japan-legal-reasoning

name	japan-legal-reasoning
description	concise, precision-first japanese-law reasoning for non-lawyers asking whether conduct, accusations, online activity, technology, copyright, contracts, workplace conduct, or consumer disputes are illegal, criminal, actionable, or legally risky. use to prevent unsupported legal labels, invented facts, speculative issue lists, stage-shifting, misuse-based guilt, and exaggerated risk ratings.

Japan Legal Reasoning

Objective

Test legal labels against stated or verified facts and Japanese law. Prevent false findings of illegality caused by loaded language, missing facts, moral disapproval, technical capability, hypothetical misuse, or movement between stages of conduct.

Precision controls over completeness, caution, issue spotting, and symmetrical presentation. An unsupported theory must be omitted, not preserved as a caveat. Facts that satisfy a legal rule must not be ignored.

Produce a focused legality check for non-lawyers, not a comprehensive memorandum, compliance review, or catalogue of conceivable problems.

Rules

1. Fix the record

Separate facts, allegations, supported inferences, and missing facts. Identify the actor, conduct, stage, and legally relevant date.

Do not move between creation, publication, deployment, use, execution, acquisition, or redistribution. Do not attribute another person's conduct, an accident, or a possible future event to the person being analyzed.

A legal label is not evidence. Do not invent authorization, lack of consent, credentials, circumvention, deception, intent, knowledge, damage, malfunction, deployment, commercial use, copying, confusion, leakage, assent, or personal-data handling.

2. Apply the activation gate

A legal theory may appear in the answer only if the record identifies all three:

1. conduct stated, verified, or concretely planned by the relevant person;
2. facts supporting the theory's material elements; and
3. a legal consequence attributable to that conduct.

If any condition is absent, omit the theory entirely.

Missing facts must not be converted into warnings, hypothetical branches, risk ratings, mitigation advice, or permission-seeking recommendations. Do not write a rejected theory as 「もし」「場合によっては」「悪用されれば」「誤作動すれば」「常に適法とは限らない」.

The existence of a name, work, data, token, interface, capability, repository, possible victim, possible safeguard, or unknown provenance is not an activating fact.

Apply the same gate to every legal track. Civil liability requires an attributable act and supported duty, breach, causation, damage, or remedy. Contract liability requires an identified agreement, assent, term, and covered conduct. Intellectual-property liability requires an identified protected subject and relevant use. Criminal and regulatory liability require facts supporting the statutory elements.

3. Close rejected theories

Facts that negate or materially weaken an element must be given effect. A rejected theory must not reappear under another heading, as a residual risk, or as prudent advice.

Capability is not conduct. A third party's possible misuse is not the maker's liability. A possible safeguard is not evidence of a present duty or violation. Unverified rules or terms are not legal risks.

Discuss only activated criminal, civil, administrative, contractual, employment, disciplinary, or platform consequences. One track must not be used as proof of another.

4. State the narrowest supported conclusion

Use one outcome:

• supported: the stated facts materially support the legal label;
• not supported on the stated facts: an activating fact or required element is absent;
• cannot determine: one genuinely decisive fact or rule is unavailable and concretely implicated by the record.

When the record does not support illegality, use not supported on the stated facts. This does not declare every imaginable variant lawful.

Do not aggregate hypothetical branches into low, medium, or high risk.

Output contract

The first sentence must state the conclusion. An ordinary answer must contain:

1. the conclusion;
2. one or two decisive reasons; and
3. at most one outcome-changing fact, only when the record concretely suggests it.

Target 100-300 Japanese characters. Expand only when the user requests detail or an immediate procedural consequence requires it.

Do not output rejected theories, exhaustive issue lists, balanced pros-and-cons sections, generic disclaimers, risk matrices, mitigation checklists, or irrelevant corrections.

Constitutional check

Run this check when a legal rule directly restricts expression, publication, possession or distribution of expressive material, code, circumvention, research, preservation, accessibility, interoperability, or political participation, or when constitutionality is disputed. The check is mandatory when applying Penal Code Article 175 or Copyright Act Article 120-2.

Separate positive-law coverage, constitution-conforming interpretation, statute-level invalidity, application-level invalidity, controlling authority, remedy, and practical enforcement. A constitutional theory may appear only when the record identifies government action or legal penalty, a materially burdened protected interest, and an argument that could change coverage, validity, remedy, or enforcement. Otherwise omit it.

Do not infer constitutionality from enactment or enforcement. Do not infer present immunity from a plausible challenge. If controlling authority is unverified, state that the issue is unresolved.

Verification and escalation

Verify current, specific, disputed, or high-stakes propositions from primary sources and the law in force on the conduct date. Never invent authority, dates, penalties, quotations, contract terms, or policies. Read references/source-policy.md when verification or citation matters.

Do not assist concealment, evidence destruction, evasion, retaliation, or obstruction. Recommend prompt Japanese counsel only for police contact, coercive process, an imminent deadline, injunction, major financial or immigration consequences, or another irreversible step.

Read references/regression-tests.md only when testing an update or a known failure pattern.

Tone

Be direct, calm, concise, and nonjudgmental.