The former Manchukuo Judicial Yuan is one of the Eight Grand Ministries that collectively represent the administrative architecture of the colonial capital. This building, like the others in the series, was designed in the Japanese-Chinese neoclassical hybrid style that characterised Manchukuo's official aesthetic — formally authoritative, culturally ambiguous, intended to project civilised statehood without clearly being either Japanese or Chinese.
The building is currently in use as a government or institutional facility. Its exterior, facing a main boulevard, represents the street-level experience of walking through what was once a planned colonial capital and is now a Chinese city that has absorbed those buildings into its own fabric. The visual effect of encountering a building from this period — imposing, well-preserved, slightly uncanny — is one of the distinctive experiences of visiting Changchun.