Legal Education in Modern Japan.
here expecting a free hand in their own de
partments, or at least an equal vote in the
decisions of a managing faculty. They find
themselves as a rule in the position only of
hired specialists, without a voice in the con
trol. Their work is generally cut out for
them, and changed at the discretion of their
employers. But they are in this respect
treated no differently from some of their
Japanese colleagues; and there are many
reasons why it is natural and justifiable on
the part of the Japanese to maintain such a
relation with their foreign employees. If it
deprives the foreigner of certain privileges,
it has also the result of freeing him from
some of the responsibilities and anxieties
which attend freedom of discretion.
The plan of putting instructors on the
footing of hired lecturers, and the consequent
absence of an organized and co-operating
faculty, is in part merely one result of the
system, generally followed, of taking as in
structors men who are already employed in
other positions, — usually as lawyers and
government officials. This in turn is due
partly to the fact that the schools cannot
pay salaries suitable for resident professors;
but chiefly to the fact that the younger ex
perts in legal science have almost all received
their education abroad at government ex
pense, and are now in prime demand as
judicial and administrative officials. If all
such persons were to withdraw from the
school staffs, perhaps less than one fifth
would remain. This condition of affairs must
continue for some time to come; but there
are these unsatisfactory results, that instruc
tion in law is with such persons a subsidiary
pursuit, and can never receive systematic at
tention as a life-vocation, and that no steady
and permanent interest is taken in the insti
tution or the students, to whom they give a
mere hour or two a week. Among the pri
vate schools I de not know of one which em
ploys (apart from its director) a resident
Japanese professor of law.
The hours of lectures vary greatly. . In
the Japan Law School lectures are given al
79
ways in the evening, from five to nine; in the Imperial, from eight to twelve, and from one to four; in the German, in the morning, from eight to twelve; in the Law Institute, usually from three to six in the afternoon; in the Meiji, from eight to eleven, and from three to six; and in Keiogijuku, between eight and three. Early morning and late afternoon hours are the most frequent, because so many of the instructors must be in court or at their government desks between nine or ten and three; but the time of day is in Ja pan one of the most immaterial of consider ations. In summer there are funerals at four in the morning; one may receive a call at daybreak; the postman jogs in at ten o'clock at night; and I know of a law course given last year by a Japanese instructor three times a week from half-past six till half-past seven in the morning. I have said " lectures; " for a recitation is almost a thing unknown. The styles vary, of course. Many Japanese lecturers dictate from a prepared text. To this plan the for eigner in the end finds himself obliged to come; though oral explanations usually pre cede the dictation of the general principle. The students' acquirements in foreign lan guages do not permit them to reduce an oral discourse to summarized notes in the course of delivery; and they write down nothing that is not dictated. So that the only way in which the retention of the matter by the students can be insured is to dictate, which, indeed, they usually insist upon. Many Japanese, of course, are able to lecture rapidly in their own language, and require the students to make their own notes. Where the course is upon a part of the Code, the articles are sometimes taken con secutively as the basis of comment; but the lecturer often follows his own arrange ment, referring, upon occasion, to the Code sections In the Law Institute, the students in the English law courses are usually as signed beforehand a number of pages; and in the class these are gone over with careful exposition. I am told that progress is slow,
