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Taking Kawashima Seriously: A Review of Japanese Research on Japanese Legal Consciousness and Disputing Behavior

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Setsuo Miyazawa
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Abstract

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This paper discusses Japanese research on legal consciousness (ho-ishiki) and civil disputing. The author presents a recent explication of Takeyoshi Kawashima's concept of legal consciousness as a cultural factor and also proposes to explore the possibility of treating it as an individual, attitudinal factor. He also reviews large-scale surveys of aggregate-level culture and studies on individual-level disputing behavior. The need and possibility of a longitudinal study of individual disputing behavior that uses individual-level attitudes and regional culture as explanatory variables is suggested.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , 1987 , pp. 219 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1986 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association held in Chicago from May 29 to June 1, 1986. It was prepared upon an invitation from Malcolm M. Feeley, a member of the program committee for that meeting. The author is grateful to J. Mark Ramseyer and Antoine Chalhoub for their assistance in editing that paper. The Japanese Ministry of Education provided a travel grant for the meeting. This slightly modified version benefited from comments from Jim Inverarity and encouragement and assistance from the editor and the production editor of this journal.

* Kawashima (1982: 404-405) opposes the translation of ho-ishiki as “legal consciousness.” He says that he meant to include subconscious as well as conscious elements of psychological phenomena, that his concept is based not on psychology but on the sociology of culture or anthropology, and that he used ho-ishiki as a convenient term to mean “a broader mental life as a whole.” He complains that he has been bewildered by and felt responsible for the misleading translation of “legal consciousness” and approvingly refers to the French translation of ho-ishiki as “mentalité.” His protest notwithstanding, I use “legal consciousness” simply as the most conventional term for the subject.

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