Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/103

 tical influence that has been produced upon crime in Japan by these sweeping modifications of criminal law and criminal procedure. It has never been possible in the case of any other nation to observe such a rapid sequence of cause and effect. Elsewhere all legislative and judicial modifications have been deliberate even to timidity. The conditions demanding change have made themselves palpable before change was essayed. But Japanese law-givers seemed to take no thought whatever for the nation's fitness. They made a wholesale adoption of Western jurisprudence, and applied it at once without pausing to consider its applicability. Yet the result seems to justify their temerity. In Tokugawa times, the number of citizens consigned to jail in Yedo was about seven thousand annually, and over three thousand of them went to the execution ground. At present the yearly number of capital punishments for the whole Empire averages above eighty. Did the old system waste life fruitlessly? It would seem so. Unfortunately the science of statistics is of modern growth in Japan. There are no means of making an exact comparison between the criminal conditions of to-day and those of a cycle or a century ago. It is possible, however, to trace pretty clearly the influence that the radical jurisprudential changes of the Meiji era produced during the early years of their full operation. The statistics divide themselves broadly into two heads, major crimes and