Your honor, I object - Blowfish - Brief Article

Japan, Inc., Nov, 2002

Tokyo is home to no fewer than 3,203 law offices. I don't know what big-name attorneys like Alan Dershowitz or Johnny Cochran are raking in these days, but I did find a listing of the nation's most successful attorneys in a recent issue of Dacapo magazine. The nation's best paid lawyer, Hidetoshi Masunaga, is believed to have earned [yen] 935.76 million during 2001.

Other top earners were Shogo Abe ([yen] 527 million); Shin Ushijima ([yen] 450.84 million); Takashi Ejiri ([yen] 384.81 million); Hideki Matsushima ([yen] 349.32 million); Hiroyuki Kawai ([yen] 323.2 million); and Tadashi Shimizu ([yen] 381 million). We would like it noted for the record that all of the above earned more than 10 times the average income among the survey subjects, which according to a June 2000 survey taken by the Japan Bar Association was [yen] 31.63 million. That compares to a [yen] 27.64 million a year salary for a justice on Japan's Supreme Court and [yen] 20.81 million for the prosecutor general.