Part II focuses on cases related to tobacco control. Law, rights talk, and litigation have become regular features of tobacco control movements and public health campaigns aimed at reducing tobacco consumption worldwide, including in Japan and Korea. But are they enough to overcome the resource and information disadvantages tobacco control activists face when taking on the industry? Chapter 6 provides historical background on the tobacco epidemic, the multifaceted reasons the tobacco industry remains politically influential in both countries, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and recent tobacco control measures—including taxation and pricing, limits on advertising, and new responses to electronic nicotine delivery systems.

Chapter 4 focuses on a central demand of disability rights activism—accessibility. In both Korea and Japan, the built environment has grown markedly more accessible, in part through non binding measures. But by combining contentious and institutional tactics, disability rights advocates have pushed to make standards and regulations mandatory and to give disabled persons (the users of barrier-free features) a seat at the table in policy design, implementation, and evaluation. National governments and localities in both Korea and Japan have gradually responded by making accessibility policy more formal and participatory, though gaps remain.

The book’s conclusion assesses the extent of legalism in Korea and Japan, including other issue areas. It underscores the importance of studying the role of activists and lawyers in catalyzing sociolegal and institutional change. Legalism may take diverse forms, as demonstrated in the comparisons of Korea and Japan. The tobacco liability cases show that legalism is not emerging everywhere. The cases suggest legalistic governance is more likely when support structures for advocacy and legal mobilization exist, opposition is diffuse or weak, and activists sustain all five mechanisms. The conclusion considers what the expanding role of law and courts means for democracy in both countries. It ends on a cautiously optimistic note: the potential for rights realization and participatory channels has grown, especially in Korea. Although challenges in legal mobilization persist, and reform implementation faces human, resource, and attitudinal barriers, activists and lawyers are creatively engaging with legal frameworks in ways that strengthen legalistic regulatory styles.

Chapter 8 turns to a paired comparison of secondhand smoke prevention policies, which offer a more optimistic picture of sociolegal change. In addition to more nonsmoking rules, changing social norms and declining smoking rates were conducive to realizing reforms—and benefited from them. This chapter details the contributions of tobacco control advocates through lobbying, educational activities, and lawsuits related to secondhand smoke, especially in workplaces and at subnational levels. Their multi sited activism is a necessary part of understanding why one is now much less likely to be exposed to secondhand smoke in Korea and Japan.

Part I comprises three chapters focused on the history of disability rights activism and recent reforms related to accessible public transit and disability discrimination. Chapter 3 overviews historical parallels in the marginalization of people with disabilities, the development of welfare policies for them, and the emergence of independent living movements in Japan and Korea. Activism by (rather than for) Japanese and Koreans with disabilities, along with growing rights consciousness, accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s through ties with transnational activist networks and negotiations around the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. As background for the next two chapters, Chapter 3 surveys recent reforms and the organizational ecology of disabled persons’ organizations and lawyers, who activate the causal mechanisms and thereby contribute to the legalistic turn in governance.

As this book’s “negative cases,” Chapter 7 unpacks why legal mobilization related to tobacco product liability and the recovery of healthcare costs for treating smokers has had so little impact on legal frameworks and jurisprudence. The chapter highlights the persistence of the Tobacco Business Law in sustaining the tobacco industry’s political power, the role of transnational networks among tobacco companies in resisting stronger regulations, domestic Japanese and Korean judges’ narrow interpretations of standing rules and causation, and the weaknesses of support structures for sustained legal mobilization and advocacy.

Chapter 2 outlines the book’s conceptual and theoretical frameworks. It bridges studies of regulatory styles with scholarship on legal and political opportunity structures to detail indicators of legalistic governance, which serve as a guide for the subsequent paired case studies. It also theorizes five causal mechanisms that elucidate how activism contributes to more legalistic governance. Finally, it discusses, in probabilistic terms, the conditions under which activism is more likely to contribute to legalistic modes of governance.

Worldwide, more than 125 countries have enacted legal provisions against disability-based discrimination; such legislation was also a core demand of Japanese and Korean disability rights activism. Despite the rapid diffusion of non discrimination norms, we know less about why their forms vary and how they have affected rights-claiming options. Through a paired comparison of activism surrounding statutes enacted in Korea and Japan in 2007 and 2013, respectively, Chapter 5 shows how advocacy for such legislation and related litigation transformed governance and created legal opportunities. To a greater extent in Korea than in Japan, people with disabilities gained non discrimination rights, mechanisms for redressing discrimination, support from NGOs and state agencies, and the legal tools with which to solidify and expand anti discrimination protections in court and through statutory revisions.

The introduction outlines the book’s two main puzzles: First, why is legalistic governance emerging in South Korea and Japan, which were long known for their non legalistic regulatory styles? Second, what accounts for the varieties of legalism observed in Korea and Japan? Legalism describes a style of regulation that relies on more formal, detailed, and enforceable laws and regulations, as well as more participatory policy design and implementation processes. This book argues that activists and lawyers are often-overlooked societal drivers behind the emergence of legalism and the broader judicialization of politics in Korea and Japan.