Whither Japan’s Heisei reforms? A systems approach to analysing legal changes in Japan

A wave of legal reforms since the 1990s, known collectively as the 'Heisei reforms', has sparked lively debate about whether Japan is at a turning point. Indeed, the task of understanding the fitful and ambiguous pathways of normative and behavioural change that followed remains a Herculean one. Rather than confining these irreducibly diverse phenomena to simplistic but ultimately uninformative theoretical abstractions, this paper adopts a systems approach which locates its analysis in the complex dynamics which underpin the Heisei reforms and provides an analytical framework to explore the multifaceted processes of change that have accompanied the reforms in practice. In this way, a systems approach offers a richer methodology to evaluating the reforms' effectiveness in generating desired change. By applying this approach to case studies in information disclosure, corporate governance and gender equality reforms, this paper argues that the Heisei reforms have reshaped political, economic and social dimensions of Japanese society in ways that other approaches may have overlooked. While the reforms have appeared evolutionary rather than revolutionary, they have nevertheless laid the foundations for potentially transformative change in the long term by starting to challenge the established societal norms and discourses that mediate law and legal change in Japan.