Daniel H. Foote

Juries in the Japanese Legal System: The Continuing Struggle for Citizen Participation and Democracy by Dimitri Vanoverbeke, and: Japan and Civil Jury Trials: The Convergence of Forces by Matthew J. Wilson, Hiroshi Fukurai, and Takashi Maruta (review)

Japan’s so-called jury system—a lay participation system for serious criminal cases, with mixed panels of professional judges and “lay assessors” (saiban’in, hereafter “lay judges”)—has been in operation since mid-2009. As the works reviewed here refl ect, one can trace the roots back decades or longer. The direct genesis of the current system, however, lies in the debates and recommendations of the Justice System Reform Council (JSRC), which began meeting in 1999 and issued its fi nal report in June 2001. Between then and 2004, concrete details of the system were determined and implementing legislation enacted; and an additional fi ve-year period was set aside for preparations. Ever since the JSRC began its deliberations over lay participation, commentary has abounded. Countless books and articles in Japanese have debated the pros and cons of lay participation in general, suitability for Japan, merits of all-citizen juries versus mixed panels, and numerous other aspects of the system. As called for by the original legislation, three years after the system took effect, the Supreme Court of Japan undertook a comprehensive evaluation. In addition to the resulting report, numerous books and articles in Japanese have sought to assess the impact on the justice system, on the lay judges themselves, and on the general public and society. The attention has by no means been limited to Japan. Korea, Taiwan, and other nations have studied the Japanese model in planning their own lay participation systems. And there has been a steady stream of articles about Japan’s “jury” system in the United States, Europe, and Asia. To my knowledge, however, these are the fi rst books in English to undertake a comprehensive examination of lay participation in Japan. Both books make a substantial contribution to the literature. Not surprisingly, they overlap in certain respects. Their main focus is different, however, and their respective assessments of the new system contrast sharply, providing a striking reminder of how widely views diverge. The plural “juries” in the title of the fi rst work considered here, Juries in the Japanese Legal System, bears note. Dimitri Vanoverbeke, professor of Japanese studies at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, places

Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan by Darryl E. Flaherty (review)

Public Law, Private Practice is an impressive work that greatly advances knowledge about Japan’s legal profession and its role in Japanese society and history. The author, Darryl E. Flaherty, associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, has conducted a vast amount of research, in both Japaneseand English-language sources from the Meiji era to the present, including archival materials housed at numerous institutions, biographies and autobiographies of major fi gures, and comparative works on the profession in Europe and the United States. From this comprehensive research, he has constructed a rich account of the historical development of the legal profession in Japan. As the subtitle implies, Flaherty’s primary focus is on the nineteenth century. His account commences much earlier, though, from early in the Edo era; and many themes continue to resonate today. Late in chapter 1, Flaherty quotes an 1889 letter from John Henry Wigmore to the then-president of the Johns Hopkins University: “I believe you could render a substantial service to New Japan by Historical investigations into the social and legal History of Old Japan” (p. 85). Wigmore is well known to generations of U.S. lawyers as the author of a leading treatise on the law of evidence, and he served for nearly three decades as dean of Northwestern University School of Law. He began his teaching career in 1889 as professor of Anglo-American law at Keio University and wrote the above letter that year. Wigmore himself organized a major project to compile and study law and legal precedents from the Edo era, and he devoted a chapter to Japanese legal history in his 1928 three-volume work, A Panorama of the World’s Legal Systems (West Publishing Company). Relatively few others have taken up Wigmore’s call. Noteworthy Englishlanguage sources that address civil justice in the Edo era include works by Dan Fenno Henderson, John Owen Haley, Carl Steenstrup, Herman Ooms, and Frank Upham. Their works include some discussion of legal practice

The Supreme Court and Benign Elite Democracy in Japan (review)

women who want to enter managerial tracks within fi rms have equivalent chances of doing so, however, we have no way of telling how big a role women’s preference plays in shaping the unequal distributions of men and women across the different career tracks. Despite the drawbacks discussed here, Tachibanaki’s book is impressive in the amount of information it contains. Readers might not agree with some of his interpretations, arguments, or policy recommendations, but the statistics he brings from a wide range of data sources should be helpful to all scholars and students interested in various aspects of Japanese women’s lives. Perhaps more important, Tachibanaki calls attention to a topic that has long been neglected: differentiation within women. An increasing amount of research on Western societies has shown that women as a group are far from homogeneous and that their economic well-being varies widely by their education, occupation, and family status, among other things. Tachibanaki’s book demonstrates that Japanese women are no exception. Thus, future research on inequality in Japan must pay attention to gaps not only between the two gender groups but also those within each group.