Human Trafficking and Intra-Imperial Knowledge: Adopted Daughters, Households, and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan, 1919–1935

Abstract

In the early 1920s, the League of Nations embarked on regulating human trafficking as a social problem and questioned colonial empires about how to regulate it within and outside of their territories. As this question affected the Japanese empire and colonial Taiwan (1895–1945), the metropolitan government utilized the international discourse about human trafficking to construct regulations for the border-crossing prostitution of under-age women. This translation of the international discourse about human trafficking enabled Japan to preserve adult prostitution and freed colonial Taiwan from the related effects of Japan’s international agreement. These maneuvers also encouraged officials and the press based in Japan and Taiwan to associate prostitution with daughter adoption and further child abuse and parental authority, redefining the ideal of free will and movement. This article examines how Japanese criticisms of human trafficking evolved and intertwined in the Japanese colonial courts that adjudicated the adoption of Taiwanese daughters into households.