Disir
Platinum Member
- Sep 30, 2011
- 28,003
- 9,607
- 910
Family registry system can seem schizophrenic but its authority keeps citizens out of the courts.
In case you missed it, rivers of ink have been spilt over Japan’s supposed aversion to litigation, often in juxtaposition to a United States portrayed as the ninth circle of litigiousness hell. Theories abound as to whether Japan’s fabled litiga-phobia is due to cultural, structural or other factors, but the focus is typically on how and why people use the courts to resolve disputes. Or don’t.
All civilized societies have mechanisms for resolving disputes, but preventing them from arising in the first place is even more important. And no, this paragraph is not going to transition into some blather about Japan being a wa-based culture of harmony and consensus-based decision-making; it’s going to transition into the dull but important subject of Official Documents, and where they come from.
People associate courts with resolving disputes, and that is of course one of their principal functions. What people from common-law jurisdictions like the U.S. may take for granted, however, is the possibly abnormal role their courts play in issuing Official Documents, even in situations where there is no real dispute.
Official Documents — proof of ownership, birth, identity, marital status and so forth — are needed to live in any modern society. Ideally they are issued by a government institution, as this makes their contents almost immune from challenge — dispute — and thus reliable.
It may seem normal to divorced Americans that an Official Document they will likely need when submitting an application for their child to attend school or receive a passport is a custody decree. Arguably it is silly and inefficient: A custody decree contains all sorts of private information you wouldn’t dream of mentioning in conversations with people at the school or passport office, and most of it is irrelevant to them anyway. The school just needs to confirm who has legal authority to act on the child’s behalf, and probably doesn’t care who the child spends the summer with.
Japan is different, in part because its entire system of law and government is more modern than the United States, where the common law has roots going back to Ye Olde England and an age when almost by default, courts were one of the limited number of institutions capable of issuing Official Documents. This difference may explain why even today, Americans end up going to court in some situations where Japanese people do not. On the Japanese side, the reason may not be wa, but the koseki system.
Japan's koseki system: dull, uncaring but terribly efficient | The Japan Times
You can read the rest there ^^^
I realize I'm looking at from the US but all of the stuff the koseki system doesn't keep is exactly why it has to go through the courts. I also have no idea how the rest of their system operates and who would be keeping track of it. It seems to me, if you had one official document that it would also have all of the other information.........otherwise you have several official documents.
In case you missed it, rivers of ink have been spilt over Japan’s supposed aversion to litigation, often in juxtaposition to a United States portrayed as the ninth circle of litigiousness hell. Theories abound as to whether Japan’s fabled litiga-phobia is due to cultural, structural or other factors, but the focus is typically on how and why people use the courts to resolve disputes. Or don’t.
All civilized societies have mechanisms for resolving disputes, but preventing them from arising in the first place is even more important. And no, this paragraph is not going to transition into some blather about Japan being a wa-based culture of harmony and consensus-based decision-making; it’s going to transition into the dull but important subject of Official Documents, and where they come from.
People associate courts with resolving disputes, and that is of course one of their principal functions. What people from common-law jurisdictions like the U.S. may take for granted, however, is the possibly abnormal role their courts play in issuing Official Documents, even in situations where there is no real dispute.
Official Documents — proof of ownership, birth, identity, marital status and so forth — are needed to live in any modern society. Ideally they are issued by a government institution, as this makes their contents almost immune from challenge — dispute — and thus reliable.
It may seem normal to divorced Americans that an Official Document they will likely need when submitting an application for their child to attend school or receive a passport is a custody decree. Arguably it is silly and inefficient: A custody decree contains all sorts of private information you wouldn’t dream of mentioning in conversations with people at the school or passport office, and most of it is irrelevant to them anyway. The school just needs to confirm who has legal authority to act on the child’s behalf, and probably doesn’t care who the child spends the summer with.
Japan is different, in part because its entire system of law and government is more modern than the United States, where the common law has roots going back to Ye Olde England and an age when almost by default, courts were one of the limited number of institutions capable of issuing Official Documents. This difference may explain why even today, Americans end up going to court in some situations where Japanese people do not. On the Japanese side, the reason may not be wa, but the koseki system.
Japan's koseki system: dull, uncaring but terribly efficient | The Japan Times
You can read the rest there ^^^
I realize I'm looking at from the US but all of the stuff the koseki system doesn't keep is exactly why it has to go through the courts. I also have no idea how the rest of their system operates and who would be keeping track of it. It seems to me, if you had one official document that it would also have all of the other information.........otherwise you have several official documents.
