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1997 Utah L. Rev. 639 (1997)
The Place of Japanese Legal Studies in American Comparative Law

handle is hein.journals/utahlr1997 and id is 649 raw text is: The Place of Japanese Legal Studies in American Comparative Law Frank K. Upham* Students of Japanese law suffer from a disadvantage that is unusual among law school subjects: most observers think that their object of study either does not exist or is a trivial add-on to a society that functions quite well without any reference to law. This view is by no means limited to non-Japanese bewitched by visions of kabuki and the Tale of Genji. It is apparently shared by American political scientists. How else to explain the lack of a single entry for law or similar terms in the index of a volume entitled Conflict in Japan?' It is also widely shared by the Japanese. Shortly after becoming a law professor, I was asked by a Ministry of Finance bureaucrat, apparently bewildered by the idea of an American specialist in Jap- anese law, why I would want to study anything so irrelevant. And she was a graduate of a faculty of law. Despite this peculiar handicap, the field of Japanese law is now firmly established in American law schools. Although in 1970 there was only one American law professor specializing in Japanese law and only one or two law schools even offering a course, as of 1996 one count put the number of law schools with courses on Japanese law taught by full-time professors with Japanese language ability at * Professor of Law, NYU School of Law. I want to thank David Lee and Valerie Leipheimer for their excellent research assistance. I presented this paper originally at the conference on New Approaches to Comparative and Foreign Law held at the University of Utah, October 11 and 12, 1996. In addition to the useful comments I received at the conference, I have benefited from the comments of Bill Alford, Mary Anne Case, Jorge Esquirol, Mary Ann Glendon, Donald Horowitz, Duncan Kennedy, Susan Pharr, Michael Reich, and Arthur Rosett. I asked for sub- stantial help from my colleagues in Japanese law and am very grateful for detailed comments, corrections, and suggestions received from Eric Feldman, Daniel Foote, John 0. Haley, Dan Henderson, Curtis Milhaupt, and Mark Ramseyer. I have tried to incorporate their views into this Essay, but the opinions and mistakes remain mine. I presented a substantially similar paper at the Edwin 0. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University on November 14, 1996, and an expanded version of this paper will be published as a chapter in a volume commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Reischauer Institute. 1. CONFLICT IN JAPAN 403-17 (Ellis S. Krauss et al. eds., 1984). 639

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