Zeitschrift für Japanisches Recht

2. Jahrgang 1997 - Heft Nr.4

Aus fremder Quelle

For the Liberal Transformation of Japanese Legal Culture:
A Review of the Recent Scholarship and Practice

Setsuo Miyazawa

Table of Contents

I. Introduction

II. The "Interpretive Turn" in Studies on Legal Culture and Consciousness

III. My Own Interpretive Turn

IV. Visions for the Transformation of Japanese Legal Culture

1. The Liberal Vision

2. Japanese Critics of Rights

3. Hegemonic Power of the Legal System and Legal Culture

4. Participation and Negotiation as Solution

5. Priority in Japanese Society

V. Agents of Transformation

VI. A Story of a Transformative Movement in Japan

VII. Conclusion

Bibliography

 

I. Introduction

In this paper, I wish to discuss two problems. Firstly, I wish to discuss what transformation of the Japanese legal culture is desirable. Secondly, I wish to discuss how such transformation could be brought about. These questions require me to review both the scholarship and the practice.

Stewart Macaulay wrote (Macaulay, 1992) that when Joel Handler went to Philadelphia in 1992 to give his presidential address at an annual meeting of the Law and Society Association and criticize postmodernist scholars for their disabling impacts on transformative politics (Handler, 1992), he rattled the cage. Handler actually rattled the cage strongly enough to produce a symposium in Law & Society Review and to make his successor, Sally Engle Merry, present her own vision of socio-legal studies and transformative movements in her presidential address (Merry, 1995). I would be happy if my paper had one tenth of that effect. This means that I will criticize some of the best and brightest of the socio-legal scholarship in both Japan and North America.

II. The "Interpretive Turn" in Studies on Legal Culture and Consciousness

Many recent works on legal culture and consciousness in English-speaking countries can be characterized as results of the "interpretive turn" in socio-legal studies (Harrington and Yngvesson, 1990). Among its various characteristics, the interpretive turn sees legal cultures both as a constraint and as a resource. A legal culture is a constraint when it sets a limit on the way people understand and respond to the reality. A legal culture is a resource