Introduction

It is conventional wisdom in Japan that public policy is carried out through the law. It is widely recognised that policy goals are achieved by laws, including the constitution, statutes and administrative regulations. For example, the Japanese government pursues the goal of protecting the privacy of citizens by utilising specific provisions in Chapters 2 to 5 of the Protection of Personal Information Act 2003 and other related statutes, as well as some administrative regulations. However, the common wisdom that legal rules and principles work as measures to pursue policy aims leaves half the story untold. They also stipulate the goals of public policy and impose constraints on the policy instruments used to pursue the goals. Article 1 of the act defines the ultimate end of privacy protection policy, and Article 50(1) exempts the press, for the sake of the public's right to access information, from some duties of organisations handling personal information. As these and many other instances illustrate, a more accurate picture of law and public policy may be that their relationship is twofold: policy is conducted through the constitution, statutes and regulations on the one hand; and the law sets forth policy goals and places constraints on policy tools on the other.

Going further from this improved picture, I advance the conception of law as public policy. The system of public policy is multilayered, self-referential and enforceable. It is multilayered in that it ranges from a general level to a more particular one; it is selfreferential in that it refers to itself when a superior policy provides a subordinate one with aims and restricts the available measures to attain those aims; and it is enforceable in that many policies can be enforced even if targeted citizens do not want to obey them. These characteristics obviously apply to the system of law. The constitution is more general than statutes and regulations, and a so-called basic law such as the Basic Environmental Act 1993 is more general than specific environmental laws, say, the Environmental Impact Assessment Act 1997. A typical example of legal self-reference is Article 98(1) of the Constitution of Japan, which declares that no law, ordinance or other act of government that is contrary to constitutional provisions shall have legal force.