JAPAN Law and Practice Contributed by: Hiroki Wakabayashi, Kenichi Sadaka and Kei Akagawa, Anderson Mori & Tomotsune
1. General 1.1 General Characteristics of the Legal System The modern Japanese legal system is primarily based on the civil law system, with partial modi- fications engrafted under the influence of the US legal system after World War 2. Japanese civil proceedings, which are now regulated by the Code of Civil Procedure (1996 Law No 109, or CCP), follow a combination of the inquisitorial model and the adversarial model. The CCP provides for oral arguments in which parties may submit their allegations and evi- dence to the court. Written briefs are submitted in preparation for oral arguments. In most cases, however, oral arguments are regarded as a mere formality and the parties are deemed to have presented their arguments in written briefs and documentary evidence submitted in advance. 1.2 Court System All courts in Japan are national courts. There is a unified hierarchy in the Japanese civil court system, which consists of four tiers. Litigants are given opportunities to go through up to three of these four tiers. At the top is the Supreme Court of Japan which, as the final appellate court, hears appeals from high courts functioning as intermediate appel- late courts. High courts not only hear, as inter- mediate appellate courts, appeals from district courts or family courts functioning as courts of first instance, but also hear, as the final appel- late courts, appeals from district courts in cases where a summary court was the court of first instance. District courts function as the courts of first instance, as well as intermediate appellate courts, hearing appeals from summary courts.
Among the courts of first instance, district courts handle all civil cases, including ordinary civil cas- es, commercial cases and administrative cases, except for those cases in which family courts or summary courts have jurisdiction. Summary courts have jurisdiction over civil cases involving an amount in controversy not exceeding JPY1.4 million. There are no official statistics on the average time from the commencement of proceedings to trial. However, for reference, the Supreme Court’s data for the past five years indicates that proceedings in district courts, acting as the first instance, typically take around nine to ten months on average to conclude. This timeframe includes the entire process, ending with a judg- ment, settlement, or other resolution. Excluding cases resolved by default judgments (see 3.6 Failure to Respond ), first instance cases generally take about 13 to 14 months on average from the initiation of proceedings to the delivery of a final judgment. In many of these cases, the trial itself occurs a few to several months before the final judgment is rendered. 1.3 Court Filings and Proceedings Court filings and proceedings in formal litigations are generally open to the public. As an excep- tion, a trade secret or confidential and detrimen- tal information about the private life of a party may be protected from public disclosure by a court ruling issued in response to the party’s motion (Article 92 of the CCP). Following an amendment to the CCP in May 2022, a new mechanism has been introduced to protect a party’s or their statutory agent’s name and domicile, residence or usual place of abode from public access. This protection applies in cases where public disclosure would cause
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