Setsuo Miyazawa

Taking Kawashima Seriously: A Review of Japanese Research on Japanese Legal Consciousness and Disputing Behavior

This paper discusses Japanese research on legal consciousness (ho-ishiki) and civil disputing. The author presents a recent explication of Takeyoshi Kawashimas concept of legal consciousness as a cultural factor and also proposes to explore the possibility of treating it as an individual, attitudinal factor. He also reviews large-scale surveys of aggregate-level culture and studies on individual-level disputing behavior. The need and possibility of a longitudinal study of individual disputing behavior that uses individual-level attitudes and regional culture as explanatory variables is suggested.