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Volume 79 (2025)
- Issue 2 Pages 157-
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── Corporate Personality Controversy and the Diversity of Corporate SystemsKatsuhito IWAI2025 Volume 79 Issue 2 Pages 157-194
Published: 2025
Released on J-STAGE: February 15, 2025
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSThe report begins by presenting survey data collected by Professor Masaru Yoshimori in 1991, which highlights the differing corporate objectives between Anglo-American and Japanese-European business corporations. American and British corporate managers believe that a business corporation belongs solely to the shareholders and prioritize the maximization of the profits distributed to them. Japanese, German and French managers, on the other hand, believe that a business corporation does not belong solely to its shareholders and respect the autonomy of its organization consisting of employees and managers. Despite Professors Hansmann and Kraakman's declaration in 2000 that the corporate system around the world was converging towards a single model of maximizing shareholder interests, recent studies have shown that there still exists a large difference in corporate objectives between Anglo-American and Japanese-European corporate systems. This, however, raises a theoretical question. The US, UK, France, Germany and Japan are all capitalist societies based on the universal legal system of private property. Then, why do these apparently contradicting corporate systems continue to coexist within this universal framework of capitalism (and the private property system that underpins it)? This is the central question addressed in this report. A business corporation is a firm that becomes a corporation, and the report's main thesis is that it is the very legal concept of “corporation” that is responsible for their coexistence.
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Are Linguistics Features in Anatolian Languages Innovative or Inherited?Kazuhiko YOSHIDA2025 Volume 79 Issue 2 Pages 195-212
Published: 2025
Released on J-STAGE: February 15, 2025
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSThis paper has attempted to elucidate the origin of the thematic conjugation in Indo-European. It has been shown that the thematic conjugation originated from the present stem, not from the aorist stem. This observation is supported by the paucity of root thematic aorists safely reconstructed for the parent language and the absence of thematic verbs in the past tense in Gothic. What is unique in the present stem and not found in the aorist stem is two suffixes exclusively used to form present stems, i.e. *-i̯e/o- and *-sk̑e/o-.
We have examined Hittite and other Anatolian languages which play a major role in discussions of the thematic conjugations. The Anatolian languages have virtually no attestation of simple thematic verbs in *-e/o-, but thematic verbs with the suffixes *-i̯e/o- and *-sk̑e/o- are abundantly attested. As a result of our systematic survey, it has turned out that there is no compelling evidence for reconstructing the thematic vowel *-o- in the active paradigm for Proto-Anatolian. The persistent e-vocalism is a feature inherited from Proto-Indo-European.
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── Legitimacy of Bankruptcy DischargeMakoto ITO2025 Volume 79 Issue 2 Pages 213-237
Published: 2025
Released on J-STAGE: February 15, 2025
JOURNAL FREE ACCESS1．Introduction
The Merchant of Venice contains the line, “Earthly power starts to merge with divine power when mercy tempers justice.” In the context of this report, justice is defined as “debts must be performed,” and mercy can be replaced with the proposition “if the debtors are without resources, let them be relieved of their responsibilities to perform”. Therefore, how the earthly powers, i.e., the legislative branch (the Diet) and the judicial branch (the courts), harmonize these two propositions is the essence of the various issues related to the purpose and operation of the bankruptcy discharge system.
(1) From Debtor's Prison to Bankruptcy Discharge
Whether and how to enforce the fulfillment of a debt when a debtor is in a state of financial incapacity is an issue for societies going back 2000 years. Roman law provides for sanctions against debtors who fail to repay their debts, such as debt bondage, debt slavery, murder of debtors, and dismemberment of their bodies. In Suffolk County, Massachusetts, U.S.A. (with a population of about 60,000 then), the number of debtors detained in debtors' prisons during the 10 years from 1820 to 1830 is said to have reached 11,828.
Thus, the enforcement method that deprives the debtor of his/her freedom and targets his/her life, body, or labor in order to compel the performance of an obligation is called personal execution. Such practice has disappeared along with the establishment of modern law, however, the occurrence of a situation in which a debtor becomes insolvent for some reason and is unable to perform his/her obligation is still inevitable in an economic society. The expression “judgment proof” is used to describe the debtor's inability to pay, and when such a situation arises, the question arises as to whether the proposition “the obligation must be performed” should be modified in any way and to what extent.
The question that needs to be addressed by the powers on earth (legislative and judicial branches) is whether there should be any modification to the proposition “the obligation must be performed” and what the limits of such modification should be. The response of modern law to this challenge is the bankruptcy discharge system.
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