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Abstract:
Confidential documents which became public through civil litigation discovery in the late 1990s reveal that, ten years after the Watergate and Lockheed scandals and just five years after the enactment of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the senior-most executives of the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation were developing a plan to provide cash and other benefits to one of Japan's most powerful political insiders and a close confidant of then-Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. B&W's officials should have been well aware that the activities described in the plans, if carried out, were very likely illegal under U.S. federal law at the time. Had these industry documents emerged in a timely fashion, B&W's chairman and senior-most executives ought to have been investigated for serious crimes with penalties including up to five years of imprisonment for the individuals involved.

This paper presents the historical record of Brown and Williamson's contemplated political influence buying in Japan as demonstrated by the documents. The paper analyzes those facts under the terms of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in effect at the time and concludes that the documents reveal plans that, if carried out, constituted a felony. Drawing at least upon the snapshot portrayed in this paper of one company's inclination towards corrupt activity, the paper proposes further investigation by the United States' Department of Justice and Congress and corresponding statutory, regulatory, and international policy measures. Finally, this paper concludes by arguing that the individuals involved perhaps did not just get away with violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It should be time to consider whether the individuals involved got away with murder.

U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Tobacco, International Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, Political Bribery, Japan, Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation, Yasuhiro Nakasone, Eiichi Nakao

Abstract:
Confidential documents which became public through civil litigation discovery in the late 1990s reveal that, ten years after the Watergate and Lockheed scandals and just five years after the enactment of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the senior-most executives of the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation were developing a plan to provide cash and other benefits to one of Japan's most powerful political insiders and a close confidant of then-Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. B&W's officials should have been well aware that the activities described in the plans, if carried out, were very likely illegal under U.S. federal law at the time. Had these industry documents emerged in a timely fashion, B&W's chairman and senior-most executives ought to have been investigated for serious crimes with penalties including up to five years of imprisonment for the individuals involved.

This paper presents the historical record of Brown and Williamson's contemplated political influence buying in Japan as demonstrated by the documents. The paper analyzes those facts under the terms of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in effect at the time and concludes that the documents reveal plans that, if carried out, constituted a felony. Drawing at least upon the snapshot portrayed in this paper of one company's inclination towards corrupt activity, the paper proposes further investigation by the United States' Department of Justice and Congress and corresponding statutory, regulatory, and international policy measures. Finally, this paper concludes by arguing that the individuals involved perhaps did not just get away with violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It should be time to consider whether the individuals involved got away with murder.

U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Tobacco, International Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, Political Bribery, Japan, Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation, Former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, Former Japanese Construction Minister Eiichi

Abstract:
The establishment of the professional law schools in Japan has generated conditions for a perfect storm that may devastate legal scholarship. First, the current generation of law scholars are so burdened by teaching and administration for the new law schools that it has become difficult for them to produce their own scholarship. Second, these burdens are impairing law professors’ ability to mentor new scholars. Finally, the academic track graduate law programs are attracting fewer among first tier of talent. Many of the best and brightest potential scholars are instead enrolling in the new professional law school programs.

Scholarship generates the intellectual foundation of the law. As the great pedagogical theorist Paulo Friere said: “I do research so as to know what I do not yet know and to communicate and proclaim what I discover.” If legal scholars in Japan cease to generate creative empirical and theoretical analysis of the law and society, a weakened ability to understand and report on the present will imperil the future.

This paper portrays the dynamics in legal education in Japan generating the current circumstances, considers the attending risks for the future, and aims to offer valuable policy reform suggestions.

Legal scholarship, Japanese legal education, legal education reform, legal knowledge, comparative legal education, hōkadaigakuin, East Asian Law and Society

Abstract:
The panoply of claims against Japan and Japanese parties arising from wartime acts in the mid-twentieth century remains a pressing matter of diplomacy, international affairs, economic affairs, and domestic politics for the many nations involved in Imperial Japan’s fifteen-year wars in Asia and the Pacific. One strand in this tangled web - involving claims for compensation in Japanese domestic courts - was firmly cut by the Japanese Supreme Court in a linked pair of decisions handed down in April 2007. The court dismissed two claims brought by kidnapped Chinese victims, one of which was forced into hard labor and the other into sexual slavery. The decisions, determined by two separate panels of the Court, presented verbatim identical reasoning that the terms of the Japan-China Joint Communiqué of 1972 implicitly incorporated by reference provisions of the San Francisco Peace Treaty to bar compensation claims by private individuals against Japan and its nationals for wartime acts. The holdings effectively foreclose all pending and future similar lawsuits in Japanese domestic courts. This article analyzes both decisions and how justice still eludes the victims of Imperial Japan’s wartime actions.

Japan-China Joint Communique of 1972, San Francisco Peace Treaty Article 14(b), Japanese wartime forced labor, Japanese wartime sexual slavery, World War II restorative justice, Supreme Court of Japan, Nishimatsu Construction Co., Song Jixiao, Ko Hanako