ABSTRACT
Japan has undergone extensive legal and regulatory reform since 1989, when Japan’s “bubble economy” collapsed. Since then, Japanese government and industry have embarked on deregulatory policy and economic restructuring, in the process explicitly turning to formal law, legal institutions, and lawyers as regulatory mechanisms.1 As a result, we have seen a surge in rule-based, hierarchical controls in Japan, including more regulatory law but, at the same time, the emergence (or reshaping) of informal forms of regulation such as industry practices and codes of conduct and ethics. I call this process the “re-regulation” of Japan.2
