The Parental Rights and Protection of Children in Early Modern Japan

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I studied on these themes and the following results were obtained.1. In the early Meiji era there was no legal concept of parental rights. In this time, father naturally has great power to bring up his children. The head of the household, relatives and certain member of community also had concerns with bringing up them to maintain the feudalistic family system. The Meiji Civil Code of 1898 was the first legal provision in Japan to specify the rights and duties of parents. The Code regard the rights as natural because parents had natural love to their children.2. In the early years of Meiji era a boy attains his majority at the age of fifteen based on the old custom. The forty-first proclamation of Dajokan (1876) provided that the age of legal adulthood was twenty years old. Then the Meiji Civil Code restricted the ability of minority and proscribed the right of parents to protect them.3. In the case husband and wife got divorced, boy belonged to his father and often girls belonged to her mother following the custom in the early Meiji era. The Meiji Civil Code denied this custom and provided that father exercised the parental right to every child after divorce. At the same time the Code provided the mother's right to take care of her children if her husband agreed to her proposal.4. The word, Shufu was used in the textbook of home economics for the first time in the early Meiji era. It meant mistress who ordered her servants to do housework at that time. But it changed the meaning in the twenties of Meiji to housekeeper or housewife who did the housework by herself. Therefore housewife came to be thought as a vocation of woman.