office of Whitman Breed Abbott & Morgan, thinks that there is another reason
that Japan has fewer lawsuits. “In my
personal opinion, it is a matter of the
judicial system rather than culture,” he
says, adding that the U.S. judicial system
encourages litigation. Punitive damages,
wide-ranging document discovery, and
formal class actions—all of which he says
fuel litigiousness—don’t exist in Japan.
If those affected by the accident turn to the courts, Nonaka
says, their experience will be very
different from that in the U.S.
Most strikingly, the court emphasizes maintaining order over
determining who is in the right.
To achieve this, Japanese judges active-
ly try to encourage a private settlement
throughout the entire process.
Nevertheless, attitudes to litigation are
changing fast in Japan’s business commu-
nity. Nonaka says he sees more willing-
ness among Japanese in-house lawyers—
particularly younger ones—to assert their
rights. Japanese society is becoming less
communitarian, he says, and that’s begin-
ning to rub off on business norms.
One Tokyo lawyer says businesses
affected by the Fukushima disaster
might go to court “if they don’t feel
the compensation is adequate.”
which separates the pleading and trial
stages of litigation, says Furuta. This
reform has helped reduce the typical
length of time for a first-instance decision from four or five years—the average
25 years ago—to less than two years now.
The country now has more than 30,000
lawyers, nearly double the number of a
decade ago.
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Mediation might still be the faster
route. Furuta says the mediation center
is aiming to dispense with claims arising
from the immediate aftermath of the ac-
cident within “several weeks, or a couple
of months.”
But hopes of a quick resolution of the
full range of legal issues are misplaced,
In 1959 victims signed away their
right to bring follow-on legal action,
even for liabilities that could clearly be
linked to the accident, when they ac-
cepted payments of “sympathy money”
from the company. (The amount that
Chisso paid for each death, adjusted for
Japanese inflation, would be equivalent
to $21,800 today.) A decade—the Japa-
nese call it the “ten years of silence”—
passed before the first lawsuit was filed
against Chisso; the sympathy money
waiver was overturned in a 1973 decision
by the Kumamoto District Court.
Many of the outstanding claims were
finally settled last year, 54 years after
the Minamata disease was discovered.
Previously unrecognized sufferers of the
illness accepted Chisso’s offer of a lump
sum of $27,000 per person, as well as a
$38 million payment to the plaintiffs
group.
Tepco is still finding fresh pockets of
radiation around the Fukushima Daiichi
plant, some of them at lethal levels. Furuta says that as far as he is aware, victims of the accident will not be asked to
sign a Chisso-style waiver against future
compensation claims, such as the effects
of radiation exposure. As a result, Case
says, “you’ve got people who aren’t even
born yet who could have claims.”
