Abstract
Legal culture has long been a central focus of the Japanese socio-legal studies. However, there is a tendency today to play down or even deny the importance of cultural factors in legal processes, while in the Western countries they are increasingly drawing attention. The author criticizes Mark Ramseyer's study in law and economics that claims to explain the Japanese out-of-court settlement practices without resort to culture. The author rejects the notions of culture that simply equate it with the characteristics of a national legal system or with the prevalent values actually held by individual members of society, and urges to stick to the classical sociological notion that culture embodies a system of symbolic meanings representing the basic frameworks for cognition and evaluation, distinctive to each society and that it inevitably exerts pervasive influence on social processes and institutions.
