In 2017, Japan underwent the first major amendment of its rape law in 110 years. The reform focused on revising the definition of rape and its sentencing practice to extend legal protection and reflect victim experiences in the law. But one of the most controversial agendas of the reform – mitigation or elimination of the requirement of force or intimidation in Japanese rape law was left unmodified after multitudes of negotiations among legal scholars, law practitioners and activists. Although the requirement is thought to exclude or disqualify particular rape scenarios, it is valued as a practical criterion to assess consent. To examine the various claims of the interpretation and application of the force and intimidation requirement in practice, this study analyzes publicly available court judgements in rape cases since the reform. The findings suggest that trial judges use the force requirement for three primary purposes: 1) to specify the degree of sufficient unlawful force, 2) to evaluate (the lack of) victim resistance, and 3) to assess the defendant’s knowledge of lack of victim consent. The study suggests that the non-guilty verdicts examined in the study hinged on the exceptionally high standard to demonstrate lack of victim resistance and defendant’s knowledge of lack of consent. The paper contributes to a discussion of further legal reform by highlighting the ways the current rape law enables inconsistent judicial decisions in rape cases driven by limited and biased understanding of sexual assault. It situates the findings within the social, cultural and legal context of Japan.

My dissertation explores how the course of Japanese rape law reform (2014-2023) shifted through the mobilization of new interpretations of victims’ experiences. To connect law with people’s diverse experiences of sexual violence, a group of activists proposed that a lack of sexual consent be recognized as the fundamental element of rape. Despite the initial strong resistance by legal scholars and practitioners to incorporate the concept of sexual consent in the 2017 reform, the 2023 reform adopted it by identifying a list of conditions in which sexual consent cannot be legally assumed. My dissertation aims to understand the developments that enabled the adoption of the sexual consent standard. Drawing from official pre-legislative committees’ meetings, mass media coverage about legal reform, and interviews with reform stakeholders, I identify the processes that led to the incorporation of this new concept into legal framework and public discourse. Central to this exploration is the concept of resonance, where individuals develop cognitive and emotional connections with certain ideas within an institutional context. I focus on resonance in an institutional context and examine how certain institutional strategies made it possible for legislative decision-makers to recognize a consent standard as sensible. Storytelling by victims, providing decision-makers with explicit instructions for listening to new perspectives, and encouraging committee members to suspend their disciplinary assumptions in listening to victims proved especially important. These strategies allowed reform decision-makers to understand the impacts of rape as mental injury and to acknowledge coercion as behavior that did not involve explicit force or intimidation. These shifts, in turn, made it possible to implement a collective problem-solving process to effectively overcome legislative challenges and adopt a sexual consent standard in the 2023 reform. This study contributes to studies of resonance by illuminating the mechanisms and institutional contexts that help individuals address tensions that arise from putting different perspectives into interaction. The case of Japanese rape law reform demonstrates the generative power of repeated interactions with non-resonant ideas in diffusing and institutionalizing new ideas in legal reforms.