Tanaka Kōtarō and World Law: Rethinking the Natural Law Outside the West

136 Pages·2019·1.969 MB·English

by  Kevin M. Doak

GLOBAL POLITICAL THINKERS
Series Editors: Harmut Behr and Felix Rösch
Reethinking thhe Natural
LLaaww OOuuttssiiddee tthhee WWeesstt
Kevvin M. Doakk
Global Political Thinkers
Series Editors
Harmut Behr
School of Geography Politics and Sociology
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Felix Rösch
School of Humanities
Coventry University
Coventry, UK
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Kevin M. Doak
Tanaka Kōtarō
and World Law
Rethinking the Natural Law Outside the West
Kevin M. Doak
Department of East Asian Languages
and Cultures
Georgetown University
Washington, DC, USA
Global Political Thinkers
ISBN 978-3-030-02034-7 ISBN 978-3-030-02035-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02035-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957451
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Chief Justice Tanaka Kōtarō, ca. 1954
(permission to reprint from Yuhikaku Publishing Co., Ltd, Tokyo)
A
cknowledgements
My research on Tanaka Kōtarō has taken far more time and received far
more assistance from other scholars than this slim volume would suggest.
I first became aware of Tanaka’s Theory of World Law at a 1993 academic
conference in Milwaukee where Jim Bartholomew introduced it to me.
So, of the many people to whom I’ve become indebted in the subse-
quent years of my research on Tanaka, it is first and foremost Jim whom
I must thank for sparking my interest in the topic. Soon after that, I
received a two-volume set of Tanaka’s Zoku sekaihō no riron from Walter
Skya with whom I have had many profitable discussions on Tanaka and
modern Japanese jurisprudence since. I was privileged to spend much of
summer 2014 in residence at Waseda University as a Global Leadership
Program scholar where, under the sponsorship of Uemura Tatsuo and
Wakabayashi Yasunobu of the Law Faculty, I was able to study Tanaka’s
early writings on commercial law. After a series of articles, chapters and
presentations on Tanaka for over two decades, it was a sabbatical from
Georgetown University and appointment at the International Research
Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto during calendar
year 2015 that gave me the opportunity to devote myself full-time to my
long-held dream of writing a book on Tanaka. I wish to thank my many
friends at the Nichibunken, especially Takii Kazuhiro who sponsored me
and guided my research on Tanaka during that year. While on sabbati-
cal in Japan, I was greatly assisted in obtaining copies of rare documents
at the Tanaka Archives of the Tokyo University Law Faculty by Kokubu
Koji to whom I am most grateful. Many people have assisted my research
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
over the years, inviting me to give talks on Tanaka at various universi-
ties and professional meetings. There are too many to list here and I’m
sure to forget someone. At least I would like to recognize the support
and advice I have received from Aida Hirotsugu, Araki Shin’ichirō,
Darryl Flaherty, Jieun Han, Hanzawa Takamaro, Makihara Izuru,
Kawakubo Tsuyoshi, Jason Morgan, Franklin Rausch, Shibasaki Atsushi,
Ko Takemoto, Kei Uno, Mark Williams, and Urs Matthias Zachmann.
I also wish to thank Frank Stopa of FSS Photography whose excellent
professional skills improved the quality of several of the images used
in the book. I also thank Nishino Yasuki of Yuhikaku Publishing Co.,
Ltd. for permission to use the image of Chief Justice Tanaka that origi-
nally appeared in their publication, Natural Law and World Law: Essays
to Commemorate the Sixtieth Birthday of Kotaro Tanaka, LL.D. (1954)
and Yashima Shinji of Misuzu Shobō Publishing Co., Ltd. for permis-
sion to use the image of Tanaka in Chapter 3 that originally appeared
in their publication, Hanzawa Takamaro, Kindai nihon no katorishi-
zumu: shisōshi-teki kōsatsu (1993). I would be remiss not to thank Felix
Rösch for his encouragement to submit my work to this series on Global
Political Thinkers and to Oliver Foster and Sarah Roughley of Palgrave
Macmillan Press for their excellent help in editing my messy manuscript.
Finally, my wife Therese and sons Anatole, Emile and daughter-in-law
Kelsey have patiently indulged my Tanaka obsession for many years. I
hope the publication of this book proves cathartic and provides some
respite to them all.
c
ontents
1 The Formation of a Japanese Globalist Thinker 1
2 Law as a Universal Force for Good 19
3 Tanaka’s Theory of World Law 41
4 A Globalist at Home 63
5 A Globalist Judge, at Home and Abroad 85
6 Tanaka’s Final Years—And Beyond 109
List of Publications by Tanaka Kōtarō in Western Languages 121
Index 123
ix
l f
ist of igures
Fig. 3.1 Tanaka Kōtarō, ca. 1935 (with permission from
Misuzu Shobō, Ltd., Tokyo) 43
Fig. 5.1 Mrs. Tanaka (nèe Matsumoto) Mineko, Pope Pius XII,
and Tanaka Kōtarō, 1956 (image from Getty database) 92
xi