Japanese Law and the Global Diffusion of Trust and Fiduciary Law

This article will trace the paths of trust law diffusion, with the dual aim of identifying the role of Japanese law in shaping the global evolution of the fiduciary norm and examining the doctrinal and conceptual implication that the understanding of these historic paths can bring about. The path of trust diffusion that started from England in the seventeenth century diverged into two routes. One route went around the Cape of Good Hope toward the East, through South Africa and India. The other path went West, crossing the Atlantic and across North America. These two routes met with each other in the early twentieth century, when the Trust Act of 1922 was introduced in Japan. The westbound diffusion continued when Japan imposed its law and industry regulation in Taiwan and Korea as part of its colonial expansion. While the colonial impact diminished over time after World War II, the common self-identification as civil-law jurisdictions and the similarities in economic growth models have led to the development of parallel trust doctrines in South Korea and Taiwan. On the eastbound route, Hong Kong and Singapore have emerged as the two major commercial hubs in Asia with vibrant trust practices based on English common law. Today, these two routes converge in mainland China, where trust industries have played a vital role in the development of the Chinese market economy since Den Xiao Ping declared the opening up policy in 1979. Over a long period of time and across a number of jurisdictional borders, many factors interacted to shape the law and practice of trusts. Those factors included financial pressures, legislative imitations, academic exchange of ideas, colonial rules, commercial competitions, and shifts in national wealth and demographics. Despite some signs of the harmonization of trust law worldwide, in the increasingly competitive global economy, trust service providers and their host jurisdictions are vying with each other for comparative advantages