In significant part, the history of law in imperial Japan is a history of the way courts enforced claims to scarce resources. More simply, it is a history of property rights. As one court (somewhat sanctimoniously) put it in 1918, “the inviolability of the right to property is one of the fundamental principles of the Imperial Constitution.” Throughout the period, Japanese courts enforced private claims to property, and labor remained an asset controlled by the laborer himself or herself.

Over the past several decades, scholars have detailed the close (though obviously imperfect) relation between institutions that enforce private rights to scarce resources and the dynamics of economic growth. Those institutions, as Douglass North (1994: 359) put it in his Nobel Prize address, “form the incentive structure of a society, and … in consequence, are the underlying determinants of economic performance.” Through its courts, the Japanese government maintained those institutions scrupulously. The relatively efficient Japanese economic growth in the pre-War years was no surprise. It was the predictable result of the legal rules the government enacted and the courts enforced.

Land and labor are critical ingredients in almost all industries. By the turn of the century, Japanese courts systematically enforced the rights to use land, to exclude others from it, and to transfer it. Most land has value only when improved, and for most of Japanese history improvement has meant irrigation. Over irrigation rights, too, courts enforced such rights.