Sungyun Lim's Rules of the House is a groundbreaking work on Korea's colonial history (1910–45), legal history, history of gender and family, and modern history as a whole. Broadly, the book analyzes the reshaping of the Korean family system over the first half of the twentieth century through legal proceedings; the gradual introduction of the Japanese household registration system; and Koreans’ efforts to reframe, negotiate, and resist this process. Such developments affected the modern formations of gender relations, inheritance practices, customs and customary law, and cultural norms involving sexuality and conjugal ideals—indeed well past the colonial period into even more recent times.
The book furthermore highlights the agency of the colonized Koreans in general and Korean women in particular, who pursued grievances and lawsuits over inheritance, divorce, adoption, and household authority. Lim's core argument is that the colonial setting brought about a gradual nuclearization of the legally constituted family system,...
