Trusts and Legal Transplants: Lessons from Japan

Abstract

This chapter links the Japanese experience of trust reception to wider debates about legal transplantation. It considers the reception of the trust device into Japanese law in the early twentieth century, some of the distinctive doctrinal features of the Japanese trust, and its capacity to disrupt foundational axioms of the wider law of property and succession, in order to reflect on the success of the Japanese trust as a legal transplant. It concludes that it is wrong to consider the trust a particularly problematic legal form for emulation, by locating the inevitable disruption caused by introduction of the trust into Japanese law within a general account of legal change.