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Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture: From Crime Fighting Robots to Dueling Pocket Monsters

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.5.2.0191

2380-7687

Thomas E. Simmons,

Japanese History and Culture

Western attempts to decode Japanese legal culture have often floundered. Previous scholars observed a dissonance between legal texts and social practices in Japan. Distracted by low crime and a general aversion to litigation, these scholars found Japanese culture to be one of lawlessness. In fact, Japanese culture is particularly invested in substantive and procedural legislation.Meanwhile, recent academic interest that applies a law and humanities lens on comic books has fallen short by ignoring manga. The interrogation of law through comics, which has developed in the last decade or so, has been almost exclusively concerned with Anglophone traditions. The three co-editors of Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture aim to redress both shortcomings. Their collection contains seventeen brisk essays.In these essays, the various scholars successfully locate recurring legal themes and concerns in manga as well as in film, fiction, video games, and fan culture. The crime-fighting robots and dueling pocket monsters referred to in the book’s subtitle (i.e., Tetsuwan Atomu [Astro Boy] and Pokémon, respectively) each receive a chapter of their own. The essays are grouped under four subtitles, the first dealing with justice, the second, with “the legal subject,” the third with image problems, and the fourth with law and justice specificities in everyday Japan. The origins of the collection can be traced to a Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia conference in 2015.The collection’s utility to academics is somewhat compromised by its wide-ranging themes and approaches. Some essays focus on a particular Japanese popular culture element like depictions of kōban (Japanese “police boxes”—diminutive police stations). Some are descriptive, some literary, some social. Some essays simply cover aspects of law: two essays consider the regulation and criminalization of yaoi (a fictional genre concentrating on male-male love and marketed to female audiences). Professor Yuichiro Tsuji writes on constitutional copyright concerns of doujinshi (derivative texts like fan-illustrated manga). While informative and probing, especially for comparative legal scholars, the more aesthetically and culturally oriented readers will likely skip over the more technical legal studies. Still, each scholar has something to say and the quality of the analyses is evenly accomplished.The two most gainful essays strain aesthetics, humanities scholarship, and thematic criticism through legal concerns. Much—but not all—of the book investigates law and justice through the medium of comics. This sort of cross-disciplinary approach is particularly productive and fulfills the promise of the collection’s title, emphasizing the placements of law in Japanese popular culture. The first such noteworthy attempt contrasts Grant Morrison’s Batman, Incorporated against Jiro Kuwata’s Batmanga. The second considers Japanese capital punishment in manga. Each is encapsulated below.Tim Peters’s essay unpacks a comparative assessment of Batman, Incorporated and Batmanga. His chapter is playfully titled “Holy Trans-Jurisdictional Representations of Justice, Batman!: Globalization, Persona and Mask in Kuwata’s Batmanga and Morrison’s Batman, Incorporated.” It tracks the transnational flow of Batman comic renditions, from 1960s American silver-age comics to 1960s Japanese manga, then whipsaws back to modern American Batman comics, specifically those by the legendary Scottish author Grant Morrison. Peters considers the cultural resonance of Batman’s mask and persona in Western and Japanese popular culture.Peters emphasizes how the popularity of both American comics and Japanese manga have been globalized, not simply in a hegemonic sense (particularly American) but in a range of indigenous ways as they are read by and blended with a variety of cultures. Thus, hybridized commodities cross and recross the Pacific Ocean repeatedly. As they do so, a process of indigenization can be observed.Jiro Kuwata reimagined Batman in 1966 and 1967 in response to the craze ignited by the campy, color-drenched American television series. Kuwata’s shōnen manga featured dynamic art and action. As Peters explains, Kuwata’s Batman is closely aligned with conventional law enforcement and operates in an ordered Gotham City with occasional criminal disruptions. Batman applies scientific detective technology and reasoning to apprehend various villains. Frequently, Batman’s aim is to unmask the villain—to reveal his true identity. Peters argues that Western treatment of masks, back to the inception of Greek theatre, has been to represent the underlying individual. But in Japanese noh and kabuki theatre, masks are deployed so that an actor can become the role and impart to the audience a character that is distinct from the actor who plays her. Peters distills these fundamentally different ways of viewing masks as well as legal personhood. He then illustrates those differences as portrayed by Jiro Kuwata and Grant Morrison.In 2010, Grant Morrison explicitly referenced Kuwata’s narratives in Batman, Incorporated. A central character in Morrison’s series is Lord Death Man, modeled on Kuwata’s Death Man character (who in turn modeled the character on one which appeared in a 1960s American Batman comic). In Batman, Incorporated, Batman essentially franchises himself to wage a global war on crime. The global merchandising of superhero toys by corporations is inverted by Morrison and replicated by the Batman character himself as Batman manufactures and endorses new Batmans. Morrison also invokes corporate personhood. He allows the Batman character to utilize a new style of personhood in a kind of quasi-corporate format where an individual actor diffuses his aims—and his mask—across multiple actors and countries.Ashley Pearson’s essay is also particularly worthwhile and a summary of it provides another illustration of the book’s tone and content. She excavates the manga Death Note against the flaws of Japan’s capital punishment procedures in her chapter titled “‘The World is Rotten’: Execution and Power in Death Note and the Japanese Capital Punishment System.” (She also co-authors the preface along with her co-editors.)In Tsugumi Ohba’s Death Note (serialized between 2003 and 2006), high-school student Light Yagami discovers a notebook that grants its user the power to execute anyone that the user can identify by name and face merely by writing their name in the notebook. Light attempts to use these powers to eliminate crime, achieving justice by virtue of the power of death that the notebook embodies. Indeed, crime rates plummet as a result. And the world begins to view the anonymous Light as a god. Eventually, Light’s identity is revealed and Ryuk, an actual demonic death god, kills Light by writing her name in his Death Note.Pearson unearths Japanese disquiet with its capital punishment system within Death Note. Three primary obstacles to an effective Japanese capital punishment system are identified: delay, anonymity, and secrecy. Lengthy delays often precede the imposition of capital punishment following a sentence of death, with some criminals dying of natural causes before execution. When an execution does take place, the responsibility for the defendant’s death is diffused among multiple actors. Legal actors are distanced from the violence of execution. In this way, Pearson observes, everyone is made responsible for a criminal’s death and, simultaneously, no one is. Finally, executions are characterized by secrecy in Japan with public announcements made only after the sentence has been carried out. The timing of executions may only be announced to the condemned themselves a day ahead of time.Death Note illustrates these salient procedural characteristics by transposing them. Delay is eliminated as deaths are essentially instantaneous. Responsibility is concentrated—in Light alone. And secrecy is eventually overcome. Light’s character is ambiguous, just as the criminal justice system she parodies. Is she righteous, as she claims? Or evil? Death Note presents the very struggles that the Japanese criminal justice system would face if accountability could not be diffused among multiple actors. The system would rupture were a web of actors replaced with one individual like Light; the separation of person and abstract legal actor would collapse.Both Pearson’s and Peters’s articles are representative as well as noteworthy. The overall impression of the collection is varied, but crisply edited and effective. In sum, Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture succeeds in offering progress toward addressing twin shortcomings—legal comic book scholars’ disregard of manga and misfired attempts to decode Japanese legal culture. The prose is consistently erudite and accessible as the writers engage with the treatment of law and justice within the popular cultural legacy of Japan. The essays represent determined attempts to initiate serious considerations of manga in a legal context, as well as other popular culture narratives such as those contained in the Pokémon Black and White game and the Ringu films. And the collection appears at a particularly timely moment in the evolution of inter-disciplinary work in the comic books and law department.Thomas E. Simmons is a professor at the University of South Dakota’s Knudson School of Law, where he teaches courses in estates, ethics, and remedies. He is interested in the intersections of law, history, popular culture, and literature.