Narrative approaches to Japanese legal research questions are rare. Indeed, until Burns’s (2004, 2005) ground-breaking work on judicial narratives in Japanese rape trials, no researcher in Japanese law has attempted to employ narrative techniques to analyse questions of how law functions in Japanese society. This omission is puzzling. Narrative analysis seems well-suited to much work on Japanese law. After all, researchers in the field are interested in how the Japanese experience and engage with the law, especially in comparison with their counterparts in the West; and, as Paton (2002, p. 116) observes, “[t]he central idea of narrative analysis is that stories and narratives offer especially translucent windows into cultural and social meanings.” Further, narrative analysis enjoys prominence in both the social sciences generally and legal scholarship specifically. Following a long tradition in
literary studies dating back to Russian formalism in 1928, narrative analysis emerged in social sciences in the 1980s and entrenched itself as a popular method by the 1990s (Czarniawska, 2005, pp. 649-450; Elliott, 2005, p. 5). In law, it is a commonly employed by legal feminists (Flagg, 1990; Harris, 1990; Scheppele, 1987, 1991, 1992) and critical race theorists (Delgado, 1991a, 199b, 1995, 1999; Harris, 1990; Williams, 1991). |