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After the Qing (1683-1895) established Taiwan, located near southwestern China, as a Han Chinese settler island, it became Japan’s first formal colony in 1895 and remained under Japanese control until 1945. In 1932-1933, a Japanese colonial court decision at the intersection of the Taiwanese family, colonial law, and popular debate marked a turning point in the prevention of human trafficking.1 A Taiwanese adoptee named Dong Jian, who a Japanese lawyer represented, sought the dissolution of her adoptive relationship with Ms. Dong Duan, claiming that Duan coerced Jian into prostitution. After a full year of deliberations, the Court of Re-Appeals (J: kōtō hōin jōkoku bu) confirmed that Dong had indeed coerced Jian.2 The court reasoned that any forced prostitution within an adoptive relationship fell under the category of “inhumane and immoral” (J: hidō hirin) acts, regardless of whether an adoptive contract allowed prostitution or if the adoptive household used prostitution to provide financial support. The Japanese colonial court argued that these acts constituted a “serious insult” and “abuse” under Item 1, Article 866 of the 1898 Japanese Civil Code.3
This court decision represented a legal reconstruction of local social practices; a reconstruction of Japanese courts in colonial Taiwan and Korea.4 Colonial court judges used Japanese legal and moral language to delegitimize coercive adoptive relationships, striking a delicate balance between the law and localized moral understandings of the proper transfer of women and children who had been dispersed throughout the Japanese empire. These legal and local moral arguments not only affected the social life of the Taiwanese family, but also extended well beyond the realm of prostitution. This article examines the emergence of these forces from the early 1920s onward, their circulation in the Japanese metropole and colonial Taiwan, and their close linkage with Taiwanese family relationships-daughter adoption in particular-through the medium of the Japanese civil and criminal colonial court system.
Historians largely frame the modern history of human trafficking in relation to prostitution and global shifts in the configuration of physical and moral borders. The sociologists and historians Stephanie Limoncelli and Jessica Pliley look at the problems around human trafficking, illuminating the issues of border-crossing and the international sale of women in terms of the domestic and interstate movement of...