ABSTRACT
This chapter attests to the difficulty field researchers face when trying to locate corruption in practice. It argues that references to corruption in the discourses of appellants and judges can help to locate "public trust" and "law"—just as Gupta for example uses corruption discourse to map out people's interactions with "the state" as a translocal entity. The chapter focuses on the judgment of corruption and defenses against the charge rather than on the practice of corruption itself. What this research tells us of the interdependent relationship between law, corruption, and moral rectitude makes it clear that there is more than one way to search out, analyze, and—possibly—confront corruption. The chapter shows that Japanese judges of the prewar Supreme Court negotiated the intersection of legal statute, morality, and culture by expanding the legal process to accommodate more ambiguity while at the same time applying exceedingly high moralistic standards. It explains the historical forces that shaped the institutions of the Japanese judiciary.
