This paper empirically examines the conflict between official and unofficial law, focusing on cases where discrepancies arise between registered titleholders and owners based on customary rights in Japan’s common forests. In Japan, compliance-oriented legalization has progressed, and recent legal reforms have framed common forests with irregular registrations as “abandoned lands with unknown owners.” Interviews with commoners revealed a weakening confidence in their customary rights, leading to a lack of resistance to demands for registration regularization. However, a nationwide survey of forestry cooperatives showed that common forests are often well-managed due to economies of scale. In practice, legal relationships are frequently established with representatives of commoner groups, bypassing the need to trace all heirs of outdated titleholders, thereby mitigating the tragedy of the anti-commons. However, this practice stems from the high costs of complying with official law and does not signify a revival of customary rights. In fact, forestry cooperatives that placed emphasis on registration were confronted with difficulties in managing common forests.

The term “customary law” is a label given by outsiders to what is simply the “law” for the local people. This article proposes an analytical framework for the case studies in this special issue in observing the normative contests through land and forestry dispute resolution in Asia and Africa, as a challenge to a changing regime of positive law under the pressures of contemporary “legal transplant.” A comparative view across jurisdictions may tell us the commonalities as well as the variation of the modes of normative modification through dialogues. As an attempt to demonstrate such an analytical approach, this article looks into the cases of normative resistance by local communities, similarly facing the eviction orders in the context of post-disaster reconstruction: in post-2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia, and Moken villages in southern Thailand; in the post-2013 Typhoon Yolanda in Leyte, the Philippines; and post-2011 tsunami-affected communities in the East Japan.