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In the past two decades, South Korea and Japan have enacted stricter regulations to reduce exposure to secondhand smoke, signaling more legalistic modes of governance. Whereas both countries previously depended on nonsmokers’ tolerance and smokers’ etiquette, the legalistic regulations entail more detailed rules and financial penalties for rule-breakers. As the Japanese government’s promotional materials note, the reforms move “From manners to rules.” What explains this shift toward legalism? Non-smoking regulations run counter to Japan’s and Korea’s entrenched smoking cultures, especially among men, and are surprising considering the persistent political power of their tobacco industries. Additionally, scholars of comparative public policy and law often contrast American-style legalism with the more bureaucratic and cooperative modes of governance found in Korea and especially Japan. I argue that the turn toward legalism evident in the smoking bans is the product of domestic reform advocates leveraging transformed public attitudes about smoking, legal reasoning, and networks amassed through the 2005 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and the International Olympics Committee’s campaign for smoke-free games. But the comparative lack of party turnover in Japanese politics enabled the tobacco industry to retain political influence and thereby water down non-smoking regulations. This argument draws on qualitative content analysis of policy deliberation minutes, social movement documents, news stories, and thirty-five original interviews. The paired comparison of regulation in one area of tobacco control—smoking bans—indicates that legalistic modes of governance are spreading in East Asia but more so in Korea than in Japan and not yet to U.S. levels.

Celeste L. Arrington (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University. Her research interests include law and social change, comparative policy processes, and transnational advocacy. Her first book was Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Government Accountability in Japan and South Korea (Cornell, 2016). She has published articles in Comparative Political Studies, Law & Society Review, Journal of East Asian Studies, Law & Policy, and elsewhere. Her current book analyzes the changing role of lawyers and litigation in Japanese and Korean policymaking regarding tobacco control and disability rights. She also co-edited (with Patricia Goedde) the volume Rights Claiming in South Korea, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2021.