Gendai-Nihon no Funsō-katei to Shihō-seisaku (Disputing Process and Judicial Policy in Contemporary Japan: Civil Justice Research Project 2016-2020)

Research is actively being carried out around the world to empirically clarify people’s experiences and responding behaviors to disputes in their everyday lives, which is one of the central themes of scholarship on law and society. This book is the result of the “Civil Justice Research Project [CJRP] 2016-2020,” a large-scale social research project conducted by a nationwide research group with the goal of comprehensively elucidating the disputing process in contemporary Japan.
 
Specifically, this book address the three following issues: (i) empirical clarification of people’s experiences and responding behaviors to disputes in their everyday lives based on the results of large-scale social research (two nationwide surveys and interviews); (ii) clarification of the relationship between macro changes in contemporary Japanese society—including the super-ageing of society, changing of family and employment patterns, and gender-related changes—and people’s experiences of disputes in their everyday lives; and (iii) elucidation of the impacts that judicial system reform since the 2000s has had on people’s experiences and responding behaviors to disputes and verification of these impacts based on empirical data.
 
This book is a collection of 38 articles. Chapter 1 introduces the book as a whole by providing an overview of the “Civil Justice Research Project [CJRP] 2016-2020” on which this book is based and an explanation of the details of the surveys and interviews that serve as the core of the project. The 37 articles that follow are divided into four sections. Section 1 contains articles that provide up-to-date information regarding the entire disputing process in contemporary Japanese society, from the emergence of a dispute to the obtaining of advice from various advice agencies or legal professionals through to the resolution of the dispute. Section 2 contains articles that classify the attributes of litigants, compare litigants’ expectations and evaluations regarding the outcome of litigation, and compare litigants’ evaluations regarding judgments and settlements. Section 3 contains articles that examine the relationship between macro changes in contemporary Japanese society and people’s experiences of disputes in their everyday lives. Section 4 contains articles that reexamine experiences of dispute from the standpoint of the persons involved.
 
The uniqueness of this book lies in (i) its empirical clarification of the entire disputing process in contemporary Japanese society based on data obtained through social research, (ii) its use of a mixed methods approach that combines quantitative research based on data obtained through surveys and qualitative research based on data obtained through interviews, and (iii) its conscious attempt to contribute theoretically and empirically to global scholarship on law and society by following global research trends in this field.
 
Although the book is both large (750 pages) and highly academic, our hope is that it will be read by researchers, legal practitioners, judicial policy makers, and others interested in contemporary Japanese law and society.
 

(Written by SATO Iwao, Professor Emeritus, Institute of Social Science / 2023)