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On October 30, 2008, the Intellectual Property High Court issued an important opinion in connection with the restrictive requirement to the amendment filed within 30 days from the filing of an appeal under the Japanese Patent Article 17bis(1)(iv).  The Japanese Patent Law Article 17bis (4) states that the amendment filed under Article 17bis(1)(iv) shall be limited to (i) the cancellation of the claim or claims, (ii) the restriction of the claim or claims, (iii) the correction of errors, or (iv) the clarification of an ambiguous description.  As such, the second requirement evidently prohibits the applicant from making an amendment to expand the scope of the claim or claims.  Practically, however, it has been controversial whether the Article 17bis(4)(iv) prohibits an addition of a new dependent claim with a new element not included in any of the pending claims.
The patent application of this case, finally rejected by the examiner, had 12 claims.  Against the final decision by the examiner, the applicant filed an appeal along with an amendment including new claims 13 and 14.  The added claims 13 and 14 are dependent claims each depending upon the independent claim 1.  Specifically, the dependent claim 13 included a new limitation that “a rate of a relative light output ranges from 80 to 100 percent when …”.  The dependent claim 14 included a new limitation that “the position detecting device (10) rotates in part or vibrates in part in an angular range from -45 degrees to +45 degrees from an initial stopping position to reach a fixed position.”  As above, neither of the claims 13, 14 were to restrict a certain element existed in claim 1 into a specific manner or embodiment.
The court upheld the decision of the board of appeal that the addition of the claims 13, 14 fails to meet the requirement of the Article 17bis(4)(iv).  In this decision, the court delivered an opinion that although the Article 17bis(4)(iv) does not prohibit an increase of the number of the claims by, for example, (1) rendering a part of the multi-dependent claim into an independent claim which includes all the limitations included in some (but not all) of the claims on which the multi-dependent claim depends, or (2) rendering the claim including alternatives into a plurality of claims each including one or more of the alternatives, the amendment at issue is no doubt to increase the number of the claims and does not correspond to any of the above allowable patterns (1), (2).

Japanese Patent Law: http://www.wipo.int/clea/docs_new/pdf/en/jp/jp006en.pdf