The New Act on International Jurisdiction in Japan: Significance and Remaining Problems

Abstract

This paper focuses on Japan’s newly enacted rules on international judicial jurisdiction, which is one of the pillars of the recent reforms of Japanese private international law.

Japanese private international law belongs to the continental legal system. The first enacted choice-of-law rules, Hōrei, were drafted in the light of the second Gebhard draft of 1887 of the German Civil Code and other dominating scholarly opinions of those days. The first amendment of the Hōrei took place in 1989 and was mainly focused on matters concerning marriage and parent-child relationships. The subsequent amendment of Hōrei was in 2006 and concerned civil and commercial matters. As the result of the 2006 reform, a new Act on General Rules for Application of Laws was adopted and came into force on 1 January 2007.

With regard to the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments, foreign final judgments can be recognized and enforced pursuant to Art. 118 of the Code of Civil Procedure and Art. 24 of the Code of Civil Enforcement. These provisions were also modeled on the basis of German law and were later amended slightly.

While Japanese law has certain provisions regarding the choice of law as well as the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments, it had been thought that there was no specific provision prescribing international jurisdiction in Japan. This situation changed with the adoption of the new ‘Act for the Partial Amendment of the Code of Civil Proedure and the Civil Provisional Remedies Act’, which came into force on 1 April 2012. This subsequent statute is considered to be the first legislation regarding international jurisdiction in civil and commercial matters in Japan. The background of this legislation is quite specific. There had been strong academic opposition regarding the interpretation of the guidelines developed in case law between predictability and case-by-case justice. This opposition was also obvious in the discussions during the legislative process. Due to this controversy of opinions, the new legislation has only limited significance. This paper describes, first, the background of the new legislation, and, second, the legislative process of the Act. Then, after the overview of the Act is summarized, its significance and problems are examined. Though the Act can be evaluated through how it has made each condition of international jurisdiction clearer and more reasonable, it must be considered insufficient because it has not adequately achieved the legislation’s objective, nor has it provided rules on such important issues as the coordination of parallel proceedings.