I was delighted to learn of the publication of a new hornbook on Japanese law by West Academic, a leading American academic publisher. This seemed to run counter to the general trend of a decline in interest in (and publications about) the field of Japanese law in the US. Although a number of textbooks on Japanese law have been produced in the US and remain in print, it has seemingly been difficult to keep them up-to-date. Ironically, this trend has occurred precisely at a time over the last several years when Japan’s gradual pace of reform has accelerated and the value of current comparative research on Japan should be high.

This book’s publishing success is explained in large part by the identity of the book’s co-authors: Colin Jones, a long-time professor of law at Doshisha University in Kyoto who has a broad background in Japanese law and administration (and has often shed light on underappreciated aspects of Japanese law in his columns in The Japan Times); and Frank Ravitch, a professor of law at Michigan State University who has focused on constitutional law and religion with an emphasis on comparisons with Japan (and who has run a summer programme on Japanese law in Kyoto for a number of years) who presumably took the lead in arranging for the book’s publication in the US.

To cover a broad field such as Japanese law in a single volume requires tradeoffs and compromises. I would characterize the authors’ approach as aiming at a broad audience with the goal of providing a non-specialist reader with a thorough grounding in Japanese law and administration in a single volume. To achieve this goal, the authors generally forego footnotes so that, even though this volume is published as part of West Academic’s hornbook series, it is presumably not intended to provide Japanese-law scholars and students with a starting point to pursue research interests (as might be the case with Hiroshi Oda’s well-known single volume on the subject)Footnote ¹. The authors are also disciplined and, although their respective areas of expertise—family law (Jones) and religion and the Constitution (Ravitch)—are incorporated into the book, they refrain from heavily emphasizing these areas of interest.Footnote ²

The result is a comprehensive, but efficient, volume of reasonable length that does an excellent job of providing a broad overview of Japanese law and administration. The authors concentrate on the administration of government and the law, in addition to the substance of Japanese law. The first half of the book (Chapters 1–7) focuses primarily on the structure and organization of Japanese law and administration, while the second half (Chapters 8–11) focuses on substantive discussions of the major areas of Japanese law, such as criminal law, civil law, dispute resolution, and business law.

Chapter 1 (“Introduction”) summarizes the always present problems in the study of Japanese law—tendencies to focus too much on broad, cultural stereotypes and on formal laws and the court system—and outlines the book’s methods of countering them, namely avoiding cultural explanations, emphasizing the practical uses of law as a tool, and looking at governmental institutions as part of the overall legal system. Chapter 2 (“The Historical Context”) traces the development of Japanese law, primarily through the Edo (1603–1868) and Meiji periods (1868–1912), noting its relatively recent origin in the Meiji period and continuing efforts to adapt Western law to fit Japanese circumstances. Chapter 3 (“The Structure of the Japanese Government”), which is the longest chapter in the book’s first half, contains an extensive overview of the administrative structure of the Japanese government, with particular reference to those institutions that are related to the legal system. Chapter 4 (“The Judiciary”) examines Japan’s court system, noting its continuity and change with respect to Japan’s pre-war system, and particularly emphasizing the judiciary’s strong administrative function (in addition to its judicial function) and the resulting effect on the career paths of professional judges.

Chapter 5 (“Japanese Law: What It Is and Where It Comes From”) delves into the various categories of law and (particularly) regulation in Japan, the law-making process, and the use of judicial (primarily Supreme Court) cases as precedent. Chapter 6 (“Constitutional Law”) discusses continuity and change between the postwar Constitution and its Meiji predecessor, and traces the European, American, and Japanese influences on the postwar Constitution that was supposedly “imposed” by the American-led occupation following World War II (but which has never been amended and the implementation and interpretation of which are characterized in the book as being distinctly Japanese). Chapter 7 (“The Legal Professions”) covers Japan’s heterogeneous legal services market by avoiding the tempting, but inaccurate, comparison of the number of lawyers (bengoshi) in Japan compared to other industrialized nations and instead focusing in the first half of the chapter on “other” legal professions and only in the second half turning to the more familiar topic of bengoshi.

Chapter 8 (“The Criminal Justice System”) describes law-enforcement actors and institutions, and provides overviews of both the process and substance of criminal law (and reminds us, for example, that there was domestic criticism in Japan of “hostage justice” resulting from long-term pre-trial detention well before the arrest of Carlos Ghosn). Chapter 9 (“The Civil Code, Family, Identity and the Civil Law Infrastructure”) provides an overview of private law in Japan, centring on the important Civil Code and including discussions of practical issues such as the significant role of Japan’s household registry (koseki) system. Chapter 10 (“The Civil and Administrative Justice Systems”) covers civil dispute resolution, not (as in some other textbooks) by discussing possible cultural explanations for Japan’s supposedly low rate of litigation, but rather by providing an overview of the substance of Japan’s civil procedure law and also the reality of dispute resolution in a variety of contexts, including civil law generally, family law, administrative law, and bankruptcy law. Finally, Chapter 11 (“The Legal Framework of the Business Environment”) seeks to provide a sense of the framework of business regulation by focusing on a number of core areas (and the regulator for each area), including contract law, company law, securities law, banking law, employment law, and intellectual property law.

By characterizing the book as an introductory volume for general readers, I do not mean to imply that it is not of interest to Japanese-law specialists and students. I would point in particular to Chapter 3 and Chapter 5, which are very useful chapters that are not found in other textbooks or casebooks on Japanese law. The book also provides frequent reminders to Japanese-law specialists of areas that are often overlooked or insufficiently emphasized. One example of an underappreciated aspect of Japanese administration is the section (in Chapter 3) on Japan’s Board of Audit, which I do not recall having ever previously encountered in English (with the exception of Professor Jones’s Japan Times column on the subject). Or, for example, if one wished to recall the exact distinction between a Cabinet order and a ministerial order issued by the Cabinet (which recently happened to me), it appears in Chapter 7 (pp. 129–31).

I have two caveats. The major one is the aforementioned lack of footnotes, which does not permit the use of this book as a starting point for further research. This may give pause to utilizing this book as the primary source of information on Japanese law, both in the classroom and outside it. The book could also have benefited from another round of editing/proofreading, as there is a distracting pattern of grammatical mistakes, repeated words, and the like (the most conspicuous example of which occurs on p. 419, where a four-line discussion of the practice of tanshin funin, i.e. an employee living apart from his family, is repeated nearly verbatim in two consecutive paragraphs).

The stated aim of the book is to “teach you the structure of the Japanese government, the legal institutions that constitute a part of the government, and the foundation of law and practice that underpin them.” It does an admirable job of achieving that goal and goes well beyond it to convey successfully a sense of the “living” law in Japan, including practical considerations and applications of Japanese law, and the operation of its legal system. The book is a welcome addition to our literature on Japanese law and the Japanese legal system.