I mentioned last time that Japan has very few lawyers. It’s true — there’s just one lawyer for every 7325 people in Japan, compared with one per 288 individuals in the United States and, for comparison, one for every 1634 in France. For various reasons, likely related to Japan becoming a modern Westernized nation only 130 years ago or so ago, the country has evolved a legal structure that’s largely based on common sense, or at least that’s how it appears to my unfamiliar gaijin eyes. There’s almost no tradition of litigatating civil disputes in Japan, a phenomenon which is assisted by the Japanese tendency to prefer being harmonious rather than confrontational, and I can’t think of a single instance where a Japanese person I knew was involved in any kind of lawsuit. Another contributing factor to this might be the fact that lawyers seem to earn only $50 per hour — I wonder how that would fly in the U.S.? When my wife was here in San Diego, one of the things on our list to do was meet with my lawyer and go over my will and living trust, which covers what should happen to the house I own in the event of my demise. American ideas of “Death planning” are totally alien in Japan, since when a man dies, his possessions naturally should go to his wife and kids with no questions asked, and it’s actually quite taboo to bring the subject up, as I’ve discovered to my cost. Because these concepts are so different from Japan, I thought my wife was going to be confused during our meeting with the lawyer, but fortunately she’d seen enough episodes of Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives to grasp the issues right away.
This image is from a show that put four lawyers on a game show (well, a variety show) and various legal issues would be put to the four who would give their opinions. One example I remember was, a woman bought a mansion (an apartment that’s owned) in which the previous owner had committed suicide, so was there a duty for the real estate agent who sold the property to pay damages for failing to make this clear ahead of time. One of the four lawyers on the show, the handsome Hashimoto-bengoshi (kind of the Brad Pitt of the law world in Japan) got so popular that he won the election for Mayor of Osaka.
