The Revival of German Scholarship on Japanese Law

Abstract

Until World War II German scholars led the West in scholarship on Japanese law. With the exception of Joseph E. de Becker, the English-born lawyer whose prodigious contributions have seldom been replicated even among Japanese jurists, only a handful of lawyers in the English-speaking world displayed interest in the Japanese legal system. (Wigmore, Gubbins, Sebald, Blakemore, Sherman and Carkeek nearly exhaust the list of Americans.) The flow of literature in the United States on Japanese law began, for instance, with the Allied occupation and did not reach its present volume until the mid 1960s (surpassing perhaps that on any country other than the United Kingdom). Unfortunately this expansion of Japanese legal studies in the United States paralleled a long hiatus in German research. A few in Germany-notably Wilhelm Rohl-kept the spark alive, but rare was the publication of any significant work in German except those authored by Japanese scholars (or an occasional Korean or Chinese) studying in Germany or writing from Japan. Even so, the quality of what scholarship was published remained high. Rohl's introductory studies of the reception of Western law in Japan, Fremde Einflisse im modernen japanischen Recht (Metzner, Frankfurt a.M., 1959) and of the postwar Constitution, Die japanische Verfassung (Metzner, Frankfurt a.M., 1963), are still valuable references. Equally important are the contributions on Japanese family law by Friedrich Tappe, a Jesuit scholar at Sophia University in Tokyo-for example, his Soziologie der japanischen Familie: Grundauschauungen, Ethik und Recht des japanischen Familiensystems (Mtnster, 1955). More reflective of the dearth of German research during the postwar period is the fact that between 1940 and 1970 almost no German doctoral dissertations were written on Japanese law and few, if any, of the exceptions were by German students. See, for example, Shen-Chang Hwang's, Das japanische Antimonopolgesetz im Lichte des deutschen Kartellrechts (Heidelberg, 1968) and Sung Bae Kim's, Die Behandlung asozialen und strafftlligen Jugendlichen im japanischen Jugendrecht (Cologne, 1967). Since 1970, however, there has been a remarkable revival of Ger-