The Internationality of Legal Academia

Prof. Tatsuhiro Ueno published an editorial called <The Internationality of Legal Academia> at the Volume 72, Issue 12, December 2023 of GRUR International. The extract is as below, but you can access the contents at <https://academic.oup.com/grurint/article/72/12/1105/7457726?utm_source=authortollfreelink&utm_campaign=grurint&utm_medium=email&guestAccessKey=e3182662-7373-4a76-b89c-7eca6f231728>

Extract

The last panel at the successful ATRIP 2023 Conference at the University of Tokyo on 12 August 2023 addressed the problem of the accessibility or availability of academic research in other countries. A question was raised concerning citation practices, according to which Western scholars refer to research from their own countries and rarely cite studies from other jurisdictions, such as developing countries and Asia.

This perspective may be exaggerated or one-sided, but as a Japanese scholar participating in the panel from Asia, I felt somewhat embarrassed about the peculiarity of Japanese legal academia. Let me explain.

My impression is that Japanese legal academia is isolated from other countries. Japanese law professors tend to write articles and books almost exclusively in the Japanese language, which are then published only in Japan. Even one of the most prominent books on IP law in Japan in recent years – The Theory of IP by Professor Yoshiyuki Tamura – was written in Japanese and has so far only been published in Japan. This is because there is a traditional tendency for Japanese legal academia to recognize an article or a book written in Japanese as an ‘academic achievement’. Even if you write an article in English for a prestigious international journal, it is likely to be overlooked or for the most part ignored by other Japanese scholars, and hardly cited or mentioned in the discussions in Japan because it is not so easily accessible and understandable to most Japanese scholars. In fact, there are not that many Japanese scholars who regularly attend international academic events like ATRIP. This is the reason why Japanese legal academia is isolated from other countries. This situation is likely due not only to the unique language and the geographical conditions, but also to the evaluation system of academic performance in traditional legal academia in Japan, which may seem strange to Western scholars.