This paper focuses on how Japanese government's new policy on gender equality inherits and transfers to local governments' policies. Among various factors concerning the enactments, psychological processes of the deliberation committee are discussed.
In 1999 Japanese government enacted the basic law for a gender-equal society, which requires prefectural governments make action plans to pursuit its purposes. This law contains not only the ideal of gender-free but also wide and long span economical efficiency.
This gender-equal law also leaded to the enactment of the local laws (Jorei) or the action plans in some local governments. We compared two cases; one which made the law on gender equality, the other didn' t. Through the close examination of the committee proceeding recodes and interviewing, we found their members' values, experiences, knowledge levels, and behavior patterns played important roles to impose the purpose of gender equality policy.
In the case which didn't make the law, the committee members well discussed about the meaning of gender equality policy and ombudsperson system. Although this local government didn't make the law up to now, they tried to make a tailor made plan and policy which are best fitted to this particular city. On the other hand, in the case which made the law, the committee members were not strongly involved to the enactment process. This local government seemed to be more interested in the political and economical factors, though the alternatives tried to make the law with strong enforcing power.
In conclusion, the spirit of Japanese government's gender policy transfers to the local government policies in different ways, because the psychological foundations of committee members are not the same.

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The article aimed to propose a psychological model of procedural justice and to contribute to understanding why citizens obey laws. The model consists of three psychological elements: procedural justice judgment, social identity, and ingroup behavior. They correspond to the basic psychological processes: cognition, affect, and behavior, respectively. The article also reported the study that examined the model using 540 sample of Kyoto citizens' survey data. The structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed that the model had good fitness and that the relational aspect of procedural justice had an influential recurrent path with the social identity.

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The modern legal sytem has been drawing its universal validity from the "general will" of the people who constitute the state. Within this legally constituted community the Law is supposed to be applied to every member equally by the universal standard. The modern man is a legal person, who has accepted and adapted to this universal validity.
However, in some of recent hard court cases about basic human rights such as the Hansen's disease litigation, it has been revealed that the will of the majority is not necessarily identical with the general will in the Rousseauist sense. Jean-Jacques Rousseau characterized the Law as the written expression of the General Will of the people, which transcends the particular wills of egoistic individuals. But Rousseau himself indicated in «Social Contract» that it is hard to find somebody inside the community who is authorized to represent the General Will in the form of the Law. Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida rediscovered this problematic about the fictiveness of the Law in the postmodernist context.
Many of contemporary philsosophers of law such as Habermas, Alexy or Shigeaki Tanaka have been arguing that the General Will will be gradually constructed through the fair legal procedure like the parliamentary legislation or the court processes. However, it is not clear how and from whose perspective the concept of "fairness" is constituted. Those who are playing the game according to "their" own rules might not recognize "our" fairness. John Rawls has been trying to reconstruct the "fairness" through the representational device of "the veil of ignorance".
There is another approach to this fairness problem. Some theoreticians have been proposing the hypothesis of the "hermeneutical community", to put forward the validity of community-based local norms as the basis of our actual legal system. This model is expected to replace the classical model of the social contract. Yet, if this approach were brought to extremes, it might come close to premodern communitarian thought. It is now required to conceive a new legal discourse in which the fairness for Others could be properly reserved.

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This essay sketches the methodological shift in legal theories in the postwar Japan.
From the end of the Second World War until the mid-1970s, Jurisprudence and Sociology of Law in Japan were dominated by the "science"-oriented approach, in which the "linguistic" scrutiny was emphasized both in methodology of legal interpretation and empirical study of legal practices. In this approach, the separation of the world of "Ought" and that of "Is" was crucial, and Jurisprudence dealt with the former while Sociology of Law the latter. Since the model of linguistic analysis applied was that of C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards and that of behaviouristic science of the day, this approach was capable of illustrating the mechanism of the "social control" by law, but it could not at all shed light on the discursive process in "conflict resolution".
It was the Austinian or Wittgensteinian understanding of the "language" that has opened up a new approach towards the Law. As exemplified by the pioneering work by H.L.A. Hart, in this new perspective of the legal studies, the legal language is not treated as transparent medium of the meaning or the "mirror of the nature", but something performative which do things. Moreover, by introducing the notion of "institutional fact", this new approach of "law and language" challenges the conventional boundary between "Ought" and "Is", and, at the same time, between Jurisprudence and Sociology of Law. It also led to the introduction of the diverse constructionist approaches, such as ethnomethodology, discourse analysis, hermeneutics and narrative studies etc. into the legal studies, and opened up a possibility to explore the genesis of the "normative" out of legal practices.

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Nearly seven million people leave their job each year. Every event of unemployment comes with various circumstances and reasons. But Employment Insurance Law requires people to specify and report the only reasons.
There are some cases in which employers treat the fired people as ones that resigned voluntarily. In those cases people are disempowered by discharge, and at the same time they are forced to have a token image of sufficient self by the treatment of resignation.
But people are not always restricted by the dichotomy of "discharge/resignation". On the other hand they are trying to make the event of unemployment better by reconstructing the dichotomy and the way law treats their lives.

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Environmental social movements demand their participating in legal procedure, especially questions and answers style in environmental assessment. Environmental assessment procedures in Japan don't provide the questions and answers style, but we can find such application on some local governments. In this paper, I focus on some movements against industrial waste facilities in Fukuoka Prefecture, and investigate how they construct the questions and answers style.

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In April 2001 the revised juvenile law was put into effect. The juvenile law that had been in effect since 1949 was thereby updated after half a century. With regard to this time's revision of the law, one issue that was considered to be a pillar of central concern was that of how to address the needs of victims of crimes committed by juveniles. The rise of the issue of victims of crimes by juveniles is arguably one of the factors that have helped bring about the revision of juvenile law.
The reason why the victims of crimes committed by juveniles have come to receive attention lies in the fact that trust towards the cognitive framework in terms of which juvenile delinquents were regarded as society's victims has been rapidly weakening. As assailants and victims are constructed as reciprocal reflections of one another, the juvenile delinquent as a victim did hitherto not allow for the appearance of victims of these delinquents' crimes.
In recent years, however, as juvenile delinquents have increasingly come to be regarded as assailants, the issue of victims of juvenile crimes accordingly has, as a reciprocal reflection, come to be raised. The reason why juvenile delinquents were no longer regarded as victims lies in the fact that people stopped perceiving the reality of society as a thing of which delinquents were victims, and that the reciprocal reflective relation of the societal environment as assailant and juvenile delinquents as victims was deconstructed.
Nevertheless, the basic principle that lies at the root of the current juvenile law is a paternalism that, aimed at 'domain expansion', by which juvenile law is by itself trying to incorporate the problem of the needs of victims of juvenile crimes as a part of its business. It is here, between the social state of mind of people who no longer perceive the state as a parental figure on one hand and a legal system that persists in placing emphasis on its role as a guardian on the other, that friction arises.

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The investigation of welfare state has become an important subject on several social sciences. There are two reasons in that situation. One is that the performance of welfare state has situated a social index to measure national accomplishment to secure people's life conditions. And the other is that the study of welfare state is the useful standpoint to think some features of modern society.
The task of this article is to make a sociological sketch about welfare state from the perspective of legal system. So we study it on three points. (1)legal thought on welfare state, (2)policy making process and policy implementation process, (3)contradictions between people's real life and legal assumptions.
First, I examine legal thought, especially basic humane rights and citizenship. Two thoughts laid the foundation of welfare state. But there are cases that social institutions for protecting people against life danger disturb people's life chances. Because the organization has a purpose to sustain by itself.
Second, policy making process is the stage to concrete legal thought, and policy implementation process is the stage to realize legal thought. Law is transformed minutely through two processes. I study intergovernmental relations and street-level bureaucracy to clarify problems of that transformations.
Third, law and policy have some legal assumptions. Sometimes these assumptions are hidden unconsciously. So these has some gaps in contrast with people's real life. I focus on some phenomena, nationality, middle class, gender and homeless people.

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This paper analyzes the structure and characteristic of the political process in the Judicial Reform Council (JRC) about the issues on the legal population, professional law schools, saiban-in and the judge system. As a result of analysis, the JRC had the characteristics of the balanced structure in the ratio of the legal specialist member to user member in the Council, but on the other hand, of the hierarchical decision structure that the controversial matter in the Council was decided by the interaction among important members from the three branches of the legal profession (judges, prosecutors and lawyers). Also, the views of the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Court and the Liberal Democratic Party were expressed within and outside the JRC and exerted the influence on the discussion of the Council. Although the bureaucracy such as Ministry of Justice carries out the legislation work for judicial system reform after the recommendations of the JRC, the role of the surveillance and advisory councils based on the viewpoint of the nation will need to be vitalized.

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During the Second War period, a field study called "Rural Customs Research" was carried out in the northern part of China then occupied by imperial Japan. It was organized and led by some leading Japanese socio-legal scholars now generally regarded as founding fathers of the Sociology of Law in Japan. And this research was also supported by governmental or semi-governmental organizations strongly interested in the management of the colonies and occupied areas abroad.
This paper critically reviews how this fieldwork and so the socio-legal involvement of the first generation with the colonial management have been discussed in the post war period. And the question whether and how those Japanese sociological lawyers had any "war responsibility" is to be considered, which, in the writer's view has not yet fully examined. In so doing, the paper shows this problem is not a matter of the past but has to do with the present sociological studies of law in Japan and, more generally, with the relation between academic activities and political power, and between "scientific" attitude and political responsibilities.

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This writing offers a brief outline of issues that deserve extensive discussion in the study of law and society in Korea under Japanese rule. It proposes to broaden the scope of the sociolegal historiography of Korea by introducing new themes brought into light by recent developments in social theory. Among those themes are identity, gender, communication, schooling, health, welfare, and many others, but this essay restricts its reference to the nature and structure of the government of Korea within the Japanese empire, the change in the modality of power and domination that occurred under Japanese rule, the state-society relationship, and conceptual/terminological problems regarding modernity and modernisation. As regards the nature and structure of government, it suggests that the Japanese rule of Korea be examined in the broad context of Japan's management of its empire as a whole. With regard to power and domination, it focuses on the extension of both the vertical and horizontal reach of power and gives an interpretation of the implications of the Japanese logic of social control. In respect of the state-society relationship, it discusses the transformation of local society and the unique way of corporatist reorganisation of society. Lastly, the essay raises questions about the adequacy of modernity and modernisation as analytical terms for describing the transformations that Korean and Japanese society have experienced. By way of these discussions, the essay calls for fresh imagination as to, and an enhanced sensibility to the complexity of, human relations in situations of domination/subordination.

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In 1940, Japan revised the Korean Civil Act, and mandatorily added "Japanese-style" surnames to all Koreans (so called "Renaming Policy in Korea"). At the same time, this Act allowed all Koreans to adopt a child who is not the member of the adoptive father's patrilineal clan. After liberation, all of such "non-customary" adoptions were invalidated retrospectively, and South Korean courts held this decision for more than 40 years. Nevertheless, in 1994, the Supreme Court of South Korea, overruling the precedents, declared that the "non-customary" adoptions done on the basis of 1939 Act were/are valid.
This paper reviews the appropriateness of this 1994 Supreme Court decision. To undertake this analysis, the logical relation between the "Japanese-style" surnames and the "non-customary" adoptions is mainly discussed. The first Korean Civil Code of 1960 allowed the "non-customary" adoption without forcing any "Japanese-style" surnames. This fact clearly proves that the "Japanese-style" surname is one thing: the "non-customary" adoption is another. Hence, even the former was declared "null and void ab initio" by the ordinance "Restoration of Korean Names" of 1946, the latter cannot be automatically invalidated. The "non-customary" adoptee based on the Act of 1939, however, had a right to succeed the adoptive father's "House", which was prohibited by the Korean Civil Code of 1960. The succession of the "House" by the adoptee of deferent patrilineal clan caused a serious "Japanization" to the legal identity of Korean customary "House".
In conclusion, the 1994 Supreme Court decision is proper, as far as the validity of the "non-customary" adoption on the base of the 1939 Revised Act. However, the right of the "non-customary" adoptee to succeed the adoptive father's "House" should be invalidated retrospectively, in the light of making a distinction between "modernization" and "Japanization" in the history of Korean Law and Society.

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