by Dr. Bill Mihalopoulos My recent article “Liberty, the Maria Luz Incident and the liminal legal status of Chinese indentured labourers and Japanese licensed prostitutes” in Past & Present No. 268 (August 2025) focused on the celebrated Maria Luz Incident (1872), which involved Chinese labourers on board a Peruvian ship anchored in the Japanese waters of Yokohama. The resulting 1872 Japanese court ruling rendered null-and-void the service contracts that bound those labourers to eight years of service. And the ensuing release of Japanese licensed prostitutes from their ten-year indenture contracts was an unforeseen consequence of that ruling. The prevailing academic opinion is that the legal ruling of the Maria Luz Incident was the seminal moment when rights talk was introduced to Japan. The Japanese ad hoc tribunal, it is said, freed the Chinese labourers from indentured servitude in Peru and for the first time (temporarily) emancipated Japanese women from sexual servitude by attaching the metaphor of slavery to the domestic issue of licensed prostitution. What has captivated scholarship on the Maria Luz case is what the ruling signified for Japan’s modernization makeover. Was this the watershed moment when modern Japan invested in notions of personal rights, justice, and equity? “Liberty, […]