Many people believe that conflict in the well-disciplined Japanese society is so rare that the Japanese legal system is of minor importance. Frank Upham shows conclusively that this view is mistaken and demonstrates that the law is extensively used, on the one hand, by aggrieved groups to articulate their troubles and mobilize political support and, on the other, by the government to channel and manage conflict after it has arisen. This is the first Western book to take law seriously as an integral part of the dynamics of Japanese business and society, and to show how an informal legal system can work in a complex industrial democracy. Upham does this by focusing on four recent controversies with broad social implications: first, how Japan dealt with the world's worst industrial pollution and eventually became a model for Western environmental reforms; second, how the police and courts have allowed one Japanese outcast group to use carefully orchestrated physical coercion to achieve wide-ranging affirmative action programs; third, how Japanese working women used the courts to force employers to eliminate many forms of discrimination and eventually convinced the government to pass an equal employment opportunity act; and, finally, how the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and various sectors of Japanese industry have used legal doctrine to cope with the dramatic changes in Japan's economy over the last twenty-five years. Readers interested in the interaction of law and society generally; those interested in contemporary Japanese sociology, politics, and anthropology; and American lawyers, businessmen, and government officials who want to understand how law works in Japan will all need this unusual new book.

How does a nation, defeated in war, respond to externally imposed reforms that set that nations family system upside down, completely eliminating the familys modus operandi At least that is what the elimination of family kinship and single inheritance in reforms by the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in the 1948 Civil Code was meant to do. How did the Japanese respond to these reforms in Family Law that many believed would result in the destruction of the family? This study looks at succession and adoption in the years following the reform to understand how the Japanese were able to circumvent the Code and shape the family to meet their evolving needs.

Introduction to Japanese Politics, now in its fully updated sixth edition, is a comprehensive and current review of political and public policy developments in Japan. Since the previous edition, Japan’s economic policy has undergone significant change with a prolonged period of deflation having altered the dynamics of the Japanese economy. At the same time, the Abe administration has expanded Japan’s international security participation, previously limited by the constitution, while China’s activities in the South China Sea have impinged upon Japan’s territorial claims. This classic introduction to the Japanese political system has been revised and fully updated in this sixth edition to take into account these widespread changes in the country's political life. Building on the structure and content of the previous edition, this new edition covers: An overview of Japan's geographical setting and history Japan’s political institutions, processes, and actors Recent organizational, ideological, and policy changes in the LDP since its return to power The country's distinctive social order and its educational, healthcare, and public safety systems The increasingly contentious realm of foreign relations and security issues, including China's expanding role and the effect of North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons. This broad-ranging textbook continues to be essential reading for students of Japanese politics, international politics and Japanese studies.

Japan's catapult to world economic power has inspired many studies by social scientists, but few have looked at the 45 years of postwar Japan through the lens of history. The contributors to this book seek to offer such a view. As they examine three related themes of postwar history, the authors describe an ongoing historical process marked by unexpected changes, such as Japan's extraordinary economic growth, and unanticipated continuities, such as the endurance of conservative rule. A provocative set of interpretative essays by eminent scholars, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century Japan and the dilemmas facing Japan today.

The work of both socio-legal scholars and specialists working in social movements research continues to contribute to our understanding of how law relates to and informs the politics of social movements. In the 1990s, an important line of new research, most of it initiated by those working in the law and society tradition, began to bridge the gaps between these two areas of scholarship. This work includes new approaches to group ?legal mobilization? politics; analysis of the judicial impact on social reform struggles; studies of individual legal mobilization in civil disputing and an almost entirely new area of research in ?cause lawyering?. It brings together the best of this research introduced by a detailed essay by the editor.

A critical examination of Japan's recent economic success, which places the country's post-war "miracle" within a broader social and political framework. It argues that the political and social arrangements that allowed Japan to succeed are now eroding

This is a fresh and surprising account of Japan's culture from the 'opening up' of the country in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's modernizers and nationalists, but with resistance, conflict, distress. We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychological fall-out of breakneck modernization. These people all sprang from the soil of modern Japan, but their personalities and projects failed to fit. They were 'dark blossoms': both East-West hybrids and home-grown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new structures of mainstream Japan.

This widely used text is an even-handed, forthright attempt to explain the political life of Japan as well as the forces that shape it. It demystifies this complex society by explaining the historical background for modern Japan; the political process, its formal structure, the party system, and citizen participation; the social order and the domestic economy; and Japan's role in international politics with emphasis on U.S.-Japanese relations and the international economy. The revised and updated Third Edition covers the new ground of 1995-1999, a period during which Japan experienced extraordinary political and economic change.

Meryll Dean's superb new edition of Japanese Legal System provides a wide-ranging and unique insight into the legal system of a country which is at the forefront of global development, yet rarely examined by legal scholars. It is a major contribution to the study of comparative law and through its multidisciplinary approach breaks new ground in providing a comprehensive text on the subject. It draws on the author's first hand knowledge of Japan, but is written for non-Japanese speakers.; Through its approachable yet scholarly style, the reader is introduced to the essentials of the legal system, and guided through historical and cultural context; from which they will be able to develop an informed critique.; The book covers the history, structure and tradition of the Japanese legal system, as well as providing an insight into areas of substantive law. It contains extracts from diverse contemporary sources which, together with the author's commentary, guide the reader through the complexities of a different culture.The use of multidisciplinary sources, which are contextualised by the author, make what would otherwise be inaccessible material available for comparative analysis.; This book may be used as a textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate courses. It will be useful for those engaged in the study of history, politics, international relations and law, as well as being of value to academics, practitioners and those in business

Providing comparisons to the United States and Britain, this book examines Japan's postwar consumer protection movement. Organized largely by and for housewives and spurred by major cases of price gouging and product contamination, the movement led to the passage of basic consumer protection legislation in 1968. Although much of the story concerns the famous "iron triangle" of big business, national bureaucrats, and conservative party politics, Maclachlan takes a broader perspective. She points to the importance of activity at the local level, the role of minority parties, the limited utility of the courts, and the place of lawyers and academics in providing access to power. These mild social strategies have resulted in a significant amount of consumer protection.