Why are we concerned with post-modernity? There are three major concerns. Firstly, a normative concern. The "modern" has been a norm in legal order, like liberty and freedom, or separation of law from politics etc. However, many of us feel the law what we see today does not fit neatly with this model. So a new model is being searched. Secondly, the concern for legalization. When the law plays a small role and people resort to it only in extraordinary circumstances, it is not defficult to maintain the integrity of the law in its pure form. However, as the domain of the law expands and intersects with our social world, we must find a new way to deal with the law. Thirdly, the diagnosis of the contemporary Japan. Has Japan achieved the modern sooiety in its fuller sense? Many people have an ambivalent view on this. They resent to the idea that we keep looking upon the West as a model, but still admit that there remain many irrational things in Japan.
To understand the modern/postmodern legal order, there are two major approaches: the transformation of the modern, and the fiction of the modern. The former approach, which implicitly assumes the modern as a pinnacle of the human society, treats the contemporary as the modern being transformed. This is a familiar scheme in legal analysis like formal-rational law of the modern being lost to the informal/substantive-rational law. The latter approach, I presume to be more interesting, considers the modern simply as our construction. The modern society as historically existed differs from what we depict as the modern society. This discrepancy precipitates our inquiry into the uniquely modern consciouness which lies behind its construction. The modern sceptics also reveals the modern legal order as being foundationless, relative to the belief system then prevaling. Out of the two basic elements of our social existence, namely separateness/connectedness the modern law is strongly biased to the former, which explains the predicament of the liberal law. All these analyses enrich our understanding of the legal order we have today.

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This essay aims to investigate value attitudes of various social groups among the modern middle class, such as the industrial bourgeoisie, the landed upper-middle class, the group of the professionals, and the white collars. Main questions are (1) how and why their attitude toward the mid-nineteenth century industrialization were from each other different, and (2) how they accepted the tradition of the upper class. I tried to answer these questions by comparing the English Victorian culture with its equivalents in America (the America Victorianism), Germany (the culture of the Wilhelmische Zeit) and Japan (the Meiji culture).
In England, the aristocratic-gentlemen tradition was so dominant that the middle-class groups tried to assimilate itself to it. The Victorian culture thus gained an upper-class, as well as middle-class, characteristics that had certain tension against the industrial society. Some similarities were to be found in Germany, while in America both Victorian culture and its counter cultures flourished. The Japanese Meiji culture presented parallel relations, but the upper-class (Samurai) tradition and the upper-middle class were not enough influential to preserve the legitimate culture against postmodern trends.

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In this essay, the author will examine the meaning of "modernization" or "modernity" of law and society in the early Japanese sociology of law. Japan since 1868 is said to have succeeded in the reception of western law as the other culture. It is true that the birth of Japanese sociology of law was the result of conflicts between the modern western law and the Japanese indigenous law. But the history of this reception was not so simple. In 1921, Izutaro Suehiro, proposed to research Japanese law in action different from the written statute (law in books).
There appeared two attitudes of Japanese early sociologists of law towards modern western law written in the statute. Firstly Yoshitaro Hirano in 1924, who became Marxist later, attacked the individualistic tendencies in the statute. Secondly Takeyoshi Kawashima in 1942, who was influenced from Max Weber's theory of modernization of rationalization, defended the individualistic moral embedded in the statute.
Now after the assimilation of western and Japanese legal cultures, it is in doubt if we can still maintain the evolutionalistic view of modernity both in Marxist and Weberian sociologists of law.

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The aesthetic Modern is the attitude which revolts against the rationalization of modern life and the reification of human relations by the idea of beauty, for in the beauty disappears the distinction between you and me. I will try the typology of the aesthetic Modern, examining the thought of Ernst Junger, the German Expressionist and theorist of Nazism. The first type is those who are enthusiastic exclusively to the destruction of the civic order, being indifferent to the construction of new order. Junger as man of letters of Expressionism in 1920's belongs to this type. The second is those who intend to construct the mechanic order in place of the civic order. The italian Futurists, the russian Constructivists and Junger as author of 'The Laborer' are regarded as this type. But I think Junger should not be included in this type, because his labor-state is based on the organic order. From this interpretation is drawn the third type, who dream the resurrection of the lost organic order, uncovering the corrupt civic order. In this sense the third type is the variation of the 19th century Romanticism. I conclude this paper by adding some remark about the comparison between Romanticism and Post-modernism. In spite of affinity between them there is distinct difference in attaching importance to the soil (Boden in German) or not.

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It is a thorougoing scepticism which characterizes the contemporary legal theory. Being distinct from the previous scepticism, legal realism, which tells only the subjective nature of the interpretation, the contemporary scepticism doubts the vary existence of the law as being there to be interpreted. The law is nothing but a mirage created by the performative speech acts in which the people say "this is the law" to each other.
This divides the internal and external point of view in that the former is the one to participate this language game and the latter to observe this game. The interpretive community consists of the people who share the mirage of the law's concrete existence. To preserve the integrity of this community and hence to continue the language game, it privileges the objectivity in law and marginalizes the scepticism. The strategy of legal scepticism is to de-center this dominant discourse and to reclaim the possibility of "the-law-could-be-otherwise".
The other aspect of the contemporary scepticism is to doubt the very notion of the universality which inheres in the law. Foucault's indictment of the complicity of power in an ostensibly neutral discourse and Derrida's deconstructive reading of the text to reveal the effacement of the other are the examples. This gives us a fresh insight to understand the oppression waged against the minorities through the law. We incorporate this contemporary scepticism into our vision of the postmodern community as being more attuned to the concrete other.

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The concept of free and independent individual forms the base of modern society, or of modern civilized society. It can be named as "modern self". It is supposed to possess independent moral ability, rational mentality and private property. And the liberated modern individual resists public power and tries to protect their private life, which is the base of modern law.
But modern society has the paradox in which it tend to destruct the modern self presupposed by modern society itself.
We can find that paradox in the three works of three different genres. One is Lionel Trillig's "Sincerity and Authenticity" in the genre of literary criticism. Another is the writings of M. Foucault in philosophy, and the last is the writings of N. Luman in social science. We find the collapse of modern self in such literatures written after the 70s, all which we may say belong to postmodernism in a broader sense.

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Der Postmodernismus im Recht verbindet sich-zumindest in der deutschen Rechtstheorie-mit dem Versuch, die modernen, aber bereits vergangenen Phasen der Formalisierung und der Materialisierung des Rechts durch seine Prozeduralisierung ersetzt zu begreifen. Somit wird vom Recht mehr Flexibilität erwartet. Wenn dem so ist, wird man versucht, in der japanischen, heute noch lebenden Rechtstradition mitihrer Vorliebe des immer wieder bestätigten Einvernehmens einen Vorläufer des Postmodernismus zu sehen. Allerdings darf man beim Vergleich nicht davon absehen, daß die Postmoderne in der westlichen Rechtskultur völlig andere Züge zeigt als in der fernöstlichen Kultur, wo sich die Moderne im Recht, insbesondere die Phase der Formalisierung des Rechts, nur schwach durchsetzen konnte.

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