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No. 1 (107) (1991)
Artykuły

Zjawisko prawne w kulturze społecznej Japonii

[The legal phenomenon in the social culture of Japan]

  • Leszek Leszczyński
Leszek Leszczyński
Uniwersytet im. Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej w Lublinie

Published 1991-04-30

Keywords

  • society,
  • Japan,
  • legal behavior,
  • legal systems of foreign states,
  • legal culture
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Zjawisko prawne w kulturze społecznej Japonii: [The legal phenomenon in the social culture of Japan]. (1991). Studia Prawnicze The Legal Studies, 1 (107), 37-57. https://doi.org/10.37232/sp.1991.1.3

Abstract

The Japanese legal system is a system of overlapping legal solutions which differ in their relationship to the existing cultural background. It consists of norms and institutions: a) traditionally formed in the Japanese law (here one can also include the adoption of Chinese regulations in the Middle Ages), b) adopted from German law and to some extent from other European legal systems; c) adopted from American law. The set (a) is now of historical and actually symbolic significance and can impact the application of the other sets, while sets (b) and (c) are complementary and decisive.

The Japanese legal system lacks the phenomenon of legal omnipotence, although some legal and administrative regulations have quite deep reach and implications (e.g. food prices, the scale of imports). The legal regulation is focussed on the level of statutory acts. The lack of hypertrophy of executive legislation is caused by the momentous nature of extra-legal rules (social rules or economic policy, e.g. gyoseishido).

It is a unified, centralised and clearly hierarchical system. A clear distinction can be made between law-making and law-enforcement processes. Legal norms are general in nature and statutory act is the basic normative act. The processes of law application allow the formulation of several additional features.

The legal rules provide the procedural and competency basis for individual and specific decisions made by decision-makers. With regard to the substantive basis, the peculiar legal instrumentalism, geared towards achieving decision effectiveness, determines the importance of political expediency, established before action is taken (a quasi-plan system, functioning especially in the departments of administrative and economic law, where the so-called managerial type of law application can be observed). In private law sections, customs and yōri are the criteria correcting the contents of legal norms (high numbers of references to general clauses are absent, however).

The transition from the rule-by-law to the rule-of-law signalled in Japanese literature is currently at the stage of becoming. To a greater extent, an evolution from the idea of an “administrative state” to the idea of a “judicial state” is taking place as the availability of judicial measures has increased after World War II.

The dynamic, social, functional or purposive interpretation are the most common terms for the normative theories of interpretation prevalent in the literature. This seems to be a result of reaction to the potential incompatibility of the assimilated legal regulations with the native social environment of the law. It also allows precedent arguments to form in legal practice.

Group self-regulators are the most important here. This is caused, on the one hand, by the importance of group membership (a peculiar group universalism) and the lack of individualistic attitudes, and on the other, by the genesis of modern Japanese law. This law, which has no religious or moral roots, is centralised and overwhelmingly imported, and can be seen socially as a “foreign body”. Hence the reluctance to use the law and judicial institutions to resolve conflicts. Group pressure is also a decisive factor in compliance with criminal law norms.

Legal awareness is focussed around the concept of duty, especially towards “our” members of our “own” group. This is also how responsibility is perceived. The traditional lack of entitlement structures is reinforced by group solidarity and the avoidance of conflicts which could arise if individual claims materialised. Duty may be created through rules or informal agreements.

As a result, the model of social legal culture may be defined as intrinsically conformist and opportunistic in some aspects. The attitude of conformity is protected by the dominating social features, in particular by the conviction regarding the role of consensus and social harmony. The opportunistic attitude is present there, where effective action becomes a value (economy) and is reinforced by the conviction regarding the need to defer to people occupying higher positions in the social hierarchy.

This analysis leads to a conclusion that attempts at importing this culture to any European country would have to reveal the dysfunctional characteristics of the law. It is also likely convincing that applying the European benchmark to the assessment of legal phenomena in the Japanese cultures cannot lead to full understanding why law, which is also not “liked” here, does not

become socially dysfunctional. Only those analyses rejecting positivist assumptions lead towards treating law as a phenomenon significantly coupled to the social reality as an order of human relations have a chance of success and common law courts attempt to express their views from this perspective. And although it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this research attitude in general, abandoning it could not lead to any meaningful results in an analysis of Japanese law.

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