Judicial Diversity ＆Inclusion in Japan: Insights from Former Judges and Bar Exam Passers
In 2001, Japan’s Justice System Reform Council sought to transform the country's elitist, inaccessible legal professions, by enhancing their ‘diversity, fairness and openness’ in order to satisfy the rapidly evolving needs of a modern society and maintain public trust. Twenty-five years on, how has this expansive vision of diversity and inclusion (D&I) influenced Japan’s judiciary?
We know two things. Firstly, scholarly and Japan Federation of Bar Associations discourse on judicial diversity in Japan soon diverged from the global conversation on gains in legitimacy and credibility for judiciaries that reflect the populations they serve. It skewed narrowly towards judges’ regional, educational and professional backgrounds. Meanwhile, there was silence on attributes like gender, disability, age, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Secondly, we know from Supreme Court of Japan data that there has been a clear if incremental trend towards recruiting women to the judiciary. Women occupied 29% of judicial positions as at April 2024, although mostly in junior roles. This is up from 16.5% in 2005, the year when these data were first released.
But we have not known how Japan’s judges have experienced and how its prospective judges perceive this incipient shift towards gender balance, and potential flux in other attributes.
This presentation reports on a 6-month pilot study by Australian and Japanese researchers, completed in April 2025, involving semi-structured interviews with 14 participants: eight former judges of various ages, genders, backgrounds and ranks; and six JD student Bar Exam passers. The study achieved two goals. It elicited rare insights on the invisible yet mutually reinforcing structural, institutional and cultural barriers to D&I in Japan’s traditionally monolithic judicial workforce, while also revealing the need for further research at scale to identify measures to surmount them.