398 COMPARATIVE LAW 



to the parents who belong to a different house from that of the 

 child. The tendency of the laws of a progressive society must be 

 the gradual recognition of natural relationship in place of artificial 

 connections; and the process of evolution in this branch of law is 

 from house to kinship. The reform made by the new Civil Code 

 may be regarded as the first step in that direction. 



XIII. Relationships 



The method of determining the degrees of relationship accord- 

 ing to the new Civil Code is the same as that adopted in most coun- 

 tries of Europe and America, belonging to the system of Roman 

 law; that is, by reckoning the number of generations which inter- 

 vene between two persons, either directly when they are lineal 

 relatives, or through a common ancestor, when they are collaterals. 

 This system of determining the degrees of relationship by the dis- 

 tance of consanguinity is the most natural one and is, for that 

 reason, adopted from Western jurisprudence by the framers of the 

 Code. But previous to the adoption of the Code, while Japanese 

 law still belonged to the family of Chinese law, relationship w r as 

 determined in a different way. The basis of the new system is the 

 distance of blood relationship between relatives, but the old law rested 

 on the double bases of blood relationship and family rank; that is to 

 say, the degree of relationship was determined not only by the dis- 

 tance of blood relationship, real or fictitious, but also by the con- 

 sideration of superiority or inferiority of their relative positions in 

 the family. In "the ceremony law" of the Taiho Code (701 A. D.), 

 kindred are divided into the following five ranks or "Go-to-shin." 



(1) The relatives of First Rank are: father and mother, adoptive 

 father and adoptive mother, husband, son, and daughter. 



(2) The relatives of the Second Rank are : grandfather and grand- 

 mother, "tekibo" (or wife of the father of a concubine's child), 

 step-mother, uncle and aunt, brothers and sisters, husband's 

 parents, wife and concubine, brother's child, grandson and 

 granddaughter, and son's wife. 



(3) The relatives of the Third Rank are: great-grandfather and 

 great-grandmother, uncle's wife, husband's nephew, cousin, 

 brother and sister by half-blood on father's side, husband's 

 grandfather and grandmother, husband's uncle and aunt, wife 

 of nephew, step-father, and child of husband by his former 

 wife or concubine, provided the child is living in the same house. 



(4) The relatives of the Fourth Rank are: great-great-grand- 

 father and great-great-grandmother, grandfather's brother and 

 sister, father's cousin, husband's brother and sister, brother's 

 wife and concubine, second cousin, grandfather and grand- 

 mother on mother's side, uncle and aunt on mother's side, 



