IN JAPAN, as in other functioning democracies, law and society combine to promote, protect, and restrict individual rights. With the striking degree of group orientation in Japan, many strengths and weaknesses in the status of individual rights are manifested in contexts defined by a group's sense of its own rights as a collectivity. Since cross-cultural communication on human rights issues is at best difficult, and since later descriptions of problems involve interpretive comment and value judgment on law and social patterns in Japan, it seems important to state at the outset my underlying assumptions. In this article, which stresses society more than law, the first assumption concerns human rights theory. Diversity among nations in cultural preferences and in social, economic, and political conditions must be taken into account for fair assessment of rights under law in any given country; but at the same time a transcultural natural law jurisprudence grounded in explicit or implicit recognition of each person's intrinsic dignity is an essental element in an intersubjectively persuasive and interculturally reasonable human rights theory.1 As here