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The Laundering of Legal Titles:

The Antithesis of the Concept of a

“Secure and Stable Transaction”

Hisashi Harata *
University of Tokyo

I. Introduction
II. Discussion on choice-of-law issue

1. Choice-of-law issue before Japanese courts
2. Supreme Court’s formulation: problems and background concern

III. Japanese parochialism and unilateralism on international commerce
1. Possible implication of the formulation
2. Parochial reaction from Japanese Scholars

IV. Antagonism on the “secure and stable transaction”
1. Interpretative issues regarding art.192 of Japanese Civil Code

2. Choice-of-law dimension for the secure and stable transaction
V. Conclusion: the dominant view of secure and stable transaction in Japan

* Professor of Private International Law at Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo. This article has originally
been published in University of Tokyo Journal of Law and Politics, vol. 12 (2015) pp.75-99 , being also based on
a lecture held as part of the lecture series on Japanese Law at Columbia Law School in Spring 2015. I am very grateful
to Prof. Curtis Milhaupt for organizing the series of lectures and encouraging the publication of this article and also
to Paulette Roberts for superb support for my lectures.
The series of lectures had as their general theme Japan’s “Legal Modernization” in the international context,
for the purpose of looking at various nuances in this process, allegedly modeled after “Western legal principles.”
This article more specifically focuses on certain characteristics of the view(s) on international commerce held by
Japanese case-law and academia, in terms of Japanese substantive law and choice-of-law. In this article, we cannot
afford to enter into a detailed word-by-word analysis of the Supreme Court judgment which is introduced later, nor
into a detailed discussion on the theoretical issues of choice-of-law. For these points, see HARATA, An interim report
on the principle of lex loci rei sitae with critical references to a Japanese Supreme Court case, in Chiba Journal of
Law and Politics, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2013) pp.344-400 [in Japanese].

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