2 Japanese Legal System

2.1 Concept and Sources of Japanese LawJapan — history's greatest legal transplant laboratory:1. The first reception (the ritsuryō era, 7th–8th centuries): the Chinese lü codes' adaptation (the Taihō Code 702 — the Confucian-imperial system's import);2. The feudal interval (1185–1868): the samurai orders, the Tokugawa bakufu's statutes, the merchant custom (the sophisticated Edo commercial practice), Confucian learning as official ideology — with the indigenous giri (duty) ethics persisting beneath every imported layer;3. The Meiji modernization (1868–): the great westernization: the French-influenced early codes; then the German reception (the BGB model: the 1898 Civil Code — the family-and- inheritance's indigenous reservation (the ie household system's preservation), the 1899 Commercial Code; the constitution of 1889 (Prussian-model); the 1872? — no: the French- modelled 1880 penal code then the 1907 German-influenced one; the profession and courts built German-style;4. The American occupation (1945–52): the second great transplant — the 1947 Constitution (popular sovereignty, Article 9's renunciation of war, judicial review — the American implant), the procedure codes' Americanization (the 1948 Code of Civil Procedure's discovery elements; criminal procedure's adversarialization), the democratization of the family law (the ie's abolition);5. The contemporary system: a civil-law base (codes, career-track judges, the deductive method) with American overlays (constitutional review, some procedure) and the indigenous practice (the chōtei mediation's centrality — the settlement culture: the overwhelming majorityof civil cases settled;…