Slavery in Japan

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Slavery in Japan existed in several forms from antiquity through the modern period, alongside and proceeding other systems of unfree and coerced labor, some manifestations of which continue to this day. In early Japanese sources, enslaved people included groups referred to as seikō (生口) and later nuhi (奴婢) under the ritsuryō legal codes, and historians debate how these institutions compare with slavery and serfdom in other societies. By the late medieval and Sengoku periods, the buying and selling of captives and other dependent people remained widespread, including the export of Japanese people through the Portuguese slave trade in the 16th century. Under Toyotomi Hideyoshi, slavery was officially banned in the late 16th century, but other forms of legally sanctioned coercion and dependency continued, including penal “non-free labor” under early Edo-period law. In the 20th century, Japan’s wartime empire used large-scale forced labor and prisoner-of-war labor during the Second Sino-Japanese...

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