Legal Hazard

Legal matters are more attached to our daily life. The Western people growing in the contract societies are rather accustomed to legal things than the Japanese. Historically in the recognizable records, primitive constitution and laws were established as early as the seventh century in Japan. Since then, there have been almost no ages without any laws in its history. Nevertheless, the constitutions or laws don't seem to have fit the Japanese society. These rules have been used not for developing well-disciplined citizenship but for oppressing people. It's partially attributable to the characteristic of its social side. As a symbolic expression says "Harmony is the greatest of virtues", the people tend to avoid conflicts. To introduce another expression to describe the mutual relationship as "Tacit understanding", it can be said that the people understand each other before reaching conflicts for the homogenous feature of the Japanese society.

Let's get down to the Japanese legal hazards. How many laws are there in Japan? Although this question seems to be less important, the answer is there are nearly 1000. What's important is that as many as one third of the total existing laws were legislated in Meiji period (which had lasted form 1868 to 1912). Many of them are civil codes, which have much to do with our daily life. Since the last war, anything has drastically changed. Even in the past decade, life has sharply improved with the advent of high technologies such as the Internet. We buy goods or services through computers. Therefore, legal matters occur in the purchasing process. Laws or Acts have to be adjusted in response to the fast changing societies. Japan, in reality, is a laggard in the legal field.

Nevertheless, some laws have been newly legislated recently in order to cope with consumer oriented societies. For example, there are Product Liability Law in 1997, House Quality Promoting Law in 2000(which imposes house makers or dealers to indemnify defected damages on main structures for ten years), Financial Product Selling Law in 2001(which imposes the sellers of financial products to explain the risks to consumers).

While there is a series of legislation for consumers, the legal procedures have changed to make it easy to file a lawsuit. There has been much criticism that it’s troublesome to sue partly because of its high suing costs including lawyers’ fee, partly because of less intimacy of lawyers resulting from its small number. Fundamentally as I mention above, the Japanese people don’t like conflicts. So they tend to settle mutual problems before going to court. Actually the cases of settlements out of court overwhelmingly exceeds those in court. But the revision of the legal procedure laws may increase the civil lawsuits especially in the small ones. The highlight is that judgment is given in principal in one day in the case that the liability is 300,000 yen or less.

For another factor to raise legal awareness, the number of lawyers will increase. There are about 15,000 lawyers in Japan. Compared with that in the US, which has roughly 800,000, the number is obviously lower. Although the backgrounds behind two countries are fairly different in any points, there have been demands to increase the number of lawyers to cope with legal problems the people have as the second largest economy. Legal matters, of course, arise not only from civil cases but also business-related contracts. With a series of legislating consumer-oriented laws, the incremental trend of bankruptcies and labor troubles, there are great demands from business sides. Particularly in the past couple of years, there have been the revisions and creations of laws to promote the restructuring efforts of Japanese businesses. In this sense, Japan needs certain number of lawyers as one of the biggest developed countries.

Under the circumstances mainly on the sides of legislation such as new laws for consumers, business restructuring and increasing lawyers, the legal minds of the Japanese will gradually develop. Moreover, the further globalization may accelerate the development of the minds. Colliding with different cultures in one country, it’s not avoidable that some troubles arise among the people with different backgrounds. For many reasons, Japan is definitely entering lawsuit society.