Mitsuko Miyagawa. Source: https://www.courts.go.jp/english/about/justice/vcmsFolder_149/vcms_149.html
Tokyo University
Harvard Law School
Panasonic Corporation. Photo: Akonnchiroll, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panasonic_Shiodome_Bldg.jpg)
Mitsubishi Motors. Photo: Akonnchiroll, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tamachi_Sta._Tower_S.jpg)
Supreme Court of Japan. Photo: Wiiii, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Supreme_Court_of_Japan_2010.jpg)
Tokyo University
Harvard Law School
Panasonic Corporation. Photo: Akonnchiroll, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panasonic_Shiodome_Bldg.jpg)
Mitsubishi Motors. Photo: Akonnchiroll, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tamachi_Sta._Tower_S.jpg)
Supreme Court of Japan. Photo: Wiiii, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Supreme_Court_of_Japan_2010.jpg)
Mitsuko Miyagawa was born on February 13, 1960. Her path into the legal profession combined university legal study, state-run professional training, and registration with a bar association. The Supreme Court of Japan, the highest court in the country's judicial system, oversees the Legal Training and Research Institute through which many judges, prosecutors and attorneys are trained.
Miyagawa studied law at the University of Tokyo and graduated from its Faculty of Law in 1984. The institution traces its origins to 1877, became Tokyo Imperial University in 1886, and remains one of Japan's leading centers of legal education.
After graduation she was appointed a legal apprentice in 1984, the first stage of professional qualification in Japan. Her professional training was undertaken at the Legal Training and Research Institute of the Supreme Court of Japan, which provides practical training for candidates who qualify as judges, prosecutors and attorneys.
She received a Master of Laws from Harvard Law School in 1993. Founded in 1817, Harvard Law School is among the oldest law schools in the United States, and its graduate program offers advanced legal study to lawyers with prior training. Her documented languages are Japanese and English.
Miyagawa was registered as an attorney with the Dai-ichi Tokyo Bar Association in 1986, the year she joined Nishimura & Sanada. She remained with the firm until 1990. Attorneys in Japan practice after registering with a bar association, and the Dai-ichi Tokyo Bar Association is one of the three bar associations serving Tokyo.
Her departure from Nishimura & Sanada in 1990 came in the same year that TMI Associates was founded. From 1993 to 1994 she worked with Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn in New York. Founded in 1875, that firm had been renamed Proskauer, Rose, Goetz & Mendelsohn in 1942 and added twenty lawyers from Shea & Gould when that firm broke up in early 1994.
In 1994 she worked in London with Theodore Goddard, a London law practice, and was admitted to the New York bar that year. In 1995 she became a partner at Three Mile Island Associates, known as TMI Associates. The firm was founded in 1990 by ten intellectual property specialists who had left Nishimura & Partners, and it was the first Japanese law firm to open an office in Myanmar.
From 2002 onward she held a series of government advisory appointments. These included temporary membership of the Industrial Structure Council of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and membership of its Intellectual Property Policy Committee in 2002, and membership of the Subdivision on Copyright under the Council for Cultural Affairs of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2007.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry oversees Japan's industrial and trade policy, while the Cabinet Office's Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters coordinates national intellectual property strategy. She became an expert member of the Headquarters in 2013. In 2017 she was a member of the Customs and Intellectual Property Subcommittee of the Customs Dissatisfaction Review Committee at the Ministry of Finance.
Her corporate appointments included outside director of S. T. Corporation in 2015, outside company auditor of Panasonic Corporation, a major Japanese electronics manufacturer, in 2016, and outside director of Mitsubishi Motors Corporation, a Japanese automaker, in 2019.
From 2005 she was a lecturer at Keio University Law School, where she taught intellectual property law. Keio University, a private university founded in 1858 by Fukuzawa Yukichi, is one of Japan's oldest institutions of higher education.
She became a Justice of the Supreme Court of Japan in November 2023. The Supreme Court is the highest court in Japan's judicial system, and its justices are appointed by the Cabinet.
Miyagawa has been a registered attorney with the Dai-ichi Tokyo Bar Association since 1986. The association is one of the three bar associations in Tokyo, and Japanese attorneys must belong to a local bar association in order to practice.
The Japan Federation of Bar Associations, founded in 1949, is the national body uniting Japan's local bar associations. Her 2002 membership of its Central Board on Promotion of Intellectual Property Rights Policies connected her with the federation's work on intellectual property policy.
The Japan Association of Arbitrators promotes arbitration as a method of resolving disputes, and Miyagawa served as a director of the association in 2018.
