Research About Japan Environmental Joint Torts

From1950s to1960s, Japanese economy earns rapid development, however due to the excessive pursuit of the production, environmental problems are randomly generated."Four Major Public Nuisance Litigation" in1960s becomes the most notorious environmental pollution case. From then on, Japanese government begins to governance on environmental problems. Pollution countermeasures law was enacted in1967; Air Pollution Prevention Law and Noise regulation law was enacted in1968. And in1970and1971’s congressional session, Pollution countermeasure law s, Air Pollution Prevention Law, Noise regulation law, Water pollution prevention and control law were revised and formulated. No-fault liability method and Pollution health damage compensation method were made to clear the pollution liability in the next two years.In the environmental pollution case, most of the environmental pollution was caused by pollutants discharged by several enterprises. Therefore, treatment for the composite pollution of the environment is particularly important. Based on joint tort theory of Seven hundred and nineteenth in the Civil Code, Japan’s law deal with complex environmental pollution behavior. Like most countries, the no-fault liability principle is applied for the composite pollution of the environment. But if there is difference with the popular no-fault liability, details will be mentioned n this paper. In addition, for the damage caused by pollution, victims may request civil damages to polluting enterprises. But in the environmental pollution incidents, victims as individuals who are against polluting enterprises, especially in the performance of the burden of proof and the burden of proof of a causal relationship in a vulnerable position, are very difficult to request to check the damage behavior. Therefore, doctrine and theory of the late1960s were to discuss about how to actively release the burden of victims. And in this paper the common infringement behavior in the combined pollution, the definition of the scope, request of stopping violations, compensation for losses have been made detailed analysis.In Japan, because past case has important implications on the subsequent trial, there were popular cases of composite pollution in this paper, for example, Yokkaichi litigation case. In Yokkaichi case, the principle of joint tort was applied for the first time. In addition, the Japanese various theories, not as formal law, do have considerable influence on the trial of the case. Therefore, some theories of majority and minority are introduced in the paper.Law on combined pollution, not only relates to the civil law, administrative law and criminal law, involves many aspects, but also exhibits a tendency to tilt with administrative law. But the paper mainly relates to the civil law, involved a little bit of administrative law and criminal law.