Shaping a New Profession
Not until the nineteenth century were the Japanese forced to confront and engage with the European conception of international law. In East Asia a Sinocentric regional order had governed their worldview for over a thousand years, and during the early modern period the Tokugawa dynasty then modified this outlook to place Japan in the centre of its own framework of international relations. Under the Tokugawa judicial system, moreover, the concept of a lawyer, international or otherwise, was practically unknown. It was the reluctant opening of treaty ports in 1859 that paved the way for Japan’s reception of international law. This chapter charts the shift from the early Japanese exploration of the outside world after centuries of self-imposed isolation, to the training of Japan’s first generation of international lawyers as the Meiji state embarked on reclaiming sovereign rights lost through the imposition of the treaty port regime.