Ancient Chinese Law

What holds a legal order together: punishment, moral duty, or the household? In these lectures, Kuwabara Jitsuzō follows Chinese law from its early written codes through the Tang and Ming traditions, finding the family at the center of its institutions.

He explains the Five Punishments and Ten Abominations, the duties of children toward parents, and the influence of Chinese codes on Japan. Marriage emerges as a union between lineages rather than individuals. Women’s position, mourning obligations, and the grounds permitting or forbidding divorce reveal how deeply household order shaped the law.

Delivered at Kyoto Imperial University in 1929, the lectures also expose their author’s period assumptions. His comparisons with modern courts and Western individualism lead to a defense of filial duty and Japan’s imperial polity. This makes the work both an account of legal traditions and a revealing document of early twentieth-century Japanese thought.