Masaakira Tomii

Masaakira Tomii, born 16 October 1858 in Kyoto and who died 14 September 1935 in Tokyo, was a Japanese jurist who attended the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages before studying law privately in France from 1877, at the University of Lyon, and earning his doctorate in jurisprudence in 1883. He returned to Japan and became a professor of law at Tokyo Imperial University from 1885, and together with Hozumi Nobushige and Kenjiro Ume he served on the committee that drafted Japan's new Civil Code, enacted in 1898; in 1893 he had argued for postponing the code's original planned enactment and led the Research Commission on the Civil Code's reform effort as its chief member, earning recognition in the secondary literature as one of the fathers of Japanese civil law. He was elected to Japan's House of Peers in 1891, became the first president of Kyoto Hosei School, later Ritsumeikan University, in 1900, and served as president of the Tokyo School of Japanese and French Law, later Hosei University.