 

 and juridical treatises, and freely applied the principles of Occidental 

 jurisprudence, which in their opinion were conformable to reason 

 and justice. Blackstone, Kent, Pollock, Anson, Langdell, Windscheid, 

 Dernburg, Mourlon, Baudry-Lacantinerie, and other text-books and 

 the numerous commentaries on European codes, statute-books, and 

 law reports were looked upon as repositories of just and reasonable 

 principles and supplied necessary data for their judgments. In this 

 manner Occidental jurisprudence entered our country, not only 

 indirectly, through the University and other law colleges, but also 

 directly through the Bench and the Bar. 



The above law, bold as it was, was meant to be only a temporary 

 measure to supply the immediate wants of the changing society, 

 until a complete and systematic code should have been compiled. 

 In the mean time, the work of codification had been steadily pro- 

 ceeding, and resulted in the promulgation of the Criminal Code and 

 the Code of Criminal Procedure in 1880, the Revised Code of Criminal 



