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Japan's Love For Derivative Actions, Dan W. Puchniak, Masafumi Nakahigashi

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Not long ago, there was a consensus in the legal academy that the Japanese were irrational litigants. As the theory went, Japanese people would forgo litigating for financial gain because of a cultural obsession with maintaining social harmony. Based on this theory, it made perfect (but economically irrational) sense that Japanese shareholders let their U.S.-transplanted derivative action lay moribund for almost four post-war decades, while at the same time the derivative action was a staple of shareholder litigation in the United States.

The 1980s brought a wave of law and economics to the scholarship of Japanese law, which largely discredited …