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Ashley Pearson, Thomas Giddens, and Kieran Tranter
Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture
For some, the title of this book would be an oxymoron. In the past, there has been an established orthodoxy in the West that Japan has culture but not law; at least, not law as understood by the modern Western tradition. This conceptualisation of Japan emerged in the post-war era, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, as Western lawyers became more aware of
Japan through trade and investment and puzzled over Japan as a highly organised society that was litigation adverse. From the outside looking in, the texts of law seemed to play a secondary role to cultural considerations, and yet crime was low and the streets were safe.
Subsequent generations of scholars have challenged these assumptions of Japan, yet the perspective still has a currency in the West.
At first contact, Japan was quickly marked as being ‘culturally unique’: a homogenous, collectivist, and intuitive society that stood in stark contrast to the values of freedom, rationality, and individuality so treasured by the West. This uniqueness was solidified and propagated by Japan itself, as the diverse writings of nihonjinron (日本人論: theories of cultural or racial uniqueness) that were developed in the post-war period as part of a cultural nationalist agenda sought to ‘recover a sense of identity and pride amongst the Japanese after the loss of empire and experience of occupation.’1 It was this cultural divide that dominated early academic discussions of Japan, as the West struggled to contend with Japan’s enigmatic
1 Burgess (2010). See also Benedict (1946); Mouer and Sugumoto (1986); Nakane (1970); Befu (1987); Dale
(1986); Yoshino (1992).
1 practices, identifying it as the unknowable foreign Other. And Japan used these external misunderstandings of uniqueness to reinforce their national identity of being ‘unique’ internally.2 Although Japan’s diverse and esoteric culture may have distracted from the lawful(l)ness of Japan in the past, it is time to take this culture seriously, and not exclude it from analysis because it is too odd, or too Japanese, to be understood from a Western perspective.
While traditional Japanese culture can be seen in artefacts reminiscent of past eras, such as woodblock ukiyo-e images, flower arrangement, 13-stringed koto, masked theatre, and calligraphy, it is the burgeoning kawaii (可愛い: cute) and otaku (オタク: geek) popular culture of Japan—with its bright colours and absurdly big eyes, luminescent game screens, and childish delight of superficial commercial consummables—that may be seen to problematise modern Japanese pop culture as artefacts of legitimate legal meaning. Despite such assumptions, we present this book. And we do so in strenuous opposition to these two latent occidental prejudgments about the oriental other (that it is without law, or that its kawaii or otaku stylings render it meaningless). Indeed, Japan is a highly lawful society where concerns about justice are everyday and fiercely contested. That understanding the legality of Japanese society involves an appreciation of its cultural heritage and its contemporary complexity is no different to needing to understand the cultural heritage and contemporary complexity of the common law to appreciate how that legal system shapes a lawful society in, say, the United Kingdom or Australia.
2 Iwabuchi (2009), p 51.
2 Despite all the maids and tentacles, the pretty bishōnen boys and the hungry fujoshi fangirls, scholars have begun to read into specific texts, as well as Japanese popular culture as a whole, to decipher the latent fears and desires of the Japanese public.3 The imprint and participation in this lawful society is as evident in Japanese cultural artefacts and practices as it is in those
Western tracts beloved of the law and literature tradition. Two brief examples. The first is possibly one of the most well-known Japanese cultural exports, at least to Westerners born after 1970: Masamune Shirow’s The Ghost in the Shell.4 This existential cyberpunk cyborg tale is played out with law and order in the foreground. The protagonist Major Motoko
Kusanagi is a member of a paramilitary police unit, and the narrative arcs in the original manga involve investigations of cybercrime. It is clearly about law and justice, and particularly about law and justice in a technological context of human-machine hybridisation.5 The Ghost in the Shell in its manga, anime and live action manifestations graphically displaces any notion that Japanese popular culture is a colourful and trivial zone without any projections of legality.
It is not just in the cult locations—in the West—that Japanese popular culture reflects law and justice, as demonstrated by our second example. Throughout Japan a common urban feature is the community police box (交番: kōban). These fascinating jurisdictional, social
3 Examples of how scholars have read into Japanese culture more broadly include Kinsella (1995) who puts forth that kawaii culture is a form of rebellion against the hard-working, socially responsible lifestyle expected of a Japanese adult. By using cute fashion, writing, and icons that elicit notions of innocence, infantilism, and dependence, young adults (particularly females) are able to deny, in some sense, the responsibilities that maturity brings. Another example includes Kam (2013), who explores the anxieties of excessive consumerism and consumption within the otaku culture.
4 Shirow (1991).
5 Giddens (2015).
3 and aesthetic spaces suggest many complex stories about law, order, justice and culture in
Japan;6 some of these are discussed by Richard Powell and Hideyuki Kumaki in this book.7
The kōban are unambiguous sites of law located in the streets of everyday Japan. They represent, in bricks and mortar, that Japanese culture is deeply concerned with law and justice, and kōban, in turn, have been represented in cultural artefacts and practices as evidence of their influence on the Japanese cultural landscape.
However, this book is not just concerned with law and justice in Japan. In a world of globalised media, Japanese popular culture has become a significant fountainhead for images, narratives, artefacts and identity. From the mascot of Nintendo’s Pokémon franchise, the adorable red-cheeked electric mouse Pikachu, to the digital pop icon Hatsune Miku, to the character icons of Hello Kitty and Gudetama, to the contested imagery from yaoi and ‘Boys
Love’ manga, the convenience of sushi, and the hyper-consumerism of product tie-ins: Japan has bequeathed to a globalised world a rich variety of ways to imagine, communicate and interrogate tradition and change, the self and the technological future.
For scholars of Japanese media and culture, a particular interest has been on the global reach of Japan’s popular culture artefacts and texts. Some see the international export and dissemination of Japanese cultural artefacts and practices as a distinct form of ‘soft power’, a power that ‘derives mostly from intangible resources such as culture and ideology rather than from military action or economic incentives.’8 McGray’s influential article on Japan as a rising cultural superpower was formulated in this ‘soft power’ or ‘Gross National Cool’ that
6 Leishman (2007); Aldous and Leishman (2000).
7 Chapter 16.
8 Daliot-Bul (2009), p 248. See also Nye (2009); Otmazgin (2008); Curran (2015).
4 promoted youth subculture, manga, anime, fashion, pop idols, kawaii culture, and gaming, as being the key to Japan’s cultural rise.9 In 2010, the export and propagation of Japanese popular culture became tied to a nationalistic agenda titled ‘Cool Japan’, which seeks to increase global demand for Japanese products and encourage tourists to come and visit the cosplayers and cat cafés in person. Ironically, the Japanese Government’s appropriation of
Japanese popular culture strips it of its ‘cutting-edge, countercultural appeal’ and the ability of prosumers (a term borrowed from Jenkins that combines producer and consumers to acknowledge the new forms of bottom-up content creation) to harness popular culture as a mode of challenge and critique.10
The concerns with popular culture as soft power resolve around the consequences of export and import. For Japan, the question is whether the export of its popular culture, particularly to its Asian neighbours but also to the West, creates a world that is safer and more open to
Japanese influences. For Japan’s Asian neighbours and the West, the issues are the social and cultural consequences of engagement with Japanese popular culture. Here the ‘Japanification of children’s popular culture’, as documented by the contributors to Mark I West’s book of the same name,11 could be seen as a concern, evident in some of the socially conservative and nationalistic reactions to Pokémon. However, the soft power approach does not focus on the fundamental question. Why has Japanese popular culture found such a reception? A significant body of research has emerged trying to explain the attraction of Japanese popular culture artefacts for non-Japanese consumers. In some respects, this seems to be caught in the concept, and now the brand, of ‘Cool Japan’. Japanese popular culture attracts because it is
9 McGray (2002).
10 Daliot-Bul (2009), p 262. See also Jenkins (2006) and Jenkins (2012).
11 West (2009).
5 ‘cool’; it is innovative, engaging and has the allure of otherness. Not only does Japan’s branding of all things cool and geeky promote interest overseas, whether through the export of the brand of ‘Cool Japan’ or by the visible popularity of Japanese media online, but the rise of international interest in otaku culture has spurred new acceptance within Japan as well.12
However, seeing Japanese popular culture as cool or contributing to Japanese soft power in the international sphere should not distract from its criticism. The ‘Cool Japan’ agenda has been seen to reify and cater to male otaku culture, with the official Ambassadors of Cute (a
Harajuku girl, a Lolita, and a sailor-outfitted schoolgirl) leaving little space for women who do not conform to a narrow model of cute femininity.13 This creepy fetishism (and to a lesser extent, xenophobia) is often overlooked in Japanese popular culture as the cartoonish styles, fantastical character designs, and saturated colouring are easily excused as being ‘just fantasy’ or ‘just for fun’ and indicative of neither real life nor real power relations within
Japan.14 One other marked criticism has been the questioning of the ‘Nippon-ness’ of transnationally successful Japanese popular culture. Critics have noted that Osamu Tezuka, celebrated founder of the characteristic style of manga and anime, was distinctly influenced by Walt Disney cartoons. Nintendo, responsible for some of the most well-known Japanese computer games such as the Pokémon and Super Mario franchises, focuses on its international reception and market rather than its national ‘home’. These criticisms suggest that it is difficult—as it is with any artefact or practice often held up as belonging to a distinct national culture—to identify a uniquely, pure Japanese popular culture.
12 Iwabuchi (2002), p 419.
13 Miller (2011), pp 19-23.
14 Miller (2011), p 19.
6
The ability of Japanese popular culture to become a leading cultural export may be limited ‘if viewers do not see anything Japanese’ in it.15 The unsuccessfulness and borderline loathing from fan communities of live-action adaptations of classic and well-known manga/anime titles such as Avatar, Dragonball Z, Death Note, and The Ghost in the Shell, may be an indication of this cultural erasure, given the complaints of whitewashing, the changes in locale, and the scale of cultural references and expected knowledges that are unable to easily be localised to the West. If Japan’s contemporary culture is increasingly found lacking in
‘clearly identifiable national, racial, or ethnic markers’ then these ‘culturally odourless’ or mukokuseki (無国籍) media will fail to invoke an association between the reader and the work’s origin, and resultantly lose the connection that soft power so meaningfully relies on.16
Yet, in an increasingly interconnected and borderless world, the country of a text’s origin is becoming alarmingly irrelevant, a threat to the concept of ‘soft power’ itself.17
Similar to how cultural scholars became interested in Japanese popular culture, Western legal scholars have been interested in the rules, practices and institutions that comprise the
Japanese legal system. Much of this research, especially during the 1980s and early 1990s was doctrinal in focus, setting out for non-Japanese legal audiences the formal rules and institutions of the Japanese legal system. It was at this point that the identified dissonance between the Japanese law ‘on the books’ and social practice was noted. For a then-emerging group of law and Japanese society scholars, ‘culture’ become a critical concept that was often presented in a contrast to law. More recently, Western Japanese law scholars have looked at
15 Fennell et al (2012), p 441.
16 Brown (2006); Fennell et al (2012); Iwabuchi (2002).
17 Iwabuchi (2002), p 45; Allison (2008), p 110.
7 developing more nuanced ways of framing understandings of law in Japan, framings that look to surpass the law/culture dichotomy.18
However, this legal scholarship has been focused on law and justice in Japan. A particular site where law has interacted with Japanese popular culture has been the Western reception of specific Japanese traditions of graphic representation. Mark McLelland has particularly tracked how yaoi and ‘Boys Love’, and related manga genres, have become increasingly criminalised in the West through child pornography provisions, and how Western pressure has led to tighter regulation in Japan.19 Adam Stapleton has written of the obstacles, legal surveillance, and prejudices he faced in researching yaoi in Australia.20 This is a site where the tensions and anxieties around the transnational reception of the legal and juridical dimensions of Japanese popular culture crystallise with particular firmness.
And so, this introduction has set out the dual aspects that are of most overt concern in encountering Japanese popular culture in a legal context: that Japanese popular culture is not empty of law, and that its international reception and influence is not insignificant in relation to these legal dimensions. These multiple aspects signal the intellectual tides and torrents that flow through and around this book. Considering law and justice in relation to Japanese popular culture is not a trivial exercise, but involves taking Japanese culture seriously and recognising that its artefacts and practices are lawful—that is, they are full of law. But beyond the general affirmation this book represents—that there is law to be encountered in the popular culture(s) of Japan—in its global context and international influence, there seems
18 West (2005); Wolff (2015).
19 McLelland (2017); McLelland (2005).
20 Stapleton (2017). See also Orbaugh (2017).
8 also to always be an energetic tension at play. When considering Japanese law and justice in the contexts of its popular culture, discrepancies can be identified between meanings and consideration within Japan, and meanings and considerations in a transnational context. And these tensions are often key sites where the legality of Japanese popular culture become most apparent.
The Book
Accordingly, this book is not necessarily about law in Japan, nor is it just about the reception of Japanese popular culture in the West, but is about both and more. The contributions to this book are located at the epicentre of the maelstrom of globalisation and hybridisation.21 The contributions are about the representations of law and justice within Japanese popular culture, but are also concerned with the reading, meaning and consequences of those representations, as both transient and permanent, local and global. An apt image is Katsushika Hokusai’s famous and familiar woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa. This image is considered to be one of the highest peaks of Edo artistic expression in Japan, and was also a significant inspiration for the modern art movement in the West,22 specifically the late nineteenth century movement of Japonisme.23 It was Cool Japan before ‘Cool Japan’ was a thing. However, its visual impact is due to Hokusai’s use of Prussian blue pigment,24 first brought into Japan from the West in the 1820s.25 Within the very technology of the print, as well as in its cultural influence, it embodies waves of exchange and hybridisation that flow
21 Ackermann (2011).
22 Ives (1974).
23 Lambourne (2005).
24 Clark (2011), p 10.
25 Howgego (2017), p 47.
9 Westward as well as Eastward. The image itself, of a rogue wave and vulnerable boats, encapsulates energy and change, while Mount Fuji in the background is a conserving witness.
The print counterpoises a dynamic image with a static, expressing both dramatic change and continuity. Further, it is an image that continues to resonate in Japan and globally as successive artists reappropriate it to represent ocean pollution, climate change, and the politics and problems of the Anthropocene.26 It is in these many ways that the The Great
Wave off Kanagawa encapsulates what the contributions of this book strive to do—what viewers worry the boats in Hokusai’s image will not do. That is, to ride the waves of cultural transmigration, to see law and justice not just in Japanese culture or in the West, but as a moving hybrid that has continuity, that is localised yet also global.
This moving hybridisation and continuity is also reflected in the diversity of methods in the individual chapters. The focus of this book is unambiguous: law and justice in Japanese popular culture. However, there is significant diversity in how each contributor identifies, explores and examines law and justice. This diversity is a characteristic and a strength of cultural legal studies.27 There is not one privileged way in which cultural artefacts and practices can be captured and analysed, and this is evident in the contributions in this collection. Many of the contributions adopt a law and humanities approach, akin to that developed by William MacNeil, of reading cultural artefacts and practices jurisprudentially.28
This approach involves decoding and interrogating the cultural artefact or practice as a legal- theoretical tract. The founding premise of this approach is that the nomos of legality is enshrined and manifested in, and oozes out of, cultural artefacts and practices. Furthermore,
26 Helmreich (2016).
27 Sharp and Leiboff (eds) (2015).
28 MacNeil (2007); MacNeil (2012).
10 this approach suggests that in enshrining, manifesting and oozing legality, cultural artefacts do more than just reflect the underlying nomos but often do the work of critique. Some contributions draw on earlier law and humanities methods of law in literature to show how specific manifestations of legality—statutes, courts, police—are represented within cultural artefacts. Other contributors draw upon social scientific methods to document, survey and observe representations of law and justice within Japanese popular culture. Finally, a few contributors deploy more doctrinal approaches in order to examine the regulation of Japanese popular culture artefacts and practices by specific national institutional regimes.
This leads to consideration of the scope of ‘Japanese popular culture’ within this volume. We have deliberately sought out a broad range of contributions. At a baseline level all contributions deal with artefacts or practices that either originate in Japan or are regarded in
Japan and internationally as distinctly Japanese. Many of the contributors deal with the core expected artefacts of cool Japan: anime, manga and definitive Japanese computer games like
Nintendo’s Pokémon. Some contributors examine Japanese literature and film. Other contributors look at the semiotics of everyday Japanese life. The volume does not attempt to delineate what is Japanese popular culture but rather presents a cross-section of artefacts and practices, all of which are readily discernible as Japanese, and all of which tell distinct stories about law and justice.
The Chapters
Within the contributions there are four distinct orientations to thinking about law and justice in Japanese popular culture, and these make up the four parts of the volume. The first concerns the possibilities of justice. The second, the constitution and re-constitution of the
11 legal subject. The third, the power and problems of the image. And the fourth, the specificities of law and justice in everyday Japan.
Possibilities of Justice
The first theme concerns possibilities of justice, considered in relation to questions of authority. Within this theme, contributors examine how speculative projections of political authority within specific Japanese cultural artefacts balance authority with justice.
Daniel Hourigan’s study of the anime series Psycho-Pass sets a challenging articulation concerning the possibilities of justice. Psycho-Pass presents a near future Japan that seems to have escaped from the pages of a Philip K Dick novel. Familiar to, yet distinct from, the cyberpunk universe of The Ghost in the Shell, Psycho-Pass is a world where law has been supplanted by high technology crime prevention that identifies and judges the criminal potentiality of citizens. Yet as Hourigan reveals, this is not a landscape alien to modern legal theory. The efficacy of calculation and the separation of order from justice are essential features of modern law. The authoritative techno-totality in Psycho-Pass, the monstrous cybernetic hive-mind Sibyl System, is shown repeatedly in episodes as unjust, where the claims against the system by the primary antagonists stand for a version of justice that emphasises individual freedom. Caught between the order of the Sibyl System and the claims of justice by the villains is troubling protagonist Akane Tsunemori, who knows the failings of the system yet continues to serve it. Hourigan sees this as instructive of living within modern law, painfully knowing its failings, yet at some level remaining committed to it.
Where Hourigan sees an irresolvable conflict between calculations of order and non- calculable claims of justice within the dystopian anime of Psycho-Pass, James C Fisher’s
12 examination of three contemporary manga series (One Piece, Attack on Titan and Fullmetal
Alchemist) tells a more redemptive story of political justice. He identifies that each series animates and plays with the fundamental nexus articulated by HLA Hart between legal authority and acceptance. Each manga is profoundly cynical regarding the representations of lawful sovereigns. The narrative arcs in each involve protagonists uncovering the ‘truth’ from the official fake history used to legitimise and perpetuate the existing regime, leading to civil insurrection. Fisher reminds that this is a confirmation rather than a rejection of legal positivist accounts: to be positivist is not about accepting authority; rather, in keeping morality separate from law, positivism safeguards the space for critical thinking and action in relation to authority.
Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk also catch glimpses of HLA Hart in their reading of the
J-horror revival film Ringu.29 Focusing on the initial 1998 Japanese film directed by Hideo
Nakata, they identify that the monster within the horror genre—in Ringu, the ghost of
Sadako—is a rule-bound and origin-oriented entity. This combination of rules and origins suggests an engagement with Hart. In Ringu, there are rules that the monster and the victims seem to obey, and there is the promise of freedom from the curse if the trauma of Sadako’s murder is discovered and placated. However, this resolution through resolving an original trauma is not how Ringu ends. Rather, only by becoming complicit in the propagation of the film can a victim be free of the curse. Crofts and van Rijswijk show how Ringu reveals both that ‘Hart’s attempt to find justification and legitimacy for law within itself runs into infinite regress’ and the violence that Hart’s attempt fails to hide.30
29 Nakata (dir) (1998).
30 Chapter 4.
13 In his exploration of the beautiful and evocative manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,
Thomas Giddens moves the attention from the establishment of lawful authority, and the bloody cost of its maintenance, to a wider vista: the origins and place of humanity within the planetary ecosystem. For Giddens, Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä is a corrective to the Judeo-
Christian origins of ecological jurisprudence. He identifies parallels between Giorgio
Agamben’s notion of the anthropological machine—where entities only become human or animal through the political operations of knowledge—and the orientation of the lead protagonist, Princess Nausicaä, who ‘leaves open the question of human/nature, instead engaging with the world around her through her unique powers of empathy, inquisitiveness, and understanding.’31 Nausicaä emerges from Giddens’s chapter as a fable against judgments and sovereignties, particularly judgments and sovereignties made in the name of the planet.
The examination of ecological jurisprudence is continued by Dale Mitchell in his analysis of the Pokémon Black and Pokémon White iterations of the Nintendo Pokémon computer game franchise. 32 That Pokémon, a role playing game that at its essence involves the capturing, training and battling of critters, prioritises consideration of ecological justice has been observed by Jason Bainbridge.33 Mitchell furthers this observation, by showing how
Pokémon Black and White animate the jurisprudential mechanics whereby the legal persona is established through the creation and acquisition of property. Identifying a similar tension to
Giddens, he goes on to show how the game, through the fall of the antagonist ‘N’, tells a problematic story of attempting to forge responses to animal welfare and environmental issues using anthropocentric legal resources. For Mitchell, the game’s conclusion in N’s
31 Chapter 5.
32 See Game Freak (2010a) and Game Freak (2010b).
33 Bainbridge (2014)
14 declaring an enduring mission ‘encourages advocates to think outside the Poké Ball, to extend beyond existing legality and seek a higher power, a higher justice beyond
‘“personhood” which will provide justice for all.’34
The Legal Subject
A continual connection between the contributions by Hourigan, Fisher, Croft and van
Rijswijk, Giddens, and Mitchell is that a site of tension between authority and justice can be identified in the individual person: Akane Tsunemori in Psycho-Pass; the journalist/protagonist Reiko Asakawa (played by Nanako Matsushima) in Ringu; the eponymous Princess Nausicaä; N in Pokémon Black and White. Drawing out this individualisation and embodiment of law and justice is the focus of the second theme of this volume.
Kieran Tranter deals with, what many consider to be the ur-text of post-war Japanese popular culture: the original manga of Tetsuwan Atomu (known in the West as Astro Boy), penned by
Osamu Tezuka. While many of the stories involve law tropes (police and criminals, discrimination and prejudice), Tranter suggests that it is in fact a story about a more essential form of legality: the relationship between limiting essence and transcending those limits.
Tranter suggests that Tezuka has drawn a world that is hopeful for posthumans. He shows that, notwithstanding essences that dictate and constrain, responsibility for life remains possible through engagement, play and laughter. He suggests that Tetsuwan Atomu is a treatise on finding out how to do right as a posthuman.
34 Chapter 6.
15 Rosie Taylor-Harding’s exploration of Trigger Studio’s 2013 anime Kill la Kill brings the loci of law and justice directly and particularly to the body. She emphasises that Kill la Kill is about the power of clothes, beyond superficial semiotics; the clothes in Kill la Kill brutally regulate the body. Set in the enclosed total institution of a high school, Kill la Kill tells a story of retributive justice for the protagonist Ryuko. Power and authority is woven directly into the uniforms within the school, and Ryuko’s revenge involves the destruction of the uniforms of her antagonists. In this, there is a cutting through of various regimes—institutional and gendered—that dictate what selves in bodies, particularly women, should wear and how they should act. Through this cutting, the self becomes disentangled from the roles and expectations of power: ‘Freedom can only be enjoyed by changing or removing the meanings inscribed upon clothing, thus limiting its impression of those meanings on to the body.’35
Timothy Peters examines two transnational contributions to the Batman franchise. The first is
Jiro Kuwata’s 1967-68 Batman manga series, Batmanga. The second is the globalising of
Batman in Grant Morrison’s Batman Incorporated, released in 2012-13. Peters identifies the transnational flows evident in the two series (Kuwata’s Batmanga is a clear importation and
Japanification of the 1960s DC Comics and the Adam West television series, and Morrison’s series directly refers back to Kuwata’s) emphasising the centrality of the mask to the representations of justice within both. While in Taylor-Harding’s reading of Kill la Kill clothes constrained and needed to be overcome and mastered, for Peters the mask delineates an office that allows justice: it is a role that is worn, that does not constrain but empowers and transforms the wearer.
35 Chapter 7.
16 The Power and Problem of the Image
The third theme examines the problem of the image. In Peters the waves of transnational movement of the icons of images of Batman from the US to Japan and back is seen as productive and instructive. However, as has been identified above, to think law and Japanese popular culture immediately invokes the concerns of the transnational legality of images. The interaction of images and law creates sites of power and problematisation. The contributions clustered around this theme also demonstrate a change in method. While most of the contributions to the themes above utilise law and humanities methods that involve identifying and revealing legal concepts through close examinations of specific cultural artefacts, the following contributions examine law and justice in Japanese popular culture using methods closer to those of the social sciences.
Thomas Baudinette examines the problem and power of the image in the constitution of queer activism within Japan. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, Baudinette focuses on ‘how engaging with popular culture texts influences gay men’s understandings of their ideological positioning under Japanese law’.36 He focuses on two images. The first is a
HIV awareness poster by artist Murata Poko that was censored by the local authorities. The original image, a domestic scene of a gay couple with a muscular young man in his underwear in the foreground, was considered obscene by the authorities and had to be modified so that the central figure was wearing trousers. Baudinette, in correspondence with the artist, identifies that the actions of the authorities show a distinct double-standard and continual discrimination against sexual minorities in Japan, as much more explicit images of women are displayed in the same area. Having established the problematisation by law of
36 Chapter 10.
17 images of gay men in Japan, Baudinette looks at the power of images by considering responses to the manga Otōto no Otto. This more mainstream work by Tagame Gengoroh deals explicitly with the legal obstacles and discrimination faced by gay men in Japan.
Baudinette’s respondents show the power of this manga for ‘finding’ and ‘challenging’ the law.
Looking at the problem of the image within yaoi online fan communities, Scott Beattie examines the normative practices of Y!Gallery regarding how the community regulates access, intellectual property, and content, on the margins and in the shadows of national laws.
At its cultural origin in Japan, ‘yaoi’ referred to manga, art and fan fiction that represents romantic and sexual engagement between male characters. However, as Beattie notes, the content on the Y!Gallery is global: yaoi hybridised with Western slash and fan fiction. Beattie shows through the debates within the community and the formal rules of the terms of service how a transnational ‘counterpublic’ creates a regulated space that continually negotiates between creative appropriations and respect for creative endeavours, between the norms and mores of sexual minorities and the problematisation of specific images by national laws.
Continuing the engagement with yaoi, Hadeel Al-Alosi examines the intersections of national laws with the possession and distribution of yaoi in the West. While yaoi need not portray young or very young male characters engaged in sexual activities, this content is often present. Accordingly, Al-Alosi focuses on the problematisation of yaoi images that results from Australian and United States prosecutions and prosecutorial practices in relation to
‘fictionalised child pornography’. Drawing upon various studies that document and explain why women consume yaoi, Al-Alosi notes that despite the primary consumer group of yaoi being young females, female yaoi fans tend not to be identified by Western law enforcement
18 for investigation. Indeed, most prosecutions for fictional child pornography involve offenders who were known paedophiles. Nevertheless, Al-Alosi strongly identifies the legal dangers of transnational yaoi fandom.
Yuichiro Tsuji looks at the problem of the image within Japanese law by focusing on the cultural phenomena of doujinshi, and the complicated interactions between commercial practices and Japanese copyright law. Focusing on how doujinshi creates a fundamental conflict between the rights of expression and property in the Japanese constitution, Tsuji explores various strategies, both legal and voluntary, that try to balance the commercial interest of intellectual property holders and the creative expressions of fans. Using the High
Score Girl litigation as a touchstone for why formal litigation though Japanese copyright law might not be the best solution, he examines adoption of a US style ‘fair use doctrine’ and various creative commons schemes as alternatives, concluding that cooperative schemes seem to achieve the best balance.
Specificities of Law and Justice in Everyday Japan
The final set of contributions focus on law and justice in everyday Japan. While the contributions engaging with the power and problem of the image see cultural artefacts and practices in conflict with national law and law enforcement, these final contributions see a closeness and a continuity of cultural artefacts and practices that manifest Japanese law and justice.
Ashley Pearson’s contribution focuses on the iconic manga series Death Note. She shows how the eponymous notepad, the writing in which of a person’s name while picturing their face results in their death, fantasises the Japanese capital punishment regime. It does so in
19 two ways. First, it renders visible the officers involved in the regime: in the actions of the central character Light who cultivates a public persona Kira, the partial anonymity of the regime and the role of the Justice Minster is emphasised. Second, the publicity and speed of the death note murders inverts the practice of the Japanese capital punishment regime which is secretive and lengthy. Death Note thus tells a story of justice without law, encapsulating a popular desire for immediate retributive justice without the legality and process surrounding the Japanese capital punishment regime.
Giorgio Colombo focuses on the everyday of Japanese civil law; specifically, the family registration system and the civil debts regime as expressed through Miyabe Miyuki’s novel
All She Was Worth. A story of identity theft set in the aftermath of the Japanese debt crisis and the subsequent ‘Lost Decade(s)’, the novel introduces readers not only to the social and cultural consequences of the crisis, but also to the laws that made it possible. Colombo brings out of this gentle story a description of how lives become entwined through lax enforcement in the family registration system, the formalities and penalties of the bankruptcy regime, and the criminal elements in the personal finance system. For him, the strength of the novel is not in the critique of law, but in the accuracy of their portrayal and a sense of understanding how these laws affect the everyday lives and loves of Japanese people.
Richard Powell and Hideyuki Kumaki return to the everyday image of law and justice that opened this introduction: the police box or kōban. In a study that traverses the representations of kōban in manga—especially the long-running and popular Kochikame by Akimoto
Osamu—as well as responses by young Japanese gauging their feelings and opinions about kōban, Powell and Kumaki conclude that ‘kōban constitute something of a bridge between the legal and lay worlds, and through manga they offer the possibility of humour drawn from
20 the tension between the formal rules of legal systems and the natural unruliness of human behaviour.’37
The final contribution, by Peter Rush and Alison Young, also looks at Japanese street culture, particularly the use of hybridised anthropomorphic characters to represent legal institutions.
Their chapter is a walk through central Tokyo, but Rush and Young’s leisurely ethnography is hardly pedestrian. After beginning with the Harajuku Police Station, their chapter pauses to consider the collage of ad hoc stickers on the back of a Harajuku civic map, before encountering a kōban, catching a commuter train, and finally arriving at the ‘legal precinct’ of Kasumigaseki—specifically, the French château styled Ministry of Justice. They note the sights and sounds of the Tokyo streetscape, seeing an abundance of representations of law and authority, most obvious in the characters representing the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and the Ministry of Justice, but also in the ‘no groping’ badges available to women at subway stations, and in the stickers on the concrete in front of the kōban signalling where citizens should line up to be served. They document the waves of influences manifest on the street, of images familiarly Western and uniquely Japanese. This ultimate contribution shows the signs of a thoroughly complex, unique, yet comprehensible legal society. A legality that is distinctly local, yet also global in its licit and illicit representations.
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