00166927

open access

Version of Record

Social Movements and Contemporary Rights in Japan : Relative Success Factors in the Field of Environmental Law

English (英語)

Kobe University law review

22

63-77

神戸大学大学院法学研究科

1988

2006-07-15

Social movements can be conceptualized as collective activities that seek to alter a regime, and, since a system of legally enforceable rights is part of this regime, these activities, that seek to institutionalize new legal rights, are a form of social movements. Drawing on the sociology of social movements, this paper presents a simple sequential model of such movements. Further, a series of hypotheses related to their formation, maintenance, and success are constructed. Factors considered are the right to be institutionalized and characteristics of movement participants; availability, resources, and strategies of the leadership; characteristics of the decision-making elite, opponents, and competitors, and their controls over the movement; mobilization of the media and public support; the larger social context; and doctrinal sophistication on the part of the movement. Hypotheses were tested with examples of movements with varying degrees of success, regarding the environmental right (kankyo-ken), the right to personal integrity (jinkaku-ken), and the solar access right (nissho-ken), all related to prevention or remedies of harms caused by environmental destruction. This paper finds that while lack of access to other policy-making arenas have forced many movements to resort to the judiciary, the increasingly conservative Japanese judiciary is not likely to adopt new rights that have certain characteristics, however sophisticated their doctrinal construction. The paper concludes with an observation that many movements will have to become explicitly political.

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