Zeitschrift für Japanisches Recht
Heft Nr.12 / 6. Jahrgang 2001

The Multiple Worlds of “Nihon-hô”

Hiroo Sono*

 

I.     Introduction

II.    The Anatomy of “Nihon-hô”

1.   Primary and Secondary “Nihon-hô”

2.   Secondary “Nihon-hô” with an Internal Standpoint

3.   Secondary “Nihon-hô” with an External Standpoint

III.   Interaction

1.   “Japanese Law” as Secondary-External

2.   Little Impact?

IV.   The Autistic “Nihon-hô”

1.   Globalization and the “Worlds”

2.   Autistic “Nihon-hô”

3.   Demystification and Globalization

 

I.     Introduction

Among the three worlds of Japanese legal studies (“Japanese law”, “Japanisches Recht”, and “Nihon-hô”) identified by Luke Nottage,[1] “Nihon-hô” stands out as having a distinct character: it is multi-layered. I will start out in Part II by explaining what I mean by this. This perspective is important in assessing whether “Japanese law” and “Japanisches Recht” have had limited impact on “Nihon-hô”. Today, we all know better than to compare Japanese business people/business practices with U.S. lawyers/law when we compare attitudes toward contracts in the two countries.[2] Veronica Taylor and


*       I am grateful to the participants of the CAPI (Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives) Colloquium “The Multiple Worlds of Japanese Law: Disjunctions and Conjunctions” (University of Victoria, April 3, 2001) for the helpful comments I received at the colloquium and at the online discussion which took place before and after our face-to-face encounter. I would also like to note that I had only limited access to Japanese law materials (both in the Japanese and English language) during the preparation of this essay. Citations remain arbitrary.

[1]       L. Nottage, Japanisches Recht, Japanese Law, and Nihon-hô: Towards New Transnational Collaboration in Research and Teaching (in this volume, supra at 17). He develops on V. Taylor, Spectres of Comparison: Japanese Law Through Multiple Lenses (in this volume, supra at 11). I suspect that the worlds of Japanese legal studies are not limited to these three. For instance, judging from the nationalities of foreign students studying law in Japan (and especially in the case of Korea and Taiwan, judging from the history of pre-WW2 colonization), I imagine that Korea, China, and Taiwan have substantial amount of literature on law in Japan.

[2]       W. Gray, The Use and Non-Use of Contract Law in Japan: A Preliminary Study, in: 17 Law in Japan 98 (1984).