Indeed, divorce did exist in Meiji Japan and well before it as well.

It's important to note that marriage was often a family based deal, much like it was in other parts of the world.

Marriage was very much about two families joining and for people of status, wealth, or prestige, marriage might be decided by people other than the bridge & groom-to-be.

The importance of Meiji Japan on divorce is that it was making steps in equalizing marriage in that wives were now given more room to petition for divorce and it was now legally codified that husbands that refused to grant wives divorces on reasonable grounds "violates her rights to personal freedom".

By 1898, after learning about Western contemporary divorce law, Japanese legislatures drew up their own uniquely 'dual' system and entered it into the 1898 Civil Code.

Before we move on, I should lay down some context for the times.

in the late 1800s, many Japanese intellectuals were all about reforming marriage, divorce, and the social as well as legal laws that governed how Japanese families interacted. The idea was a a more liberal, progressive family unit would encourage a more open, productive society.

Of course, these liberal thinkers were considered fairly radical by the more conservative Japanese populace, and traditionalists/anti-Western thinkers opposed them whenever they could.

It's also important to note that divorce in Japan was essentially very free for much of the Edo Period. The big exception is families of status, namely the nobility, the samurai, and the upper crust clans. For major families, only heads of the household could decide on marriage and consequently, divorce.

But for most people, divorce was fairly straight forward. The husband would draft a letter of divorce, 三行半 mikudarihan, and once handed to his wife and her family, bam divorce complete. Only the husband could draft such a note.

Now while this may seem extremely patriarchal, with the wife liable to suffer greatly at the whims of the husband, in practice, it was a bit more balanced and nuanced, if still disadvantageous to the wife in that she could not personally initiate legal action.

For example, there are letters from the time period of a wife's family having the husband draft up divorce papers in advance and then keeping them, as a warning that if the wife was not treated well or if the husband failed to provide for her, the family would 'accept' the divorce and would retrieve their daughter.

Other times, wives would 'force' their husbands to draft letters of divorce and threaten to use it if they behaved badly, for example, drunken behavior or adultery.

All this being said, men undoubtedly had the power legally speaking, and there are a multitude of cases of mistreatment or cruelty through divorce/threat of divorce against women.

But as we move into the Meiji Period, divorce goes through a tumultuous series of changes.

The Western culture at the time saw the relatively high rate of Japanese divorce as unsettling and embarrassing. Japanese reformers reacted to this by trying to effect a change that would make Japan a low divorce rate society.

For example, in 1887, Yokoyama Masao penned a book that was published by a magazine company that was Christian leaning, examined various reasons why Japan had a higher divorce rate than other contemporary modern nations, decrying that divorce should not be allowed so freely as it was, describing it to be an evil act.

What's really interesting is that as Japan industrialized more, it's divorce rate dropped.

Even as women labor independence, education, and marriage/divorce laws became more equal, allowing women legal powers, (all the things that increased divorce rates in Western nations) Japan's divorce rate came down.

For example, in 1930 sociologist Iwasaki Yasu published a study on marriage in Japan and detailed that in 1880, the divorce rate was 3.38 per 1000 and decreased to 1.53 in 1899, AFTER the reforms to marriage law and divorce law were made in the 1898 Civil Code.

This is an important point to make historically that Japan's various changes during the Meiji Period were not simply Westernizing. Japan wasn't simply copying and pasting wholesale from Europeans and Americans. It was going through it's very own Industrial Revolution and rapid expansion of ideas, cultural thought, social changes, and religions.

If Japan was simply 'trying to became Western/American/European' many of their values would not be so different.

Moving on!

Divorce was divided into two distinct categories.

One was mutual divorce.

The other was court intervened divorce.

In court intervened divorce, there needed to be grounds for divorce, usually sexual infidelity, but in general divorce was fairly straight forward even when the government was involved.

Women were given more legal powers to enact divorce proceedings and was sometimes rewarded a settlement of her husband's property. Men had legal requirement to provide for their wives and not mistreat them or it would be grounds for divorce. This was all thanks to the legal codification in the 1898 Civil Code.

So why did divorce rates decrease in Meiji Japan?

Well there are a couple reasons.

For one thing, marriage was more focused on the household of the married couple, rather than the entire extended family. This meant that the groom's parents no longer had as much of a say. This was important because many divorces prior to the Meiji Period were from a groom's parents saying the new bride was incompetent, or simply not endearing and sent home with a divorce letter.

This is not to say that the extended family still did not play a massive role in marriage. Simply that marriage was refocused and legal restrictions made it more difficult to get a divorce on a whim.

Next, adultery was officially grounds for divorce and no longer allowed by Japanese society. Prior to the Meiji Period, many men had mistresses or visited prostitutes. This was considered the norm and unavoidable by many parts of society, including upper class families. Marriage was not for love but for status, economy, and political reasons.

But in the Meiji Period, adultery was no longer allowed. This consequently strengthened marriages that would have otherwise probably ended in divorce with the new laws set in 1898.

Next, economic independence of women meant that many women did not need to marry out of necessity any longer. Their families were not pressured into finding a husband that may or may not be a terrible person so that their daughter could be provided for.

This meant that marriages were often more carefully entered and more carefully maintained. Romantic marriages also became more common since women had a greater variety of choice and freedom in who they married than before.

And to tack onto this, rural marriage practices declined greatly with the national standardization of marriage/divorce law. Reinforced by the economic and cultural changes of the Meiji Restoration + industrial revolution, many rural marriage practices, including relatively informal divorces, declined.

I have to get back to work but let me know if you have anymore questions! Cheers!