This page is designed to complement an independent study tutorial exploring Japanese Family Law.
Week 2 - Planning
Week 3 - Creating the Meiji Family Nation
January 19
Matsushima, Yukiko. 2000.
“The Development of Japanese Family Law 1898 to 1997 and its Relationship to Social and Political Change.” In her
Contemporary Japanese Family Law. Tokyo: Minjiho kenkyukai.
Isono, Fujiko. 1988.
“The Evolution of Modern Family Law in Japan.” International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 2(2): 183–202.
Mukai, Ken, and Nobuyoshi Toshitani. 1967.
“The Progress and Problems of Compiling the Civil Code in the Early Meiji Era.” Law in Japan 1(1): 25–59.
Burns, Susan. 2009.
“Local Courts, National Laws, and the Problem of Patriarchy in Meiji Japan: Reading ‘Records of Civil Rulings’ from the Perspective of Gender History in Interdisciplinary Studies on the Taiwan Colonial Court Records Archives.” In
Interdisciplinary Studies on the Taiwan Colonial Court Records Archives, 285–309. Taibei: Angle Publishing Company.
Week 4 - Contemporary Japanese Family Law
(optional) Oppler, Alfred C. 1949.
“The Reform of Japan’s Legal and Judicial System under Allied Occupation.” Washington Law Review and State Bar Journal 24: 290.
Toshitani, Nobuyoshi. 1994.
“The Reform of Japanese Family Law and Changes in the Family System.” US-Japan Women’s Journal 6: 66–82.
Tanaka, Hideo. 1980.
“Legal Equality among Family Members in Japan: The Impact of the Japanese Constitution of 1946 on the Traditional Family System.” Southern California Law Review 53(2): 611.
Bryant, Taimie L. 1995.
“Family Models, Family Dispute Resolution and Family Law in Japan.” UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal 14: 1–27.
Week 5 - Koseki, part 1
Bryant, Taimie L. 1991.
“For the Sake of the Country, for the Sake of the Family: The Oppressive Impact of Family Registration on Women and Minorities in Japan.” UCLA Law Review 39: 109–68.
David Chapman and Karl Jakob Krogness. 2014.
“The Koseki.” In their
Japan's Household Registration System and Citizenship: Koseki, Identification and Documentation. London: Routledge. Pages: 1-18.
Krogness, Karl Jakob. 2010.
“The Ideal, the Deficient, and the Illogical Family: An Initial Typology of Administrative Household Units.” In
Home and Family in Japan: Continuity and Transformation, edited by Richard Ronald and Allison Alexy, 65–90. London and New York: Routledge.
Week 6 - Beyond Blood
Goldfarb, Kathryn. 2012.
“Care and the Politics of Change: Embodied Transformations in the Japanese Child Welfare System.” and
“Law, Blood, and the Space of Waiting: Theorizing the Temporality of Attachment in Japanese Child Welfare Placements.” From
Fragile Kinships: Family Ideologies and Child Welfare in Japan. Dissertation in the Department of Anthropology, the University of Chicago. Pages: 49-117.
Goldfarb, Kathryn. Forthcoming.
“Beyond Blood Ties: Intimate Kinships in Japanese Foster and Adoptive Care.” In
Intimate Japan, Allison Alexy and Emma E. Cook, eds. 1-28.
Week 7 - Koseki, part 2
そして父になる [Like Father, Like Son]. 2013. Koreeda Hirkazu, director. 121 minutes.
This film is streaming on Netflix.Chapman, David. 2014.
“Managing “strangers” and “undecidables”: Population registration in Meiji Japan.” In
Japan's Household Registration System and Citizenship: Koseki, Identification and Documentation. London: Routledge.
Chen, Tien-shi (Lara). 2014.
“Officially invisible: The stateless (mukokusekisha) and the unregistered (mukosekisha).” In
Japan's Household Registration System and Citizenship: Koseki, Identification and Documentation. London: Routledge.
Week 8 - State Perspectives
Scott, James. 1998.
Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Selections.
Week 9 - Buraku Identifications
Joseph Hankins. 2014.
Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Week 10 - Divorce, part 2
Bryant, Taimie L. 1992.
“‘Responsible’ Husbands, ‘Recalcitrant’ Wives, Retributive Judges: Judicial Management of Contested Divorce in Japan.” Journal of Japanese Studies 18 (2): 407–43.
Alexy, Allison. Forthcoming.
“Constructing Mutuality.” From her manuscript,
Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan.
Week 12 - GLBTQ Experiences, part 1Lunsing, Wim. 2006.
“LGBT Rights in Japan.” Peace Review 17(2-3): 143-148.
Maree, Claire. 2014.
“Sexual Citizenship at the Intersections of Patriarchy and Heteronormativity: Same-sex Partnerships and the Koseki.” In
Japan's Household Registration System and Citizenship: Koseki, Identification and Documentation. London: Routledge. Pages: 187-202.
Mackie, Vera. 2013.
“Genders and Genetics: The Legal and Medical Regulation of Family Forms in Contemporary Japan.” Australian Journal of Asian Law 14(1): 1-18.
Week 13 - GLBTQ Experiences, part 2McLelland, Mark. 2009.
“The Role of the ‘toujisha’ in Current Debates about Sexual Minority Rights in Japan.” Japanese Studies 29(2): 193-207.
S.P.F. Dale. Forthcoming.
“Gender Identity, Desire, and Intimacy: Sexual Scripts and X-Gender.” In
Intimate Japan, edited by Allison Alexy and Emma E. Cook.
Cho, John Song Pae. 2009.
“The Wedding Banquet Revisited: "Contract Marriages" between Korean Gays and Lesbians.” Anthropological Quarterly 82(2): 401-422.
Week 14 - Family IntimaciesMackie, Vera. 2014.
“Birth Registration and the Right to Have Rights: The Changing Family and the Unchanging Koseki.” In
Japan’s Household Registration System and Citizenship: Koseki, Identification and Documentation, edited by David Chapman and Karl Jakob Krogness, 203-220. London and New York: Routledge.
White, Linda E. 2014.
“Challenging the Heteronormative Family in the Koseki Surname, Legitimacy and Unmarried Mothers.” In
Japan’s Household Registration System and Citizenship: Koseki, Identification and Documentation, edited by David Chapman and Krogness, Karl Jakob, 239–56. London and New York: Routledge.
Allison Alexy. forthcoming.
“What Can Be Said? Communicating Intimacy in Millennial Japan.” In
Intimate Japan, edited by Allison Alexy and Emma E. Cook. Pages: 1-24.