The following pages are a brief survey of the legal history of Japan, from the beginning of its recorded history around the sixth century AD up to the present day. During that time, Japanese law, like other features of Japanese culture, has developed through a complex interplay of foreign and indigenous influences. Japan's first ideas of law were imported from China, but these concepts were later radically reshaped by a purely Japanese warrior ethos. In the nineteenth century, Japanese law was remade almost completely, drawing on Western primarily French and German concepts and institutions, though these were given a characteristically Japanese twist. After World War II, a new Japanese constitution was imposed by the Americans, and legal developments again merged a new foreign input with purely Japanese attitudes and characteristics. Japan's legal history is thus one of the most complex and remarkable in the world. In this regard, Japanese law is simply reflective of the Japanese experience as a whole.
The history and the current status of Japan are both unique in the world. Historically, Japan is one of several civilizations which grew up independent of, but under the influence of, classical Chinese imperial civilization (other examples being Korea and Vietnam). Thus, Japanese civilization of the Heian period (roughly 500 1100 AD) was centered on the Imperial Court, which administered the country under a Confucian ideology and methodology which broadly reflected Imperial Chinese practice. But in Japan, the Chinese model of rule by scholar bureaucrats ("mandarins," in popular Western usage) was effectively supplanted at an early date by a decentralized system of warrior government which is commonly called feudalism because of its many similarities to the system of medieval western Europe. Japanese feudalism had effectively supplanted centralized administration well before AD 1200.
Eventually, in...