Opinions vary in Japan on whether smoking is deviant today, but the behavior, once widely accepted, faces increasing regulation. Recent reforms, moving beyond reliance on nonsmokers' tolerance and smokers' etiquette, impose stricter and more detailed rules on smoking, along with penalties for noncompliance. As the Japanese government's promotional materials note, the reforms move “from manners to rules” (manā kara rūru e). The evolution of Japan's smoking regulations exemplifies a shift toward more legalistic modes of social control. Historically, Japanese governance relied on non-binding “soft law,” administrative guidance, and societal cooperation. Legalistic governance, in contrast, hinges on formal rules and proceduralized enforcement mechanisms. This article, drawing on twenty-eight interviews and qualitative analysis of policy deliberations, advocacy organization documents, court rulings, and Japanese news coverage, traces how societal actors contributed to this legalistic turn. Tobacco control advocates filed lawsuits, pursued voluntary changes through local activities, and provided information subsidies to policymakers while lobbying for local and national reforms. They thereby helped de-normalize smoking and render it regulatable. By uncovering bottom-up drivers of legalistic governance and the strategies through which societal actors influence regulatory style, this paper contributes to scholarship on governance, policy diffusion, and law and social change.

There is growing interest in social movement actors as knowledge producers, but many movements have limited ability to access or produce credible, authoritative information. Building on sociolegal scholarship and social movement studies, we show how movements can overcome knowledge gaps they have via-à-vis state authorities and contribute to public knowledge through institutional tactics. We argue that features of the process of legal mobilization activate mechanisms that bolster movements' credibility, reveal or generate information, and thereby facilitate social movement knowledge production. We theorize these dynamics by analyzing environmental activism against U.S. military bases in Japan and South Korea, which allows us to leverage most similar legal contexts and types of claims to identify and illustrate the mechanisms.

Scholars argue that litigation can have positive and negative “radiating” or indirect effects for social movements, irrespective of formal judicial decisions. They see litigation as a dynamic process with distinctive features yet nonetheless intertwined with advocacy in other forums. Litigation can indirectly shape collective identities, reframe debates, or provide political leverage. However, the mechanisms behind these radiating effects are poorly understood. Through an analysis of lawsuits and related activism by Korean survivors of Japanese actions in the first half of the twentieth century, this article disaggregates the mechanisms behind litigation's productive indirect effects. It theorizes and illustrates mechanisms such as attribution of similarity, brokerage, issue dramatization, political cover, and intergroup discussions. These mechanisms help us understand how litigants obtain litigation's indirect effects and thus also the broader impact of postwar compensation lawsuits in East Asia, despite few judicial victories. The article contributes non-Western and transnational cases to scholarship on litigation's indirect effects.