Shinto Teramoto is a Japanese lawyer and legal scholar whose work spans intellectual property, venture finance, and technology law. Born in 1963 in Wakayama, he was admitted to the Japanese bar, practiced in Tokyo law firms, and later became a professor at the University of Tokyo Law School and Kyushu University.
Background
Shinto Teramoto was born in 1963 in Wakayama, Japan, a port city on the Kii Peninsula in Wakayama Prefecture, southwest of Osaka. His birth took place during the years of rapid economic expansion in Japan, when the country's industries and commercial activity were growing quickly.
His early environment in Wakayama is closely tied to the region that produced him, and his later career developed in Tokyo and Fukuoka. The sequence of his education and training moved from the national capital's leading law faculty into private practice and then into university teaching.
Education
Teramoto studied at the University of Tokyo, a national university founded in 1877 by the Meiji government. Its Faculty of Law was one of the principal centers of legal education in Japan, and he received a Bachelor of Laws degree from the faculty in 1985. A 2025 award profile states that he passed the bar examination in 1984 while still an undergraduate.
Teramoto's legal training therefore combined a university law education with early entry into the Japanese legal profession, which later supported his work in private practice. He speaks Japanese and English.
Career
Teramoto's legal career began in Tokyo. From 1987 to 1990 he worked at Nishimura and Sanada, a Tokyo law firm, and from 1990 to 1993 he worked at TMI Associates. TMI was founded in Minato, Tokyo, on October 1, 1990, by ten intellectual property specialists who had left Nishimura & Partners, so his time there began in the firm's first year.
In 1993 and 1994 he was a visiting scholar at the College of Law of Arizona State University, a public university in Tempe, Arizona. He then practiced at Dohke and Teramoto from 1994 to 1996 and at Teramoto & Partners in Tokyo from 1996 to 2000. The latter firm's practice areas, according to his profile, included venture capital finance, intellectual property law, partnership, and electronic banking.
In 2000 he joined Nishimura & Partners, a firm founded in Tokyo in 1966 that adopted the name Nishimura & Asahi in 2007 after acquiring the international division of Asahi Law Offices. The firm is now Japan's largest law firm by number of lawyers. Teramoto's academic career followed: from 2007 to 2010 he was a professor at the University of Tokyo Law School, a professional graduate school established in 2004 within Japan's new law school system.
In 2010 he became a professor in the Faculty of Law of Kyushu University in Fukuoka. Kyushu University was founded in 1911 as Kyushu Imperial University, and he continues to teach there. According to a 2025 award profile, his courses include intellectual property instruction for law school students, business law for business school students, and legal training for undergraduates preparing for law school.
The same profile states that he has represented venture capitalists, investment fund managers, and technology ventures, and that he serves as a board member of two commercial companies and several non-profit organizations.
Views
A 2025 award profile describes Teramoto's central concern as how knowledge and innovation can be spread more widely and quickly. He connects this question to intellectual property, the diffusion of medical and healthcare information, and the sharing of medical records among patients and medical teams.
