\u3ci\u3eJapan\u27s Commission on the Constitution: The Final Report\u3c/i\u3e, translated and edited by John M. Maki (1980)

The Final Report, which has been well translated and intelligently edited by John M. Maki, demonstrates to an almost excruciating extent this concern for fairness and balance. The first three parts of the Report chronicle the creation, structure, procedure, and central issues of the Commission\u27s work. In doing so, they catalog issues and positions and explain the mechanics of the Commission, but do little else. For those interested in the substantive views espoused, Part Four, The Opinions of the Commissioners, will hold the most interest

Stealth Activism: Norm Formation by Japanese Courts

The Article focuses on the political and social roles of the Japanese Supreme Court to the society. It argues with the remarks made by law professors John O. Haley and David S. Law about the Japanese fiduciary. It outlines the judicial decisions of court cases in various areas including employment, divorce and protection against discrimination

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

Privatized Regulation: Japanese Regulatory Style in Comparative and International Perspective

To begin the analysis of Japanese regulation, Part I looks closely at the structure and implementation of the Large Scale Retail Stores Law (“LSRSL”) by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (“MITI”). The LSRSL and its implementation are representative of Japanese agency practice, and their detailed description can aid in forming preliminary generalizations about the legal nature and explanations for the delegation of power to private parties that this Article argues comprises Japanese regulatory style. To confirm the representative nature of administrative practice under the LSRSL and to provide additional breadth to the analysis, Part II looks at instances of delegation in several other areas of bureaucratic practice from MITI supervision of structural adjustment under declining industries statutes to the granting of broadcast licenses by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (“MPT”). In order to get a sense of the preconditions and limitations of this style of regulation, Part II also examines the less successful use of similar regulatory techniques in both economic regulation and by local governments interested in controlling land use within their jurisdictions. Part III draws on U.S. administrative law norms and European regulatory theory to refine the model of privatized regulation that emerges from Parts I and II. The Conclusion assesses the likelihood that recent legal and political changes in Japan and growing international pressures for transparency in domestic administrative processes will lead to changes in Japanese regulatory style in the near future