Japanese Attitudes Towards Contracts: An Empirical Wrinkle in the Debate

In this article, we re-examine, from an empirical perspective, the debate about Japanese legal consciousness. In particular, we analyze the result of a survey we conducted among Japanese law and business students to determine their attitudes towards the use of contracts as a device to order economic exchanges. We hypothesized that if the generally accepted view of Japanese attitudes towards law were correct, Japanese respondents who had not studied law and therefore possessed the "traditional Japanese attitudes" towards law would be relatively disinclined to urge strict compliance with the terms of a contract. Respondents who had studied law, on the other hand, we hypothesized, would be more inclined to see the contract enforced as written. In other words, legal education would imbue in its recipients an "American" attitude towards law, that is, a preference for strict adherence to the precise contractual terms. The data suggested just the opposite. Law students had a decided preference, over their non-law counterparts, for flexibility in the interpretation and execution of contracts. The more law students studied, the stronger that preference. This preference seems to decline, however, when law students are placed in an advisory, as opposed to advocacy role. We also observed significant gender based differences, with women preferring flexibility to a significant degree over men. Some regional differences were also observed, but were comparatively minor. Finally, we also explored whether respondents were inclined to favor a company because it was Japanese. Generally speaking, we did not observe such bias in most cases. But interesting exceptions were found. For example, we observed some degree of bias against Japanese companies in cases in which the opposing company was Korean or Chinese. And when the opposing company was American, only law students exhibited any national bias in favor of the Japanese company. Non-law students did not show any bias in favor of companies from Japan in any of the samples.