Ostracism in Japan By J. Mark Ramseyer & Eric B. Rasmusen

ostracism.pdf

September 28, 2020 Address correspondence to: Mark Ramseyer ramseyer@law.harvard.edu Eric Rasmusen erasmuse@indiana.edu 

Ostracism in Japan 

By J. Mark Ramseyer & Eric B. Rasmusen*

 Abstract: Whether in sociology or in economics, scholars have long treated informal social sanctions as a community's primary means of controlling deviance and formal legal sanctions as a more costly secondary mechanism when offenders are not amenable to informal control. 

Ostracism is one of the most severe informal sanctions. Outside of university laboratories, however, studies of actual examples of ostracism barely exist. We examine legal cases brought in modern Japan by targets of ostracism against their ostracizers. We find very few cases where a community used ostracism to try to control deviant members. Instead, in most instances the community used ostracism opportunistically -- to extract property from a member, for example, to hide communitywide malfeasance, or to harass a rival faction. These cases were not filed primarily for money damages or criminal sanctions. Instead, they were brought for informational purposes: to have the court publicly certify what happened the events that resulted in ostracism. These cases are of course not representative of all ostracism cases, so as is usual when using lawsuits as data, we must discuss the non-random selection of disputes into ostracism, and of ostracism into litigation. *

 Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, Harvard Law School; Professor o