The Japanese archipelago and the Korean peninsula are neighbouring regions, with histories of similarities and contrasts. Currently inhabited by a population of about 123 million in an area slightly bigger than Germany, Japan has been relatively isolated throughout much of the last two millennia. In the late nineteenth century, Japan reinvented itself from a land on the margins of the Sinitic cultural zone to a world power. In contrast, Korea – a landmass a little larger than Great Britain and inhabited by about 78 million people – was an active participant in the China-centred world order during much of its 2,300 year-history before losing sovereignty to Imperial Japan in 1910. (See Map 13.)

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.

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.

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.

This chapter is a short intellectual biography focusing on my interest and engagement in questions of political legitimacy over the years. The chapter is organized into three parts. I begin by discussing how the issue of legitimacy has been one of my key intellectual concerns ever since I started to do research on politics, initially in the context of the study of political and legal regimes in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay). Next, I highlight my understanding of political legitimacy as a responsibility and what this means for the evaluation and judgment of politics. This understanding builds on one of my previous books, Legitimacy and Politics: A Contribution to the Study of Political Right and Political Responsibility. Finally, I focus on how, gradually, in particular in connection with my work with the United Nations (UN), I became interested in the question of political legitimacy at the international level.

This chapter examines how the War Department approached planning for the postwar world. It specifically focuses on the future of Soviet-American relations and how that relationship impacted preparations for the defeat and eventual occupation of the Axis powers. The War Department often adopted ambiguous and confusing stances toward the Soviet Union when it came to postwar planning issues. Stimson, his senior advisers, and Marshall primarily felt a durable postwar peace required a cooperative Washington–Moscow relationship while Army planners and mid-level War Department officials expressed strong concerns about Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe and what that meant for the future. Given Army planners’ central role in the strategic planning and policy process, these divisions helped blur and muddle Washington’s broader Russia policy and helped reinforce American hawks’ views that the future Soviet–American relationship would be dominated by conflict and superpower rivalry. The hawks’ increasingly strong beliefs made confrontational US policies more likely and helped construct the foundations for the pugnacious atmosphere in the developing superpower relationship and the Cold War.

This chapter examines the War Department’s role in the formation of US policy toward the European war and the growing crisis in the Pacific between the Fall of France in June 1940 and the Pearl Harbor attacks in December 1941. This chapter argues that the War Department played a pivotal role in shaping American policy and actions in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, but in different ways. In the Atlantic, the War Department was a primary impetus within the Roosevelt administration for increasingly interventionist policies. It consistently pushed President Roosevelt to act and influenced the politics of his decision-making at several crucial junctures. The War Department provided the crucial nexus between the executive branch, Congress, and outside pressure groups as the US moved toward war. In the Pacific, the War Department pressed for a firm stand against Japan but helped muddle Far Eastern policy by working to undermine the State Department’s more cautious stance. This bureaucratic warfare made it difficult to foster consensus around US deterrence actions and contributed to worsening relations between Washington and Tokyo, setting the stage for the Pacific War.

This chapter examines the crucial seven-year period between Stimson’s resignation as secretary of state in March 1933 and his return to the War Department in June 1940. Although Stimson did not anticipate he would ever return to Washington to serve in the federal government, some of his most important public service occurred when he was a private citizen in this period. Particularly, this chapter advances two critical arguments. The first is that Stimson had both a much wider definition of national security than most of his contemporaries did and came to those conclusions before nearly any other American leader or opinion maker. The second argument is that attempting to neatly define Stimson’s internationalism is difficult. Stimson borrowed ideas from the legalistic, moralistic, and New Deal-style categories of internationalism and repackaged them into his own fusion that called for US leadership to manage the world.

It is difficult to overstate the horrors unleashed by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. While it has been challenging over the decades to determine the precise number of casualties, it is probably safe to say the number is in the hundreds of thousands.1 Those who were not instantly obliterated in the attacks had to face exposure to the blasts, extreme heat, nuclear fallout, radiation poisoning, and the complete and utter destruction of their cities. Some survivors experienced life-threatening health problems stemming from these weapons months, years, or even decades after the bombings, including organ failure, transgenerational genetic damage, and multiple types of cancer. Journalists such as John Hersey and Charles H. Loeb helped reveal these devastations to millions of people who could hardly fathom them.2 Stimson himself was badly shaken by the reports he received in the bombings’ aftermath. He told members of the Ausable Club in upstate New York days after the nuclear strikes that the war had “compelled” America “to invent and unleash forces of terrific destructiveness.