Reframing Debt, Reshaping Governance: Legal Mobilization and Processual Legalism in Japan

This article asks how legalism emerges in policy fields long governed by informal coordination and weak legal enforcement, focusing on Japan’s consumer finance regime. It develops the concept of “processual legalism,” in which legalism is understood not as an all-or-nothing regime type but the cumulative result of recurrent interactions between courts, bureaucracies, legislators, and cause lawyers. The article identifies three core mechanisms: institutional friction , generated by regulatory ambiguity and uneven enforcement; normative reframing , through which lawyers transform moralised, individualised grievances into structural injustices; and consensus realignment , as judicially articulated norms are integrated into administrative and legislative reforms. Together, these mechanisms illuminate legalism as a contingent process rather than a structural condition. While legalism is episodic in its activation, the institutional changes it generates are incremental and consensus-dependent, revealing important varieties of legalism within coordinated market economies.