Abstract
The Japanese Civil Code was a product of the mixed reception of various foreign civil codes in the late nineteenth century, and thus deserves to be seen as the “fruit of comparative law.” In Japan, while the Commercial Code is subject to decodification to a large degree, as company law and insurance law have been shifted from the Commercial Code to special laws, the Civil Code has escaped such direct decodification until now, retaining its original components. However, due to the emergence of numerous special laws, the Civil Code has been hollowed-out and decodified in an indirect manner. In particular, the rules of consumer law exist completely outside the Civil Code, so that the concept of consumer or business operator has been never incorporated within the Civil Code. However, to integrate the special rules for consumers and so forth into the Civil Code would not fit the vertically-segmented structure of the law-making and law-enforcing process in the ministries, which is a characteristic of Japanese bureaucracy. Such multilateral constraints on the basis of Japanese legal history and the political configuration form a certain image of the forthcoming recodification of the Civil Code.
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- 1.
Yosiyuki Noda, Introduction to Japanese Law, trans. and ed. Anthony H. Angelo (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1976), 22–26.
- 2.
Gustave Boissonade, Projet de code civil pour l’Empire du Japon,Tomes 1–4, Nouvelle éd. (Tokyo: Kokubunsha, 1890–1891).
- 3.
For the antecedents and the thought of Yatsuka Hozumi, see Richard H. Minear, Japanese Tradition and Western Law: Emperor, State, and Law in the Thought of Hozumi Yatsuka. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
- 4.
Zentaro Kitagawa, “Japanese Civil Law and German Law: From the viewpoint of Comparative Law,” in The Identity of German and Japanese Civil Law in Comparative Perspectives: Die Identitat des Deutschen und des Japanischen Zivilrechts in Vergleichender Betrachtung, eds. Zentaro Kitagawa and Karl Riesenhuber (Berlin: De Gruyter Recht, 2007), 28–30.
- 5.
For the reform of adult guardianship system in 2000, see Makoto Arai and Akira Homma, “Guardianship for Adults in Japan: Legal Reforms and Advances in Practice,” Australasian Journal on Ageing 24, Supplement S1 (2005): S19.
- 6.
For the reform of the system of juridical persons in 2006, see Hiroshi Oda, Japanese Law, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009): 123–126; Tadatsune Mizuno, “Reform of the System for Charitable Corporations and Tax System Revision,” Hitotsubashi Journal of Law and Politics 37 (2009): 1–10.
- 7.
Article 175 of the Civil Code, “No real rights can be established other than those prescribed by laws including this Code.” (Translations of Japanese laws in this essay are cited from the website of Ministry of Justice. http://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/).
- 8.
Article 178 of the Civil Code, “The transfers of real rights concerning movables may not be asserted against third party, unless the movables are delivered.”
- 9.
Takeyoshi Kawashima, “Dispute Resolution in Contemporary Japan,” in Law in Japan: The Legal Order in a Changing Society, ed. Arthur Taylor von Mehren (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 41–72.
- 10.
Takashi Uchida and Veronica L. Taylor, “Japan’s ‘Era of Contract’,” in Law in Japan: A Turning Point, ed. Daniel H. Foote, (Seatle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007), 454–482.
- 11.
Article 709 of the Civil Code, “A person who has intentionally or negligently infringed any right of others, or legally protected interest of others, shall be liable to compensate any damages resulting in consequence.”
- 12.
Article 467, paragraph 1 of the Civil Code, “The assignment of a nominative claim may not be asserted against the applicable obligor or any other third party, unless the assignor gives a notice thereof to the obligor or the obligor has acknowledged the same.”
- 13.
- 14.
For the various reasons of a very conservative constitutional jurisprudence, see Shigenori Matsui, “Why Is the Japanese Supreme Court So Conservative?” Washington University Law Review 88 (2011): 1400–1416.
- 15.
According to Hiroshi Itoh, The Supreme Court and Benign Elite Democracy in Japan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 26–27, it was described that “the top echelon of the Supreme Court General Secretariat forms the hard core of the elitist judicial administration.”
- 16.
Richard J. Samuels, “Politics, Security Policy, and Japan’s Cabinet Legislation Bureau: Who Elected These Guys, Anyway?” Japan Policy Research Institute (JPRI) Working Paper 99 (March 2004).
- 17.
Matsui, “Why Is the Japanese Supreme Court So Conservative?” 1421.
- 18.
Hideki Kanda, “Finance Bureaucracy and the Regulation of Financial Markets in Japan” in Japan: Economic Success and Legal System, ed. Harald Baum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997), 312–315.
- 19.
- 20.
Consultation No. 88, at the 160th meeting.
- 21.
- 22.
In this regard, the concept of “Volksgeist as the basis of law” in the sense used by Savigny (Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft. (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1814)) remains one of the most important guidelines for modern recodification of the Civil Code.
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Ishikawa, H. (2013). Codification, Decodification, and Recodification of the Japanese Civil Code. In: Rivera, J. (eds) The Scope and Structure of Civil Codes. Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, vol 32. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7942-6_12
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