Rivers and Rice: What Lawyers and Legal Historians Should Know about Medieval Japan

A story of rivers in Europe and rice in Japan, the combination of the need of warrior rulers for political legitimacy (authority) coupled with a diffusion of their capacity to coerce (power) is argued here to explain the use of adjudication as a primary means for enforcing legal rules and maintaining order in both early medieval Europe and Japan. Explained in the process is the tendency in western Europe for the regulation of otherwise private relationships and behavior particularly within local communities to be absorbed into formal legal regulation in contrast to the Japanese experience of extralegal internal community controls that arguably produced a pervasive duality of legal and extralegal ordering.