Concerns need to be discussed

One of the more eagerly, if not heavily, debated topics in Japanese legal circles is the Basic Reform Plan of the Law of Obligations, a proposed blueprint for the overhaul of Japan's Civil Code provisions on obligations. Having been adopted in 1896, the Civil Code has had no major reforms, particularly on the law of obligations in over 100 years. Thus, the necessity for its reform to address economic, business, legal and societal developments, changes and issues of the past century has been discussed for quite some time. These discussions led to the formation of a self-constituted committee of legal scholars called the Japanese Civil Code (Law of Obligations) Reform Committee, committed to study reforms.

The Committee formally announced the Basic Reform Plan in April 2009 (and published it in May), which has since gained much attention from law practitioners, partly because the Committee's members include a number of authoritative...