1. CONTEMPORARY LEGAL SYSTEM OF JAPAN

Japan is a modern country. She has an elaborate system of enacted laws and judicial courts under an advanced constitution. A variety of laws appear to be operating through well-organized machineries and functionaries for administration and adjudication.

Such a legal system was founded in her modernization process which commenced full-scale operation after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The first modernized system of Japanese law was not of indigenous origin but was received from developed Western countries. The model of reception was primarily taken from Germany, mainly Prussia, then a rising absolutist empire under the reigns of Wilhelm I and II, and additionally from France and some others. The systematic legislation modelled after Western law was mainly achieved in the decade following the enactment of the first constitution in 1889. With the modernized form of law having been established, the Japanese legal system steadily developed until it was comparable in appearance with its mother law in Western countries. Japanese law before the end of World War II is without doubt grouped into the Civil Law system.

After World War II, Japan was forced to accept a Common Law system directly from the U.S.A. It is true that the Common Law system made an important contribution to the required democratization of Japanese law and society, but the Civil Law system seems to have been too firmly rooted in Japanese law as well as in the Japanese science of law to have been replaced wholly by the Common Law system. Some scholars criticize this reform of the law, from absolutist to democratic, as unsatisfactory, while others appraise it as a harmonious though not perfect coexistence of both systems.

However opinion may be divided, Japan has a well-organized and well-functioning legal system which may be compared with no other country in the non-Western world.¹