Crime Fighting Robots and Duelling Pocket Monsters: Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture

This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Pearson, Ashley, Giddens, Thomas, & Tranter, Kieran (2018) Crime fighting robots and duelling pocket monsters: Law and justice in Japanese popular culture. In Pearson, A, Giddens, T, & Tranter, K (Eds.) Law and justice in Japanese popular culture: From crime fighting robots to duelling pocket monsters. Routledge, United Kingdom, pp. 1-17. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/124780/ c Routledge This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the document is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https:// www.routledge.com/ Law-and-Justice-in-Japanese-Popular-Culture-From-Crime-Fighting-Robots/ Pearson-Giddens-Tranter/ p/ book/ 9781138300262 Crime Fighting Robots and Duelling Pocket Monsters: Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture 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.

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