Norio Yamazaki (Yamazaki Administrative Scrivener Office) has posted Receipt of Manifestations of Intention in Asynchronous Messaging: Attribution of Receiving Functions and Notification Risk in Failures After Technical Acceptance but Before Retrieval Becomes Possible on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
When a recipient-side service provider has technically accepted a notice, but a failure occurs before its contents become retrievable by the recipient, who should bear the risk of delay or non-receipt? This article examines that limited question by connecting the doctrine of receipt under Article 97 of the Japanese Civil Code with failure analysis in distributed systems. Building on Mihoko Sumida’s distinction between transmission risk and cognition risk, and on prior work concerning storage, reproducibility, and the appropriateness of a means of communication, the article distinguishes the recipient’s selection of a service from the establishment of an opportunity to receive the particular notice. Storage, retrieval, authorization, and organizational receipt perform different functions. Retrievability may include extraction by an external service provider through a route organizationally available to the recipient. Neither invisibility in an ordinary user interface nor the need for specialist action, by itself, proves the absence of an opportunity to receive. Treating an intermediary’s acceptance response as conclusive receipt would shift notification risk even where no opportunity to retrieve ever arose. Conversely, treating a failure after the notice became retrievable as non-receipt would return an internal, post-receipt risk to the sender. Receipt by an authorized recipient agent, deemed receipt following unjustified obstruction, and a valid agreement on the time of receipt require separate legal grounds. The analysis holds the notice, address, and acceptance response constant while varying the location of failure, the role of the receiving function, and alternative retrieval routes. It also constructs two histories consistent with the same sender-visible acceptance log but producing different conclusions under Article 97, thereby identifying the additional evidence needed to distinguish them. This is a doctrinal and comparative case analysis, not an empirical measurement study. The article does not claim to discover retrievability, designation of a receiving address, storage and reproduction, or the distinction between receipt and later cognition. Its contribution is narrower: it maps the scope of delegated receipt, failure location, state history, and observational reach of evidence to the additional facts that can change either the legal conclusion or its proof.
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