Beyond the rational consumer: religion, value, and legal comparison in Japanese consumer law

Consumer law rests on the assumption that consumers are rational agents capable of comparing products and services, free of other obligations. This contribution argues that, in the Japanese context, this assumption has been quietly shaped by encounters and comparisons with religious ideologies and practices deemed problematic. Drawing on David Graeber’s anthropological theory of value – which holds that the realisation of value always requires a social totality capable of giving meaning to an action – the contribution traces the legislative history of consumer protection in Japan since the 1970s to show that religion and consumer law have been mutually co-constituted. Through parliamentary debates, court judgements, and news reports, the contribution identifies two distinct but related modes of this co-making. In the first, visible in the pyramid scheme scandal of One Family Under the Heavens, religion is embedded in the scheme’s cosmological warrant and its roots in a long history of local cooperatives that lawmakers acknowledge without referring to their shared values. In the second, visible in the subsequent history of spiritual sales legislation, religion enters consumer law explicitly, culminating in the 2018 Consumer Contract Law amendment that connects fraudulence to the exploitation of religious belief.