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Curzon
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Curzon

Date

November 7th, 2008

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Adultery Laws in the Far East

Jail for adultery in Korea

Up through World War II, Japan had a law in its criminal code that prescribed criminal punishments for women who committed adultery. This statute was also part of the criminal code in its two colonies, Korea and Taiwan.

After the war, the Americans introduced the concept of gender equality, and the adultery law was one that had to be amended. In Japan, they chose to abolish the statute altogether. In both Korea and Taiwan, the people chose to keep the statute, but apply it to all married persons.

Comments to this entry

sun bin
November 7, 2008
2:21 am
i can't been 100% sure, but what i understand is that the KMT has totally replaced the japanese laws with its own, such that the current laws in japan follows from the ROC law since 1911. (i guess the rationale for japan happened to KMT's ROC perhaps around the first half of last century)

In PRC, it is a crime for adultery only for those with the spouse of a military personnel.
sun bin
November 7, 2008
2:30 am
i did a quick google on the chinese web. it was said that PRC abolished this in 1958.

as i recall, there are many old chinese drama (traditional theatre) where both genders are punished together.

so i guess this had been a crime in east asia for thousand years. the difference is perhaps that in japan they only punished the women. korea, i suppose, had been using the same law except between 1895 and 1945.
sun bin
November 7, 2008
2:34 am
the ROC law published in march 1911 stated that both party are published equally, and could be put into jail for up to 4 years. today's ROC law changed it to 1 year.
sun bin
November 7, 2008
2:40 am
i read the text again.

actually, the 1911 ROC law only punish adulatery where THE WOMAN was married. (i.e. a married man can get involved with a single woman) But both party are punished the same.
the penalty was reduced to 2 years in 1928.

then in 1936, it finally became gender-neutral. i.e. married man are also punished the same, and the penalty reduced to 1 year. this seems to be what Taiwan is practicing today.
sun bin
November 7, 2008
10:20 am
off topic. but i thought you may like this guy
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7963&IBLOCK_ID=35&phrase_id=18148
Roy Berman
November 7, 2008
1:37 pm
I've heard that the main reason the Korean adultery law remains on the books is, surprisingly, due to pressure from woman's groups. Apparently this is because woman are treated so badly in their divorce law, that the adultery law is considered one of the few ways to get justice in the case of a philandering husband. Almost nobody is ever actually arrested for adultery, but the law is used as a threat in divorce proceedings.

Now, if this is true, I would think that the natural result would be to reform both the adultery law AND the divorce law, but what do I know?

However, I have never heard of this adultery law in Taiwan. Perhaps it remains technically on the books, but pretty much never used - much like sodomy laws were in the US for many years before (thankfully) being struck down for good recently.
Roy Berman
November 7, 2008
1:40 pm
Apparently Taiwan maintains its law for the same reasons:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/local/archives/2000/01/03/18080

Interesting update: Korea's supreme court has just ruled that adultery committed after divorce proceedings have begun does not count.
http://familylawinternational.blogspot.com/2008/08/korea-okays-sex-during-divorce.html
Roy Berman
November 7, 2008
1:49 pm
BTW, it slipped by mind before, but this is one reason why you see advertisements ALL OVER Taiwan for private detectives.
Joe Jones
November 10, 2008
7:06 am
Sun Bin: ROC civil law is basically scrubbed-down Japanese law. I wrote about this phenomenon a couple months back: http://www.mutantfrog.com/2008/09/30/asias-many-legal-systems/
sun bin
November 13, 2008
2:45 am
joe,
thanks. it all makes sense given sun yat-sen and many of those in the revolutionaries (including chiang kai-shek) had spent a lot of time in japan. in fact, many of chinese translation of western ideas into abstract terms are copy from the japanese kanji translation (eg democracy, 'ism', etc).
but that is a different kind of influence from what curzon hypothesized.