Japan is often sited as having relatively few lawyers in comparison to the more litigious USA. However, as this letter to the editor in the New York Times explains, straight comparisons between the numbers of “lawyers” in the U.S. and the numbers of “bengoshi” in Japan are misleading because japan has other legal professionals that do work often done by “lawyers” in the U.S.:

“Japan’s legal professionals consist of many licensed nonlawyer legal specialists. These include tax agents (zeirishi), patent agents (benrishi), judicial scriveners (shiho shoshi) and administrative scriveners (gyosei shoshi), who perform work generally done in the United States by lawyers.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/23/opinion/l-what-statistics-on-japan-s-lawyers-mean-245091.html

See also http://www.sumikawa.net/about-lawyer-in-japan/

I point this out because I received an inquiry about hiring a “lawyer” to draft a will. Japanese lawyers (“bengoshi”) are most certainly qualified to help you make a will (or to prepare other legal documents) but, depending on your situation, you may be better off hiring another kind of legal professional.

I’ve had some interactions with “judicial scriveners” (shiho shoshi) in Kumamoto and they explained to me that they are able to prepare most legal documents (including wills) but that they are not allowed to argue cases in court. Even if you need to go to court eventually, a lawyer will be able to build a case upon the paper work done by a competent judicial scrivener. If a judicial scrivener would be good enough for your purposes, you could save a good deal of money. The following website (in Japanese) indicates that “lawyers” can charge up to about 10 times what a legal scrivener would for the preparations of a will:

http://www.souzoku-mado.jp/yuigon-iraisaki2

By the way, lawyer jokes are not a “thing” in Japan, but I got a great reaction from a group of judicial scriveners when I introduced my Japanese translations of lawyer jokes, such as this one:

http://www.lawlaughs.com/animals/whatami.html

I think the judicial scriveners were particularly happy to hear the lawyer jokes because they are continually forced play second fiddle to high-status lawyers. They took obvious delight in the put downs (even if they didn’t dare repeat them to their lawyer friends ;) ).

– Kirk