Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/128

 It is essential to recognise the antiquity of the custom, because a leading trait of Japanese character seems to have been educated by it. Evidently the justice administered by tribunals of "five-men groups," headmen and elders of city wards or villages, cannot have paid much attention to hard-and-fast jurisprudential rules. Such arbitrators knew nothing about law and were entire strangers to the strict legal principles which form the bases of statutes and codes in the Occident. Their decisions were guided mainly by "human relationship," and only in the very remotest degree by jural dogmas. Full account was taken of all the circumstances of a case, of the past intercourse between those concerned in it, of their family connections, and of the moral obligations under which they stood to one another. Justice, in short, was "personal, not impersonal." Even when a case went before the court of a deputy or a magistrate, it received similar treatment. Neither the deputy nor the magistrate was a trained judicial expert in the sense of having graduated from a law college or satisfied an examination test. But both had the qualification that they made the study of law a life-long business, and that they brought years of practical training to the trial of a suit. In these respects they differed from the members of a "five-men group," from "headmen" and from "elders." Further, it is not to be supposed that their de-