The 1973 Japanese Law for the Compensation of Pollution-Related Health Damage: An Introductory Assessment

December 1975

Citation:

ELR 50229

Issue

Author

Julian Gresser

In 1972, the United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment highlighted for all the world the significance of foreign practice and experience in the search for more effective environmental management at home. Less well-publicized is the mandate that the Conference imposed on the legal profession: to look through a foreign culture to the essence of its response, to translate it and, ultimately, to render it usable abroad. In this sense, the Conference curiously was ahead of its time, since it asked of the legal profession a task that lawyers have been ill-equipped by training or proclivity to perform.

A central barrier for the American environmental lawyer venturing into this field is that a foreign approach, devised for the exigencies of another setting, may offend basic values and sensibilities. The establishment of a system of compensation to victims of pollution in Japan, for example, may outrage some American public interest lawyers uncompromisingly committed to preventative litigation. Nevertheless, patient study of alternative approaches can be rewarded by insights valuable to ourselves, and also, one hopes, to other countries. This is the challenge of the Japanese Law for the Compensation of Pollution-Related Health Damage enacted in 1973.¹

Associate Professor of Law, University of Hawaii.

Research on this Article began in 1974 during a seminar on comparative environmental law conducted with Prof. Koichiro Fujikura of Doshisha University, Kyoto. I acknowledge gratefully insights gained from this seminar and wish to thank Professor Fujikura for his generous comments on drafts of this Article. I express my indebtedness to Prof. Jerome A. Cohen, Director of the Harvard East Asian Law Program for his continuing guidance and friendship and to the Harvard Law School for sponsoring my research in Japan. Although many have offered suggestions on this manuscript, I wish especially to thank Profs. Robert E. Keeton (Harvard), I. Michael Heyman (Berkeley), John J. Costonis (Illinois), Richard M. Buxbaum (Berkeley), Jerrold Guben (Hawaii), William Eads (Hawaii), Akio Morishima (Nagoya), Dr. Yoshinobu Tai (Doshisha); and Miss Irene Anzai; attorneys Frederick R. Anderson, Will A. Irwin, Sanford Gaines, John E. Schulz (Environmental Law Institute, Washington, D.C.), and Frank Gniffke (Hawaii); among Japanese friends I am particularly indebted to Dr. Michio Hashimoto, Mr. Yoshitake Ota and Mr. Kazushige Iguchi of the Japan Environment Agency. Lastly, I am grateful for the generous support of the Ford Foundation.

This Article is an edited reprint of an article that appears in Volume 8 of Law in Japan: An Annual, edited by Prof. John O. Haley of the University of Washington Law School, Seattle, Washington.

The 1973 Japanese Law for the Compensation of Pollution-Related Health Damage: An Introductory Assessment

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The 1973 Japanese Law for the Compensation of Pollution-Related Health Damage: An Introductory Assessment