This article analyzes a Sankei Shimbun column by Professor Emeritus Uemura Tatsuo, emphasizing that most legal terminology in modern Chinese and Korean originates from Meiji-era Japan. Japan, uniquely among non-Western nations, successfully translated Western legal concepts into its native language and built a comprehensive legal system based on civil law, judicial institutions, and codification. The essay contrasts this historical achievement with Japan’s current decline: deregulation without discipline, failure to adopt mechanisms such as plea bargaining and whistleblower rewards, the collapse of the law-school system, and the erosion of legal scholarship since Meiji. Japan, Uemura warns, has become a “plump, naïve target” for sophisticated foreign actors. The Ghosn case exemplifies how Japan’s weakened legal framework invites exploitation. The essay argues that reducing human values to economic measures—such as shareholder primacy—was a fundamental mistake that has accelerated the decay of Japan’s legal culture.

The majority of the legal terms used today in Chinese and Korean were created by Japanese scholars in the early Meiji era.
June 8, 2024.

The majority of the legal terminology used today in Chinese and Korean was created in the early Meiji period by Japanese who fully utilized the strengths of the Japanese language, with its kun readings.
Japan was the only country able to construct and operate Western-style legal scholarship in its own native language.
February 3, 2020.

The following is a column published in today’s Sankei Shimbun, titled “Pride and Decline of Law Seen in the Ghosn Case,” written by Waseda University Professor Emeritus Uemura Tatsuo.
All emphasis within the text is mine.

The statements made by former Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn in his place of escape are nothing more than the disgraceful self-justifications of a fugitive.
If the top executive of a Japanese company declares he will not obey Japanese law, that amounts to the complete denial of the rule of law in Japan, yet there is an atmosphere both inside and outside the country that seems almost to applaud him.
This forces us to recall, on the one hand, the deep pride long held in Japanese law since the Meiji era, and on the other hand, the remarkable deterioration of the legal environment in recent years.

If a nation’s “law” is immature, it becomes an object of exploitation.
For non-Western nations, “law” and “norms” constitute a formidable barrier.
While military and economic power can be pursued to some degree, the barrier of “law,” which is built upon long experience with failure, is thick, and naïve late-developing nations become targets of exploitation by advanced countries well versed in this issue.
Under the pressure of unequal treaties in the Meiji era, Japan rapidly translated English, German, and French legal terms into Japanese, compiled legal codes, established the six major codes, and developed the basic principles of civil law, including the judicial, prosecutorial, and legal systems.
The majority of the legal terms used today in Chinese and Korean were coined by Japanese in the early Meiji era, drawing on the strengths of the Japanese language, with its kun readings.
Japan was the only country able to construct and operate Western-style legal scholarship in its own language.

Neither the United States nor France studies foreign law to any significant extent.
Most Japanese universities, founded about 130 years ago, began as specialized law schools.
Since the Meiji era, Japan has taken great pride—despite many weaknesses—in the speed with which it developed its legal system and in the depth of its understanding of Western law.
The joint-stock corporation, which functions through the use of securities markets, is a system with which every country has inevitably failed at some point.
The corporate system should originally have been a legal structure integrated with mechanisms ensuring fair stock prices, yet after the burst of the bubble, the path of deregulation as a kind of treatment for a “sick patient” only produced flimsy legal structures.

If Japan were to follow the European path, it should have restored a system of prior regulation and developed a framework that treats gentlemen’s rules, self-regulation, principles, and various codes as equivalent to statutory law.

If Japan were to pursue the American path of maximum freedom, it would need sting operations, wiretapping, undercover investigations, plea bargaining (quasi-judicialization of administrative bodies), disgorgement orders, civil penalties, and bounty programs for whistleblowers—tools essential for continuously handling the constant flow of misconduct.
However, Japan has imitated deregulation while failing to imitate discipline.
Had Japan adopted American-style institutions, many individuals who should have been permanently expelled from their industries and stripped of several times the illicit profits they gained would not now be using preserved funds to pose as “activist shareholders,” lecturing young people as if they were moral exemplars.
Without a system capable of addressing a high volume of irregularities in real time, the country must rely on prosecutors, who are ill-suited to handling market crimes, to make one-shot major prosecutions.

Because prosecutors are driven by the strong expectation that they must win, they tend to reduce complex cases to easily provable formal offenses such as violations of the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act, tax law violations, or false statements in securities reports.
As a result, the essence of the wrongdoing becomes obscured.
It is partly self-inflicted that there are few precedents for the substantive offense of special breach of trust under the Companies Act, making proof difficult.
Recently in Japan, legislation and debate concerning the Companies Act have faded, replaced by endless discussions about governance codes.
Yet violations of such codes carry no real consequences, allowing those without specialized knowledge of the Companies Act to pass themselves off as “governance experts.”

The failure of the law school system led to the neglect of undergraduate legal studies and the decline of training for legal scholars, which—combined with diminished regard for advisory bodies and the Legal Affairs Bureau—has caused the proud tradition of Japanese legal scholarship, built since the Meiji era, to fade day by day.

Japan is a plump, tasty target.
From the viewpoint of foreign experts familiar with this world, Japan is a naïve, plump, and delicious target when it comes to law.
In Japan—unlike the United Kingdom—there is not even a right to request information about shareholders’ attributes and identities.
Yet shareholder-value maximization is loudly advocated, and Japanese remain naïvely unquestioning in their dialogue with those whose qualification as shareholders is dubious, as well as in their acceptance of those individuals’ exercise of voting rights.
Ghosn likely inwardly sneered at Japan’s legal level until plea bargaining was suddenly introduced, at which point he seems to have felt “this is not what I signed up for”—which is likely the real background to his escape.

Many people still mistakenly believe Ghosn was an outstanding manager who improved Nissan’s performance, but that belief stems from the misguided notion that massively laying off workers and shutting down factories to boost stock prices is “justice.”
Today, as Europe—and even the United States—moves to abandon shareholder primacy, the claim “Avoid Blind Imitation” (Nikkei, “Economic Classroom,” December 18 last year) has gained attention.
But the real problem lies in the author’s earlier statement in his main work:
“That the desirable corporate law is one that is efficient in the sense of maximizing net benefits after subtracting costs”—
a way of thinking that reduces the diverse values of human beings to mere economic value, and is fundamentally mistaken.