If a debtor does not
pay one million yen although he or she is obliged to pay it, the creditor will
sue the debtor and get the decision from the judge that orders debtor to pay
one million yen to the creditor.
When the debtor does not pay it voluntarily in
spite of receiving the order, based on the decision, the creditor can appeal a
compulsory execution to the court.
That is, the creditor can have the court attach
the debtor’s properties, convert them into money, and use it for the payment of
the creditor’s account receivable.
By the way, it is rare that the debtors who
cannot pay anything own a real estate.
Therefore, even if the creditor has the right to
attach the debtor’s property, in most cases, the creditor can only attach the
money in the debtor’s bank account.
However, in Japan, the attachment system to the
bank account does not work well.
Since if the creditor tries to appeal the
attachment of the money in the debtor’s bank account, it is interpreted that
the creditor needs to identify the debtor’s bank account as to what bank and
what branch the debtor’s bank account belongs to (but not needed the number of
the debtor’s bank account.)
In Japan, there are a lot of banks and each
banks have a lot of branches.
Usually, creditors do not know about which bank
or which branch debtors have their account in.
Especially, if there are no continuous deals
between the creditor and the debtor, for example if the creditor is the victim
of a tort case, the creditor do not know the information about debtor’s bank
account.
And even when the creditor knows the debtor’s
bank account information, if debtor changes his bank, the debtor can easily
escape the attachment.
From above, In Japan, the effectiveness of the
civil judgment is extremely weak and it has been said that civil judgment is
like “a Rice cake, which drew a picture” or “completely useless less that
shit”.
However, according to the article of Asahi
DIGITAL dated on August 5, 2016,
Ministry of Justice will try to implement the system that makes financial institutions disclose the information about the account that was owned by the person who owed obligation to pay and was judged to pay it in the court, in order to prevent the nonpayment of the compensation or the expense of bringing up a child. (translated by Hiroshi Tobita)
This is aimed at using compulsory execution
easily in the court. In this autumn, Ministry of Justice will seek an opinion
about the draft of revision of Civil Execution Act to Hosei Shingikai that is
an advisory body of a minister of Justice, and try to submit it to the
parliament in about 2018.
According to the article, the details of the Act are as follows:
Under the revision draft of the Act,creditors may request the court to investigate whether the debtor has his/her account in financial institutions in which the debtor supposed to have an account such as a bank around the debtor's address.
The court inquires it to the financial institution, and if there is a debtor's account, the court will order each headquarters of the financial institutions to disclose the branch name that has accounts to be attached, the kind of the account, the balance of the account, on so on.Creditors do not need specify the name of financial institutions where debtor has his/her account. It is enough to get some idea of them. (translated by Hiroshi Tobita)
This is a good news in Japanese judicial circle.
Recently, the number of the cases in the court
has been inclined to decrease. I think this is because not only the populations
of Japan is decreasing, but also there is a common recognition that the court
in Japan is not useful.
If civil judgement is not effective, Yakuza
(Japanese mafia) will be rampant to debt correcting works as old time.
I hope this revise will make civil judgement of
our country more effective and useful.