A Supplement to “Japan’s Law and Thought in Connection”
A city councilman in Motosu, Gifu Prefecture, stood before the court for his first hearing, charged with violating the Public Offices Election Act after distributing gift boxes of confectionery — worth roughly 60,000 yen in total — to twenty-eight voters ahead of a municipal election in which he himself was a candidate. According to reports, the defendant approached the courtroom flashing a peace sign, while his defense team argued that the Act itself was unconstitutional.
The news article cited no specific constitutional provision.
That single omission says everything.
I. Unable Even to Depend on the Text
As I argued in the preceding essay, the self-imposed intellectual constraint that afflicts Japanese legal practitioners lies in an over-reliance on deductive reasoning structured as: statutory provision → constituent elements → legal effect. But the present case falls short even of that. Here, a constitutional claim is being made without any publicly identifiable provision to anchor it.
This is not merely the intellectual laziness of statute-dependency. It is the use of the constitution as rhetoric — a claim that lacks even the scaffolding of a specific article.
For the constitution to function as a legal instrument, four coordinates are required: the reach of the relevant provision, its constituent elements, the accumulated body of case law, and its connection to international law. To plant the flag of “unconstitutionality” without passing through any of these is not to use legal language. It is to borrow it — to drape the client’s emotional conviction in the garments of legal authority.
II. What a Designer Would Have Done
Let me reframe the question. Not: “Was there any chance of winning?” But rather: “How might a designing lawyer have constructed this case?”
The starting point is Article 98(2) of the Constitution and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — ground I covered in the preceding essay.
The election law’s prohibition on conferring benefits addresses the legitimate aim of electoral integrity. But when that prohibition extends to the wholesale criminalization of reciprocal communal practices — the exchange of gifts at midsummer, year-end, weddings, and funerals, social practices deeply embedded in Japanese community life — a point of tension arises with Article 19 (freedom of expression) and Article 22 (freedom of association) of the ICCPR.
Article 98(2) imposes on the Japanese state the obligation to faithfully observe the treaties it has concluded. The ICCPR is among those concluded treaties. By invoking the principles of necessity and proportionality that the Human Rights Committee has consistently articulated, one could construct the following question — not within the frame of domestic law, but within international human rights law: does a blanket prohibition on all gift-giving during an election period constitute a disproportionate means relative to its stated end?
I am not arguing that this construction would prevail. The probability of a court accepting it is low. But as a matter of logical reach, the question holds. And it is the work of the designing lawyer to bring questions that hold into the courtroom.
III. The Quality of a Defeat
Win or lose: as an evaluative axis for legal work, this binary is too coarse.
A more precise axis runs as follows — a defeat with a valid argument, or a defeat without one.
A defeat with a valid argument brings a question of genuine logical reach into the courtroom and compels the court to answer it directly. Even if the claim is dismissed, the court’s response is inscribed in the judgment, becoming material for the next designer. Law is updated through exactly this kind of accumulation.
A defeat without a valid argument employs rhetoric in place of a question that cannot stand, and invites nothing more than silence or a formal rejection from the bench. It leaves no trace in the judgment and contributes nothing to the accumulation of legal language. It may satisfy the client’s emotions in the short term, but it adds nothing to the design of law.
Whether the defense in this case belongs to the former or the latter cannot be determined without knowing which provision was cited. But the fact that no provision appears in the reporting means, at minimum, that “the trace of design is not visible from the outside.” Design becomes design only when its logic is presented in a form that others can examine and contest. A claim that cannot be examined is not design. It is a declaration.
Conclusion
When a client approaches the courtroom flashing a peace sign, what is required of the lawyer is not to face the same direction. It is to translate the client’s conviction in their own rightness into legal language that can be verified and contested. The willingness to take on that translation is the duty of the advocate and the integrity of the designer.
The constitution is not an emotional banner. It is a language of design. When a lawyer borrows that language, they assume responsibility for its quality.
When that responsibility is abandoned, the courtroom ceases to be a place of design and becomes a place of ritual. And in a place of ritual, a peace sign turns out to be the most eloquent language of all.
This essay is a supplement to “Japan’s Law and Thought in Connection: What Japanese Lawyers Lack, and the Possibilities Beyond” (May 15, 2026).