Law in Japan

Reviewed by: Law in Japan: A Turning Point Harald Baum (bio) Law in Japan: A Turning Point. Edited by Daniel H. Foote. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2008. xxxix, 667 pages. $65.00. This book’s title, Law in Japan, deliberately refers to the beginnings of U.S. scholarship in Japanese law and the corresponding efforts of Japanese scholars and practitioners in presenting their own law in English to a Western, [End Page 451] at first mostly American, audience.1 It grew out of a 2002 conference organized in Seattle by the editor, Daniel H. Foote, under the auspices of the Asian Law Center of the University of Washington School of Law. This conference itself was modeled structurally and topically on a historic conference arranged in 1961 at Harvard Law School and the resulting classic collection, Law in Japan: The Legal Order in a Changing Society (Harvard University Press), edited by Arthur Taylor von Mehren in 1963. For that event, von Mehren assembled a group of leading Japanese law professors and judges, mostly from Tokyo, and paired them with American collaborators. Both the present volume’s title and its subtitle, A Turning Point, refer directly to that predecessor. Then, as today, major changes in the development of Japanese law are the focus of the books. The earlier work gave a competent and comprehensive overview of the Japanese legal system as it presented itself at the beginning of the 1960s, freshly reshaped under the influence of U.S. law as part of the process of Japan’s “democratization” initiated by the Allied powers. This period saw the first fundamental change to modern Japanese law since its introduction—or rather construction from scratch—by Meiji reformers in the three decades at the end of the nineteenth century. These reformers had appropriated various, mostly continental European, laws as their role models. A century later, around the turn of the millennium, Japan’s legal system finds itself in the middle of yet another far-reaching and ongoing realignment. Arguably, this constitutes the third watershed, after the Meiji reforms and the major postwar reforms. In contrast, however, this time the impetus for change comes from within and not from abroad in the form of gaiatsu, and the resulting outcomes cannot be associated with either predominantly European or U.S. legal influences. After a “lost” decade of recession and regulatory muddling through during most of the 1990s, the balance in the epic battle between conservative and progressive policymakers in Japan increasingly shifted toward the latter. Within a few years, and obviously without an overarching all-inclusive master plan, a plethora of reforms began to take hold in various areas of law. The “Japanese Big Bang” reshaped the country’s financial regulatory architecture; consecutive reforms created a Japanese company law that is one of the most flexible and modern in the world; changes in administrative laws challenged the dominance of the once almighty Japanese bureaucracy; citizens’ rights and consumer protection gained legal prominence; and a major overhaul of the legal education and procedure laws directly aimed at coping with the shortage of lawyers and [End Page 452] other serious defaults of the Japanese judiciary system. A suitable catch phrase may be the often-cited fundamental shift “from ex ante to ex post controls of markets” to cope with the competitive demands of an increasingly internationalized economy and society. It is these changes that the volume presented here aims to capture and analyze in context. In marked contrast to the early 1960s, there is no scarcity today of Western-language scholarship on Japanese law and all its aspects; however, a comprehensive work that takes stock of the present paradigmatic overhaul of major parts of Japan’s legal system has been lacking. The editor invited some 30 authors and coauthors to contribute, mainly from Japan—almost exclusively, as in 1961, from the University of Tokyo—and the United States, but also a few from Australia and Germany. With the exception of two attorneys from Tokyo, all are scholars. Among the Japanese contributors are many names well known to comparative lawyers with an interest in Japan. The same is true of the Western contributors, most of whom are experienced researchers

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