John H. Jackson was indeed a great scholar in the field of international economic law. My association with John lasted for almost 40 years and he was one of my closest friends. There are many personal memories of him and I will mention only a few of them.

I met him first in 1978. In 1977–1978, I taught a course on Japanese international economic law at Harvard Law School. On the way back home from Harvard, I stopped in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to see John Jackson whose works I had known through reading his books and articles. As I was waiting in the lobby of the Michigan Law School, a tall man in jumper appeared and that was Jackson. He and I became good friends right away. Since that time, I have worked a number of times with him in projects, conferences and teaching, and there are many memories surrounding them.

Shortly after I met him, I received a letter from him in which he invited me to do a joint comparative study of domestic implementation of the Tokyo Round Agreement in major jurisdictions. This project resulted in a book: John H. Jackson, Jean-Victor Louis, and Mitsuo Matsushita: Implementing the Tokyo Round (The University of Michigan Press, 1984). The idea of John Jackson was to do a comparative study on the constitutional process of implementing the Tokyo Round Agreement in the United States, the European Communities (EC), and Japan.

Through this study, I learned that the methodology used to analyze constitutional structures from a legal standpoint in different countries does not fit the reality of Japan, where the free enterprise system prevails, but with a mixture of western and non-western cultures.

In the United States, the issue of implementing an international trade agreement is a constitutional problem of allocation of powers between Congress and the Executive Branch, i.e., what is the limit of executive power to regulate international trade and what is the constitutional constraint on this power in the Constitution. In resolving conflicts of jurisdiction between Congress and the executive, courts and especially the Supreme Court of the United States play the key role.

For the EC, the issue is that of the allocation of powers between the Communities and member states. Here the issue is what should be the proper allocation of powers between the Communities and the Member States in regulating trade and investment. This is a legal and constitutional problem, and, as in the United States, the European Court of Justice plays the important role.

In both jurisdictions, a legal analysis of the constitutional structure is core, and this is characteristic of the Western-type of governmental process.

Compared with those two jurisdictions, the situation in Japan is quite different. In Japan, the powers of the legislature (the National Diet) and the executive (the Cabinet) are not separated under the Parliamentary-Cabinet system in which the head of the ruling political party in the National Diet is appointed to be the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister appoints ministers who compose the Cabinet. In this system, there is a fusion of powers rather than the separation of powers. In this context, conflicts between the legislature and the executive in implementing international trade policies seldom occur.

In the Japanese political system, the Ministries and the bureaucracies in the Ministries play very important roles in policy making. In fact, they have the decisive influence. Policies are often conceived and formulated in the Ministries, and legislative bills are drafted by bureaucrats. They are discussed in the Cabinet and introduced into the National Diet. By the time bills are introduced into the National Diet, agreement and understanding about the bills have already been established among the major players. The bureaucrats in charge of drafting such bills and the ruling political party have agreed and often have worked together to prepare them. Therefore, conflicts and tensions between the legislature and the executive in the sense of those in the United States never occur. Therefore, in the Japanese context, the extra-parliamentary process is more important than parliamentary process.

This does not mean that there are no power conflicts between the key players. However, the key players are the bureaucrats in the major Ministries and there are intensive power struggles between Ministries – for example, between the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry (the METI) and the Ministry of Finance (the MOF) over the issues relating to safeguards, or between the METI and the Ministry of Agriculture (the MAFF) over agricultural trade policies.

Such conflicts and tensions do not appear on the surface of formal governmental processes. They are fought behind the scene and difficult to penetrate for outside observers. Some information trickles down to newspapers and magazines occasionally, but they may not present the whole picture of what is happening.

In order to establish a methodology of how to pierce the veil and reach the reality, a mere legal analysis is not sufficient. It requires knowledge on the sociology of the governmental process and the theory of linkage between such sociological and legal approaches is necessary.

I often discussed this methodological issue with John Jackson when I was doing this study. He appreciated the importance of the issue and encouraged me to develop a new approach and apply it to international economic law issues. I was impressed with his openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence to understand the situations. I promised him to do that. Until today, I have not been able to establish such a methodology, and I will probably have to leave it to future generations.

I think that a new approach is very important because big trade entities such as China and India are emerging as key players in international trade. In those countries, the process of trade policy implementation is quite different from those in the United States and Europe where the Western-type legalism prevails. Tools of analysis that fit the study of the Western World are not necessarily effective when analyzing the situations in the Non-West. When I think of such problems today, I recall the wisdom and flexibility of John H. Jackson.

In 1983, both John Jackson and I participated in the debate of the US/Japan Business Persons’ Council. This Council consists of the leading business persons both from the United States and Japan. Important issues in the United States/Japanese economic relationships are taken up and discussed. A report of the discussions together with policy recommendations is presented to the United States and Japanese governments. It is expected that both governments take into account such recommendations when formulating their policies.

Both he and I participated as advisers to the delegates. We were not in a position to negotiate with the other party, but merely to give legal and policy advice to the delegates. In the 1983 Council Meeting, which took place in Hawaii, heated debates took place between the US and Japanese delegates because trade issues between the two countries were very tense, and both sides made critical comments regarding the other's business conduct and governmental policies.

Some of the Japanese delegates stated that the United States was not fair in that it did not ratify the GATT and that it put domestic laws above the international obligations incorporated in the GATT. Jackson presented a view that, under the Trade Act of 1974, the government of the United States was given trade promotion authority and, in this system, Congress could not diverge from the obligations of an international agreement to which it was a signatory. This promoted the understanding by the Japanese delegates of the mechanisms through which US international obligations are incorporated into domestic laws. I think that this was a great contribution that he made to enlighten Japanese business people in this field.

I wonder what he would say on the current international trading world where the influence of the WTO has declined and mega Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) such as the TPP, the TTIP and the RCEP are coming up. I think that it is important to think about a way to avoid further erosion of the multilateralism incorporated in the GATT/WTO and maintain a proper balance between FTAs and the WTO. I wish John Jackson were here to give his thoughts on this current issue.

In any event, his accomplishments will be long remembered among those interested in international economic laws. I pray he rests in peace.