Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan

Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan PDF Author: Frank K. Upham
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674044548
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Many people believe that conflict in the well-disciplined Japanese society is so rare that the Japanese legal system is of minor importance. Frank Upham shows conclusively that this view is mistaken and demonstrates that the law is extensively used, on the one hand, by aggrieved groups to articulate their troubles and mobilize political support and, on the other, by the government to channel and manage conflict after it has arisen. This is the first Western book to take law seriously as an integral part of the dynamics of Japanese business and society, and to show how an informal legal system can work in a complex industrial democracy. Upham does this by focusing on four recent controversies with broad social implications: first, how Japan dealt with the world's worst industrial pollution and eventually became a model for Western environmental reforms; second, how the police and courts have allowed one Japanese outcast group to use carefully orchestrated physical coercion to achieve wide-ranging affirmative action programs; third, how Japanese working women used the courts to force employers to eliminate many forms of discrimination and eventually convinced the government to pass an equal employment opportunity act; and, finally, how the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and various sectors of Japanese industry have used legal doctrine to cope with the dramatic changes in Japan's economy over the last twenty-five years. Readers interested in the interaction of law and society generally; those interested in contemporary Japanese sociology, politics, and anthropology; and American lawyers, businessmen, and government officials who want to understand how law works in Japan will all need this unusual new book.

Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan

Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan PDF Author: Frank K. Upham
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674044548
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book

Book Description
Many people believe that conflict in the well-disciplined Japanese society is so rare that the Japanese legal system is of minor importance. Frank Upham shows conclusively that this view is mistaken and demonstrates that the law is extensively used, on the one hand, by aggrieved groups to articulate their troubles and mobilize political support and, on the other, by the government to channel and manage conflict after it has arisen. This is the first Western book to take law seriously as an integral part of the dynamics of Japanese business and society, and to show how an informal legal system can work in a complex industrial democracy. Upham does this by focusing on four recent controversies with broad social implications: first, how Japan dealt with the world's worst industrial pollution and eventually became a model for Western environmental reforms; second, how the police and courts have allowed one Japanese outcast group to use carefully orchestrated physical coercion to achieve wide-ranging affirmative action programs; third, how Japanese working women used the courts to force employers to eliminate many forms of discrimination and eventually convinced the government to pass an equal employment opportunity act; and, finally, how the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and various sectors of Japanese industry have used legal doctrine to cope with the dramatic changes in Japan's economy over the last twenty-five years. Readers interested in the interaction of law and society generally; those interested in contemporary Japanese sociology, politics, and anthropology; and American lawyers, businessmen, and government officials who want to understand how law works in Japan will all need this unusual new book.

FAMILY LAW REFORM in POSTWAR JAPAN

FAMILY LAW REFORM in POSTWAR JAPAN PDF Author: Joy Larsen Paulson
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1453540253
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
How does a nation, defeated in war, respond to externally imposed reforms that set that nation’s family system upside down, completely eliminating the family’s modus operandi At least that is what the elimination of family kinship and single inheritance in reforms by the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in the 1948 Civil Code was meant to do. How did the Japanese respond to these reforms in Family Law that many believed would result in the destruction of the family? This study looks at succession and adoption in the years following the reform to understand how the Japanese were able to circumvent the Code and shape the family to meet their evolving needs.

The Growth Idea

The Growth Idea PDF Author: Scott O'Bryan
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824837568
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Our narratives of postwar Japan have long been cast in terms almost synonymous with the story of rapid economic growth. Scott O’Bryan reinterprets this seemingly familiar history through an innovative exploration, not of the anatomy of growth itself, but of the history of growth as a set of discourses by which Japanese "growth performance" as "economic miracle" came to be articulated. The premise of his work is simple: To our understandings of the material changes that took place in Japan during the second half of the twentieth century we must also add perspectives that account for growth as a new idea around the world, one that emerged alongside rapid economic expansion in postwar Japan and underwrote the modes by which it was imagined, forecast, pursued, and regulated. In an accessible, lively style, O’Bryan traces the history of growth as an object of social scientific knowledge and as a new analytical paradigm that came to govern the terms by which Japanese understood their national purposes and imagined a newly materialist vision of social and individual prosperity. Several intersecting obsessions worked together after the war to create an agenda of social reform through rapid macroeconomic increase. Epistemological developments within social science provided the conceptual instruments by which technocrats gave birth to a shared lexicon of growth. Meanwhile, reformers combined prewar Marxist critiques with new modes of macroeconomic understanding to mobilize long-standing fears of overpopulation and "backwardness" and argue for a growthist vision of national reformation. O’Bryan also presents surprising accounts of the key role played by the ideal of full employment in national conceptions of recovery and of a new valorization of consumption in the postwar world that was taking shape. Both of these, he argues, formed critical components in a constellation of ideas that even in the context of relative poverty and uncertainty coalesced into a powerful vision of a materially prosperous future. Even as Japan became the premier icon of the growthist ideal, neither the faith in rapid growth as a prescription for national reform nor the ascendancy of social scientific epistemologies that provided its technical support was unique to Japanese experience. The Growth Idea thus helps to historicize a concept of never-ending growth that continues to undergird our most basic beliefs about the success of nations and the operations of the global economy. It is a particularly timely contribution given current imperatives to reconceive ideas of purpose and prosperity in an age of resource depletion and global warming.

Women and Women's Issues in Post World War II Japan

Women and Women's Issues in Post World War II Japan PDF Author: Edward R. Beauchamp
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780815327318
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Cultural Norms and National Security

Cultural Norms and National Security PDF Author: Peter J. Katzenstein
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731467
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Nonviolent state behavior in Japan, this book argues, results from the distinctive breadth with which the Japanese define security policy, making it inseparable from the quest for social stability through economic growth. While much of the literature on contemporary Japan has resisted emphasis on cultural uniqueness, Peter J. Katzenstein seeks to explain particular aspects of Japan's security policy in terms of legal and social norms that are collective, institutionalized, and sometimes the source of intense political conflict and change. Culture, thus specified, is amenable to empirical analysis, suggesting comparisons across policy domains and with other countries. Katzenstein focuses on the traditional core agencies of law enforcement and national defense. The police and the military in postwar Japan are, he finds, reluctant to deploy physical violence to enforce state security. Police agents rarely use repression against domestic opponents of the state, and the Japanese public continues to support, by large majorities, constitutional limits on overseas deployment of the military. Katzenstein traces the relationship between the United States and Japan since 1945 and then compares Japan with postwar Germany. He concludes by suggesting that while we may think of Japan's security policy as highly unusual, it is the definition of security used in the United States that is, in international terms, exceptional.

Japan's Postwar History

Japan's Postwar History PDF Author: Gary D. Allinson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801489129
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
The second edition of the book that provides a unique integrated analysis of Japan's social, political, and economic history from 1932 until the present day.

Five Decades of Constitutionalism in Japanese Society

Five Decades of Constitutionalism in Japanese Society PDF Author: Yōichi Higuchi
Publisher: 東京大学出版会
ISBN:
Category : Reference
Languages : de
Pages : 376

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Book Description
日本国憲法50年のアポリアを、18人の第一線憲法研究者が論じる、書下し論集。

Going to Court to Change Japan

Going to Court to Change Japan PDF Author: Patricia G Steinhoff
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 1929280831
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Examines the relationship between social movements and the law in bringing about social change in Japan

Report on Japan to the Secret Committee of the English East India Company

Report on Japan to the Secret Committee of the English East India Company PDF Author: Thomas Stanford Bingley Raffles (Sir)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description


Law in Japan

Law in Japan PDF Author: Daniel H. Foote
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801352
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
This volume explores major developments in Japanese law over the latter half of the twentieth century and looks ahead to the future. Modeled on the classic work Law in Japan: The Legal Order in a Changing Society (1963), edited by Arthur Taylor von Mehren, it features the work of thirty-five leading legal experts on most of the major fields of Japanese law, with special attention to the increasingly important areas of environmental law, health law, intellectual property, and insolvency. The contributors adopt a variety of theoretical approaches, including legal, economic, historical, and socio-legal. As Law and Japan: A Turning Point is the only volume to take inventory of the key areas of Japanese law and their development since the 1960s, it will be an important reference tool and starting point for research on the Japanese legal system. Topics addressed include the legal system (with chapters on legal history, the legal profession, the judiciary, the legislative and political process, and legal education); the individual and the state (with chapters on constitutional law, administrative law, criminal justice, environmental law, and health law); and the economy (with chapters on corporate law, contracts, labor and employment law, antimonopoly law, intellectual property, taxation, and insolvency). Japanese law is in the midst of a watershed period. This book captures the major trends by presenting views on important changes in the field and identifying catalysts for change in the twenty-first century.