In the 1990s, Japan officially launched its first legal-assistance projects in Asia, becoming the first Asian donor to offer bilateral assistance in the legal field in the post-Cold War profileration of rule-of-law assistance movements. This paper reviews the process of re-shaping the Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) policies in Japan leading up to the adoption of the ODA Charter in 1992 and its subsequent amendments which underlie the changes in importance and relevancy of legal assistance in the overall Japanese foreign-aid policy over the years. The paper also argues that Japan’s rule-of-law assistance projects were initially launched with pragmatic considerations but had to be continuously justified for their sustainability with increasingly sophisticated philosophical foundations and practical responses to respond to the changing trends of international co-operation and national political pressures.

Japan offers its aid recipients an approach to legal reform that in some ways mirrors, and in others diverges, from the Western approaches to rule of law aid. As a consequence, Japan challenges Western legal assistance generally, and rule of law aid in particular. More particularly, after close scrutiny of the history of Japanese ODA and its mode of legal sector support developed over the last twenty years, we argue that Japanese legal assistance exhibits a range of traits including: incrementalism; comparativism; different aid personnel; focus on self-help; budget restraint; and humility. This approach has attracted robust critics. Nevertheless, this paper asks the question whether the East Asian model of rule of law assistance challenges the West's apparent addiction to rule of law aid.