Abstract
This article attempts to understand how East Asian nations dealt with the norms and concepts of Western international law and for that purpose takes up the peace process of the Sino-Japanese War. It argues that in that incident neither China nor Japan passively accepted the methods of dispute settlement developed in Western international law and that rather those countries tried to pick and choose among the legal institutions of that law according to their respective interests. This article concludes that the incident suggests Western international law was not immune to changes through the interaction between Europeans and East Asians in the process of its expansion.