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The María Luz Case: International Emergence of Japanese Legal Identity

In July 1872, the María Luz, a Peruvian barque chartered by a Spanish subject, was carrying Chinese indentured servants from Macau to Peru. Due to storm damage, the ship had to stop for repairs at Kanagawa Bay in Japan. While in harbour, some Chinese labourers escaped from the María Luz and sought protection by the British consular authorities, claiming that they had been mistreated by the captain, a Peruvian national named Ricardo Herrera.

First, a Criminal Case

The British referred the matter to the Japanese governor of Kanagawa, which led to several legal proceedings: a criminal case against Herrera for having illegally detained and punished his passengers, and two civil cases brought, in turn, by the captain against the fugitives to force them to return on board. The Chinese indentured servants were freed by the Japanese authorities. Peru protested and, after complex negotiations, Japan and Peru eventually referred the case to arbitration by the czar of Russia, who decided in favour of Japan in 1875.

Japan in Transition Deals with Foreign Powers

The María Luz incident happened at one of the most important crossroads of Japanese history. The Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), which had ruled the country for more than 250 years, had come to an end, and the Meiji era had begun. For some 230 years, the shogun had enforced an isolationist policy known as sakoku (“closed country”), by which contacts with the outside world were kept to a minimum and strictly controlled.

In 1853, under American military pressure, Japan was forced to open its borders to international trade, and this, combined with internal factors, led to the collapse of the shogunate. The turbulent years of bakumatsu (“end of the military government”, 1853–1868) had just passed, and the ruling elite of the new nation state was busy dealing with foreign powers, building the political infrastructure of the new state, and pursuing reforms in many different sectors – all at the same time.

A period of political and economic opening: Westerners Loading Cargo by Utagawa Sadahide, 1861. Bequest of William S. Lieberman, 2005, The Met Collection.

In 1872 the modern Japanese legal system was still under construction, but the laws of the Edo period had mostly ceased to be in force. The result was endemic legal uncertainty. Seeking to present Japan to the Western powers as a country fully capable of managing complex legal issues using instruments and procedures to which foreigners could relate, the ruling elite worked to conceal such uncertainty during the María Luz incident.1

The “Barometer of Modernization”

The Meiji elite understood that demonstrating mastery of the rule of law was fundamental to being seen on an equal footing with European countries. The law was a tool that foreigners seemed adept at using against Japan. Indeed, the opening of the country was obtained through the imposition of legal instruments: the Unequal Treaties. While reforms in the economy, military, etc. certainly had a decisive impact on Japan’s accession to the club of international powers, the law had tremendous symbolic importance. In the words of Takeshi Kojima, one of Japan’s leading law scholars, it was indeed considered the “barometer of modernization.”2

» Japan, together with other ‘Oriental’ countries, was in the uncomfortable position of being seen as ‘semi-civilized’ «

This was particularly significant for Japan’s status in the comity of nations. During this period in history, international law commentators embraced an imperialistic and colonial approach, and tried to establish a hierarchy of legal systems, of course placing those of Europe and the Unites States at the top, and those of what were referred to as “uncivilized” territories at the bottom. Japan, together with other “Oriental” countries, was in the uncomfortable position of being seen as “semi-civilized.”3

Europeans were sceptical that such countries were even capable of using international law as an instrument to manage their external relationships. To be promoted to the upper league of “civilized” nations, Japan had to prove that its legal system, both domestic and international, was adequate from a European perspective. Meanwhile, the Western powers had no intention whatsoever to reflect on the “barbaric” or backwards elements still present in their own legal systems, whether in their homelands or colonies: the object of comparison was always an idealized Europe.

Success in Arbitration, but No Apology

The final prong of the María Luz incident, the arbitration before Czar Alexander II of Russia, marked Japan’s debut on the scene of international dispute resolution. In a final and binding award, the czar asserted that Japan had complied with the principles of international law and that Peru was not entitled to any reparations. In this final stage, resorting to a technical legal procedure, i.e. arbitration, rather than seeking a diplomatic solution served to show that Japan was capable of acting as a competent player in a proper international legal forum and of using the instruments of the law.

A successful encounter with Western adversaries: Yokohama Sumo Wrestler Defeating a Foreigner by Ippōsai Yoshifuji, 1861. Bequest of William S. Lieberman, 2005, The Met Collection.

Before deciding to resort to arbitration, Peru and Japan had engaged in negotiations in Tokyo. During these exchanges, the South American country relied on diplomatic pressure and even resorted to veiled threats. The Peruvian representative seemed somewhat irritated by the fact that Japan, an Asian nation, did not simply apologize and acknowledge the tort caused to a white man. In fact, the Japan-Peru controversy was the first instance in which an Asian country successfully invoked the instruments of international law to defend itself in the community of civilized nations.

The Modern Legacy of the María Luz

The Japanese have not forgotten the María Luz. They still remember the case as a moment of glory for their country, in which they demonstrated their humanity and mastery of legal skills despite the difficulties the nation had to face in negotiating with Western powers. The case is even mentioned in modern-day policy papers: a document written in support of Japan’s request for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council specifically uses the María Luz example to demonstrate the country’s longstanding engagement with justice and human rights.

  1. Douglas Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002); Michael R. Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Harvard University Press, 2006). ↩︎
  2. Takeshi Kojima, Civil Procedure and ADR in Japan (Chuo University Press, 2004): 4. ↩︎
  3. Turan Kayaoǧlu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (Cambridge University Press, 2010). ↩︎

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Giorgio Fabio Colombo, “The María Luz Case: International Emergence of Japanese Legal Identity,” ant.e, January 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/the-maria-luz-case-international-emergence-of-japanese-legal-identity/
Forced and Forged Bridges of International Law
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Comment: International Law in Three Histories

Yes, states had made agreements with, and warred against, each other for ages, yet in the decades between the 1870s and the 1930s, industrial-era politics and globally connecting capitalism drove people around the world closer together. Treaties and wars took on new and different forms. In the context of accelerating connections, an emergent framework of “international law” promised to rationalize relations among nations. While framed by its early promoters as law “among nations”, Euro-American approaches to international trade and treaties were hardly global in the mid-19th century. Rather, “international law” largely referred to the norms shared by the industrialized countries of Europe and the Americas, norms that were at times imposed on countries deemed outside the civilizational pale.

Toward Occidental Orientations

These blog posts on Japan, Korea, and Iran show the ways in which something called “international law” spread beyond its Euro-American roots. They reveal how an emerging corpus of law that pretended to a kind of internationalism became increasingly global. Giorgio Fabio Colombo’s detailed accounting of an 1872 dispute over coerced Chinese laborers on a Peruvian ship moored in Japan, which was ultimately arbitrated in Russia, reveals the undeniably global dimensions of the early 1870s. Nearly concurrently, the Japanese empire, with other global empires of the world in mind, imposed an unequal treaty on Korea, as described by Ki-Won Hong. Japanese imperialism showed that all kinds of countries could exploit the inequalities baked into international law.

The HMS Iron Duke, the vessel to which Chinese coerced laborers fled from the María Luz. Unknown author, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Then, a few decades later, elites in Tehran used international law as the departure point for establishing a law-based political order – as described by Soheil Ghasemi. By the turn of the 20th century, international law had become both an object of study by people the world over and a collection of practices from London to Lima, from St. Petersburgh to Seoul.

Early Euro-American adopters of international law used it to connect commerce and diplomacy to rules that reflected an emergent and increasingly cohering group of practices. This provoked a curious dynamic as international law stretched across the planet, sometimes by force. From the 1850s, diplomats and reformers in China, Korea, and Japan rushed to translate Euro-American legal texts from Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to Henry Wheaton into Asian languages.

» It was the potentially leveling power of international law, wedded to domestic reform, that accelerated its adoption. «

Around the same time, reformers in Tehran shifted their focus from existing regional modes of international relations to European forms, particularly French models. In Japan, Korea, Persia, and elsewhere, the cross-pollination of new ideas prompted students to study abroad in Holland, France, Germany, England, and the United States. The international movement of legal advisers from these same countries diffused a range of legal knowledge. All of this gave rise to the establishment of schools, such as the Tehran School of Political Science. By the 19th century’s end, law schools had become sites for incubating political leaders of nation-states the world over.

While the dynamic of engagement, inquiry, and then adoption unfolded both within and at the geographic margins of an Atlantic-centered world, the processes of international law’s spread reflected internal demands in many countries. For their own reasons, from shoring up sovereignty to suppressing internal dissidents, domestic reformers, thinkers, and politicians inside and outside of Europe and the Americas enthusiastically adapted newly emergent approaches to law among nations.

Legal Equality’s Elusive Promise

The three blog posts, and the papers on which they were originally based,1 generally read international law, or its spread, as a moment of possibility, if not positivity. Colombo writes: “[T]he Japan-Peru controversy was the first instance in which an Asian country successfully invoked the instruments of international law to defend itself in the community of civilized nations.” In Ki-Won Hong’s text, we see the complaint that the Meiji government “approached international law pragmatically, using it to bolster its regional ambitions, while selectively ignoring its [international law’s] egalitarian ideals.” Hong writes as if an egalitarian impulse had been widely adopted elsewhere only to be forsaken by Japanese imperialists.

Japanese and Korean diplomats at the commemorative feast for the Treaty of Kangwha. Painting by Ahn Jungsik (1861-1919), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In other words, the tone across the posts is generally positive. Colombo notes that Meiji politicos in Japan believed that by using international law to best Peru, they could raise their status among the world’s leading nations. As described by Hong, Chosŏn reformers hoped they could contain their erstwhile Japanese neighbor with international law. And Ghasemi describes how Hassan Mošīr-al-Molk Pirnia used international law as the scholarly medium for introducing modern politics to Persia. Yet despite the enthusiastic embrace of international law in each case, it was an embrace under the shadow of unequal treaties, the threat of war, or existential dread.

The promise of equal sovereignty under something called “the Westphalian System” had always been a mirage. Ghasemi notes how Tehran elites knew both the sweet and the sour of international law, as “Iran increasingly used the language of international law” – which had in the past been leveraged against Persia – “to express its historical grievances vis-à-vis imperial powers”. As self-described “pawns” in Britain and Russia’s Great Game, Persians had grudgingly resigned themselves to the system of capitulations since the 1820s. The prospects for international law serving as a leveler among nations were decidedly mixed.

» These are not histories of the weak using international law to contain the strong. «

These are not histories of the weak using international law to contain the strong. Tellingly, the Meiji government’s success in the María Luz incident was not replicable in cases when the Japanese government’s antagonist was the more formidable Great Britain. Japanese litigants fared somewhat poorly in other notorious maritime cases of the 1870s and 1880s, such as the sinking of the Japanese naval vessel Chishima in a collision with the British-flagged Ravenna, and the deaths by drowning of nearly all the Japanese passengers of a British-flagged ship, the Normanton, while the largely European crew survived. By 1910, the Japanese empire had absorbed a strategically situated and militarily weak Korea. In the case of the School of Political Science and School of Law, if one ends its history in the 1920s, then it reads as a triumph of rational constitutionalism. Yet in the longer sweep of Iranian history, the success of the school’s brand of restraint and adherence to the rule of law did not survive internal and external pressures.

And Still …

Thinking about these cases and the context in which they operated, both domestic and international, one sees the interweaving of a range of interests, extending inward and outward. Foreign pressure and imperialism certainly drove international law’s spread. But it was the potentially leveling power of international law, wedded to domestic reform, that accelerated its adoption. Savvy operators around the world, including in Korea, Japan, and Iran, exploited opportunities in the space between idealism and pragmatic statecraft to achieve goals that included convincing other nations of their civility, imposing modern imperialism on a neighbor, and crafting a constitutional nation-state.

Countries once at the margins of international law began to make it global, shaping it in the process. These histories of Japan, Korea, and Iran show that “law among nations” was not just imposed, but demanded, which made it integral to globalizing systems of nation-states and capital.

  1. Papers given at the online symposium “Legal Orders under Pressure: Non-Western Experiences of Legal Transformations in the 19th and early 20th Centuries” of the Max Planck Research Group Translations & Transitions, 7–9 December 2022, organised by the Chair for Globalisation and Legal Pluralism, Faculty of Law, University of Vienna, Austria, together with the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Theory, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. ↩︎

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Darryl Flaherty, “Comment: International Law in Three Histories”, ant.e, January 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/comment-international-law-in-three-histories/