Japanese Law and the Asia-Pacific

On 8 May I was interviewed by NHK World Radio's principal program director, Yutaka Konishi. His main questions and some of my points in response are outlined below. A transcript of some of our interview can be heard or downloaded on their "Radio News in English" broadcast today at http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/radio/program/ (in .asx format, playable on Windows Media or equivalents: the extract begins after 6 minutes and runs through to around 10 minutes on the broadcast).

[Konishi] Economic cooperation in the wider Pacific region has accelerated, with Japan’s participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks becoming certain, and a meeting of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) starting on Thursday 9 May in Brunei. Oceanian nations such as Australia and New Zealand are key in such talks. These nations promote trade and are rich in natural resources and farm products, and they have played a leading economic cooperation role in the wider Pacific.

As well as semester-length exchange opportunities, such as those described by Ganesh Vaheisvaran (presently at Yonsei University in Korea), Sydney Law School has already started to meet the challenge of 'Australia in the Asian Century' by developing short-term offshore courses in various Asian countries.

Jenny Han, a final-year LLB student with a BA (Hons) in Japanese Studies, reports below on two experiences in Japan. The Kyoto/Tokyo Seminars in Japanese Law are offered for credit to LLB/JD and Masters students over 10 days every February, to Japanese, Australian and other international students. Participation in the INC negotiation and arbitration competition in Tokyo usually attracts course credit (within the 'International Moot' LLB/JD unit), although Sydney Law School is moving towards fielding a team every two years (recommencing in the December 2015 moot). We are very grateful for financial supporters of these opportunities for closer engagement with Japan, especially Mr Akira Kawamura (LLM 1979, former President of the International Bar Association) and Mitsui Matsushima Australia Pty Ltd.

The Australian government is slowly following up on the agenda set out in last year's 'Australia in the Asian Century' White Paper. An Implementation Plan has now been announced, along with an expanded Strategic Advisory Board, and public Submissions are sought on follow-up individual country strategies (by 31 May) for Japan, China, Indonesia, India and South Korea.

Of particular interest for Australian universities and their students, on 6 April the first round of applications opened for 'AsiaBound' study - with a deadline of 20 May 2013. The government had already announced on 31 October 2012, albeit in broad terms, the $37 million AsiaBound Grants Program:

AsiaBound provides funding in the form of $2000 or $5000 grants for around 3600 Australian students each year to participate in a study experience in Asia. Students are able to undertake short-term mobility for a variety of experiences including practicums, clinical placements, research trips or volunteer projects for up to 6 months. Students are also able to undertake semester based experiences for one or two semesters. In addition to study grants, AsiaBound offers grants of $1000 for preparatory Asian language study that can be undertaken prior to or concurrently with an approved mobility project.

Program Aims:
Increase the overall number of Australian students with a first-hand study experience of Asia through funding for short-term study and language grants as well as increased OS-HELP loans
Encourage more students to become Asia-literate by supporting institutions to diversify their mobility offerings in Asia
Enhance the skills and expertise of Australians through access to a variety of study opportunities in Asia
Support increased Asian language competency of Australian students together with mobility experiences
Increase collaboration and partnerships between Australian and Asian higher education and vocational institutions.

Hopefully this program will further encourage Sydney Law School student engagement with the fascinating world of law in Asia. Already they enjoy opportunities for short-term offshore courses in Japan (every February), China, Malaysia/Indonesia and Nepal. Our law students also have also competed successfully since 2005, as part of 'Team Australia' with ANU students, in the Intercollegiate Negotiation and Arbitration competition (INC) held in Tokyo each December. There is also growing interest in semester-length offshore exchanges to leading law schools in Asia, thanks to efforts to expand university- and faculty-level student exchange agreements (traditionally focused more on Europe and North America) as well as the growing numbers of law courses offered in English by partner institutions in the region. The government's new 'AsiaBound' funding should further increase the attractiveness of these opportunities.

Already, our law students are taking the plunge. An example is Ganesh Vaheisvaran, who mooted at the INC in Tokyo (in the English-language division in 2011, and in the Japanese-language division last year). He is now spending a semester at Yonsei University in Seoul, thanks to a university-level student exchange agreement reinforced by a new faculty-level MOU. As you can read from the report below, Ganesh is obviously enjoying his Korean law and language studies - as well as some interesting extra-curricular activities!

Written by Joel Rheuben (LLM candidate UTokyo, LLB/BA (Hons) Syd, Solicitor (NSW))

In spite of Japan’s perpetual combination of economic, diplomatic and demographic challenges – not to mention the fact that the current House of Representatives faces potential invalidation by the Supreme Court – Prime Minister Shinzo Abe continues to focus an inordinate amount of political energy on his pet project of constitutional "revision". Together with the hard-right alliance Nippon Ishin no Kai, Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has determined to attack first and foremost Article 96 of the Constitution, which sets out the mechanism by which the document can be amended.

Currently, that provision requires a two-thirds majority vote of each house of the Diet to initiate a popular referendum in order to effect constitutional change. Abe and others argue that the two-thirds majority requirement makes it too hard to put constitutional amendments to a vote. The LDP/Nippon Ishin plan would lower the threshold for a referendum to a simple majority in each house. Yet Australia has a similar threshold - without having resulted in many constitutional amendments, in practice.

This is a rich book, written by Cornell Law School's Professor Annelise Riles (University of Chicago Press, 2011, xii+295 pages). It is full of ideas and observations drawn partly from extensive fieldwork – particularly in Tokyo over 1997-2001 (p. ix), just as Japan was implementing its “Big Bang” reforms aimed at making its financial markets more “free, fair and global” (p. 120). It deserves careful reading, and re-reading, by those researching Japan as well as those interested in financial markets, regulatory theory, contract law, international commercial law, socio-legal studies and anthropology more generally.

Written by Joel Rheuben (University of Tokyo)

As reported in the New York Times earlier this month (and by the Sydney Morning Herald some two weeks later), Beate Sirota Gordon sadly passed away in the final days of 2012, aged 89. While the Times’ obituary provides an adequate summary of her life’s achievements, scholars of Japanese law will likely best know of Ms Gordon as the only female civilian member in the Government Section of the postwar Occupation forces, recounted in her 1998 autobiography, “The Only Woman in the Room” (now astonishingly overpriced on Amazon: see her verbal summary on YouTube instead).

The 10th Asian Law Institute (ASLI) conference will take place in Bangalore at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) over 23-24 May 2013. The following is an accepted panel proposal drafted primarily by Dr Dan Puchniak, ANJeL-in-ASEAN Convenor (NUS):

In autumn 2009, the progressive coalition led by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) achieved a historic victory in the general election and came to power, expelling the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had been in power continuously since its establishment in 1955 (except for a very brief break in the early 1990s). The new DPJ-led coalition intended to make the policy-making process more transparent and more strongly controlled by politicians, as well as to make the policy orientation of the Japanese government more progressive. After three years, the polls showed significant discontent among the public with the DPJ’s achievements, and power reverted to the LDP in the December 2012 general election.

It is timely for legal academics to examine whether, and in which sense, the DPJ-government affected law reform over the last three years. In this context, Nottage and Kozuka will explain how—perhaps, quite unexpectedly—the historic political turnover in Japan (“macro-politics”) has had a limited influence on important reforms that are taking place in the field of Japanese contract law. In contrast, however, the process of contract law reform has been substantially influenced by the politicking of lawyers and professional bureaucrats (“micro-politics”) who have a personal stake in the reform process. Ultimately, based on this experience, Nottage and Kozuka suggest that micro-politics is more important than macro-politics in Japan’s legal reform process.

Matsunaka will continue the discussion of politics and legal reform by analyzing the new round of corporate law reform, which was initially driven by the strong policy agendas of several DPJ members. As the corporate law reform deliberations progressed, however, the debates increasingly became dominated by elite academics and MOJ officials and, ultimately, the reforms now appear to reflect little, if any, of the DPJ’s core values. Matsunaka’s analysis of this “watering-down” of the DPJ’s policy based reforms provides an interesting perspective on Japan’s legal reform process and contributes to the broad literature on the politics of corporate governance law reform.

Kozuka will then extend on Matsunaka’s analysis by examining Japan’s recent reform of its broadcasting regulation, which was one of the most important agendas for the DPJ when it first came to power. Again, Kozuka’s findings suggest that the more extreme policy based positions of the DPJ gradually faded in the process of law reform, with the final result being more technical and modest deregulatory reforms in the new Broadcasting Law of 2010.

Puchniak will conclude the discussion by examining the recent introduction of the business judgment rule into Japanese corporate law. At least based on conventional wisdom, the fact that the business judgment rule—which is of critical importance in corporate law—was introduced into Japanese law purely through judicial precedent (without any mention of it in Japan’s codified/statutory corporate law) is astounding. Puchniak’s analysis of this unanticipated source of law reform in the DPJ era will shine a light on a substantial blind-spot in both the current understanding of Japanese legal reform and the more general comparative corporate law literature.

In sum, these four presentations offer a good opportunity to discuss the relationship between the political process and law reform, policy choice through the judiciary and the determinants of the role of law in a post-industrial society in Asia.