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Paper short abstract

Analysing court cases on 'pseudo-science sales,' this presentation examines how Japanese scholarship criticising 'magical thinking' informed consumer protection law, revealing the reciprocal relationship between academic discourse and legal practice.

Paper long abstract

In April 2019, Consumer Law News, Japan’s flagship magazine for consumer issues and regulations, featured a special issue on "pseudo-science" (nise-kagaku) sales. Among several short articles dealing with vitamin treatments alleging to cure cancer or magnetic water purifiers with no scientifically proven effects, Fukuyori Naoshi, a staff member at a regional consumer affairs centre and Nichiren Buddhist priest, argued that "piety may be non-'intellectualist' (chiseishugi), but it is not 'anti-intellectualist'” (Fukuyori 2019, 43). Concerned about potential restrictive regulations that might infringe on freedoms of faith or expression, Fukuyori was calling for the government to acknowledge diverse consumer motivations while protecting vulnerable individuals. In fact, a few months later, in June 2019, a new Consumer Contract Law provision (Paragraph 8, Article 4, Section 3) began targeting transactions involving sales talk deemed to exploit fear through "spiritual" (reikan) or other difficult-to-demonstrate information (chiken), a development that culminated decades of efforts by lawyers who had dealt with fraudulent schemes they considered to exploit consumers' 'magical thinking.'

Scholarly research on such scams often employs the concept of "occult economies," linking pyramid schemes to neoliberal capitalism's spirit: "the allure of accruing wealth from nothing" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, 22). This framework connects novel religious motivations embracing neoliberal entrepreneurial ethics (such as West African Pentecostalism) with fraudulent schemes that, absent adequate legislation, exploit consumer trust. However, this approach problematically reduces scheme participants to thoughtless consumers driven by "despair that comes from being left out of the promise of prosperity" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, 25). In Japan, this framework also led scholars to associate economic fraud with supposedly "typical" Japanese magical thinking. For example, folklorist Miyata Noboru and psychiatrist Noda Masaaki, writing in the early 1990s, identified such thinking as a Japanese illness of modernity, and subsequently influenced how lawyers conceptualise fraud and evidentiary standards in trials.

By analysing court cases and lawyer statements concerning "pseudo-science sales" at the turn of the twenty-first century, this presentation examines how scholarship criticising the survival of "magic" in contemporary Japan both informed and was influenced by ongoing monetary scams, revealing the reciprocal relationship between academic discourse and legal practice.