Going to Court: The Transformation of "Judicial Consciousness" in Taiwan under Japanese Rule (Expanded Edition)

Taiwan came under Japanese rule in 1895, and the Taiwanese, who used to say they were “going to the yamen to sue,” began to say “going to court to file a lawsuit.” Faced with the replacement of the traditional Chinese-style and modern Western-style legal systems, the question arises: has people’s conception of “judicial consciousness” been guided in a new direction, or does it still cling to old notions? Does this transformation of legal perspectives differ depending on different socioeconomic classes, regions, gender, and so forth?

 

From the perspective of institutional framework and its overall operation, this book first points out that compared to the “traditional” criminal litigation, the “modern” judicial judgment in Taiwan during the Japanese rule displayed differences in judicial justice views such as the separation of judgment and mediation, the separation of trial and defense, the separation of trial and inspection, and the separation of administrative and judicial powers, yet the two occasionally intertwined in the national laws of Japanese-ruled Taiwan. It then applies the “Japanese Judicial Archives” to empirical legal research, collecting tens of thousands of civil and criminal case data from the Taipei District Court during the Japanese rule period, encoding them as variables. Through the results of cross-analysis of these variables, it interprets how people’s views on judicial justice may have changed.

 

In this expanded edition, the traditional and modern intertwining of judicial consciousness on the national legal system, originally described in one chapter, has been expanded into four chapters, forming the “first part;” the original Chapters Two to Five are now the “second part,” which corresponds to the current Chapters Five to Eight. Four arguments are presented, namely the introduction and translation of the concept of “separation of judgment and mediation” in civil disputes, the new system and old concepts of “separation of trial and defense” in civil matters, the ambiguity or negation of “separation of trial and inspection” in criminal cases, and the lack of respect for “separation of administrative and judicial powers,” thus significantly increasing the content.

 

The fifty years of Japanese rule did indeed set Taiwan’s path from traditional to modern views of judicial consciousness, but the progress, or the degree of transformation, remains quite limited, with remnants of traditional views of judicial consciousness still prevalent everywhere.