ABSTRACT
Considering the size of the Japanese economy and the place that it occupies in world trade, one may wonder why there has been no case brought to arbitration by a Japanese investor or against the Japanese Government on the basis of a bilateral investment treaty (BIT). This chapter 1 succinctly reviews the passive attitude of the Japanese government as well as of Japanese investors towards international investment law and tries to determine its causes. It examines the small number of Japan's BITs and Free Trade Agreement (FTA) investment chapters (Section 3.2), the extreme flexibility in the drafting of their core provisions (Section 3.3), and the absence of cases brought to arbitration by Japanese investors (Section 3.4).
