This article describes the actual situation of criminal appeals defined as pleas of relief to higher courts regarding undetermined trials, under the Republic of China’s Nanjing era between 1927 and 1937, in order to better understand the significance of the introduction of modern Western-style criminal justice institutions in China during the first half of the 20th century.
Under the preceding Qing Dynasty, procedures did exist for higher-level institutions judging decisions made by lower-level institutions and for parties dissatisfied with judgments of lower-level institutions appealed to higher authorities to reverse the judgement; however, these procedures differed from the modern Western-style appeals system, which would be an important matter within the formation of law and order in 20th century China, which began during the Nanjing era, the focus of the present article.
Its conclusions may be summarized as follows. To begin with, the criminal appeals system introduced under the judicial reforms of the late Qing period and the early Republican era was well organized, but it also suffered from an increase in the case loads to be handled by the judiciary and an increase in the burden of proof on defendants due to the resulting prolongation of lawsuits. Notwithstanding, in many criminal cases, defendants made appeals that were accepted by higher courts. Secondly, for defendants in criminal cases, raising an appeal was an indispensable means to be relieved from unjust judgements, while for the judiciary, the appeal system was of great significance in that it worked to clarify the truth of a case beyond doubt and prevent false charges. Therefore, the modern Western-style criminal appeals system was established as a measure for the relief of criminal defendants was an effective and important facet of judicial reform in China during the first half of the 20th century.

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In monarchical states from the latter half of the 19th into the early 20th century, a huge amount of commodities were mass-produced and put on the market to commemorate any and all celebrations conducted by the world's royal families, as scenes of large crowds gathering to buy these souvenirs of all types and styles were witnessed more and more frequently throughout the world, Japan being no exception. In at least a part of the research to date on monarchical nationalism in Japan and abroad, in particular those studies which tend to interpret the phenomenon within a theoretical framework of “the invention of tradition”, the peddling of never ending lines of royal memorabilia is seen to function socially as circulating important media for continually maintaining and arousing within the national memory all the accomplishments of monarchs past and present.
To the contrary, if we adhere to the various research findings regarding the culture of modern urban consumption, forms of awareness and material want which were generated in the cities of the world by the mechanism of mass production and distribution at the turn of the century also clashed with ideas about tradition and continuity. That is to say, what the mechanisms of modern economy and technology aroused in urban populations was, rather than an appreciation of the past, the clearly anti-traditionalist attitude of putting a price on novelty and the present moment-antitraditional in the formation of a consumption cycle by which new products were constantly sought, then forgotten. In pursuing this latter point of view, the author of the present article examines the true picture of how and why souvenirs commemorating the celebratory events in the lives of the Japanese imperial family were bought and sold during the Taisho and Showa eras, with emphasis on their distribution within urban society.
The study reveals that 1) the urban populations of the two eras often deciphered and desired every line of souvenir released on the occasion of a royal celebration as being more “fashionable” (linked to the “novelty” of the event itself) than traditional, and 2) among the purveyors of these items in the cities there was the perception that the present line of items would be shortly consumed and disposed of. Taken together, these two points indicate that royal commemorative souvenirs became a media having the opposite effect on efforts to manipulate the public consciousness as “memorabilia” of monarchical accomplishments past and present. In other words, from the historical perspective of mass production and distribution, the research to date which has simplistically read into the release of these supposed “memorabilia” as just one more way in which industrial capitalism collaborated with and complemented monarchical nationalism is called into question by the actual conditions and perceptions under which they were being bought and sold in urban markets.

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