Property Law as Housing Policy in Postwar Japan

Part 1

About the event

Japan's welfare state has long been overshadowed by its industrial policy and rapid economic growth. But this talk will argue that the welfare state was far more substantial than commonly understood. It does so by tracing the rise and fall of a set of robust protections for renters that were structured into Japanese property law. The paper on which the talk is based is available on request.

Part 2

About the Speaker

Colin P.C. Jones is a historian of Japan and China and an affiliated scholar at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute. He completed his PhD in history at Columbia University in 2017. He is currently finishing a manuscript, Searching for Social Order, in which he argues that many defining features of Japan’s postwar legal system previously attributed to tradition were in fact born in the interwar years out of an effort to manage industrial capitalism and Japan’s expanding Asian empire.