COLIN P. A. JONES

One of the interesting things about being part of Japan's new law school system and its role in greatly increasing the number of Japanese attorneys is this: Nobody seems to have bothered asking the Japanese people if they actually need more attorneys. The original target of increasing the number of people allowed to pass the annual Japanese bar exam to 3,000 by 2010 was based on a government target of achieving an attorney-to- population ratio comparable to France by the turn of the decade. (Why France? Nobody seems to know.)

No sooner had the first law school graduates (the class of 2006) who passed the exam hit the job market in the fall of 2007 than a hue and cry arose from bar associations across the country: There were too many new attorneys! There was not enough work for them all! Excessive competition would lead to lower quality! And the quality of these new attorneys is pretty iffy in any case!

As a result, the target of 3,000 new attorneys (by which I mean lawyers (bengoshi), judges and prosecutors who have passed the bar exam) per year now seems to have fallen by the wayside, with various bar associations calling for lower targets of 2,000 (roughly the number that passed in 2009), 1,500, or even as few as 1,000 per year. Bad news if you were one of the 74 law schools set up based on the assumptions underlying the "Be More Like France" plan.