1st Edition

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

Edited By Ashley Pearson, Thomas Giddens, Kieran Tranter Copyright 2018
    288 Pages
    by Routledge

    288 Pages
    by Routledge

    In a world of globalised media, Japanese popular culture has become a signifi cant fountainhead for images, narrative, artefacts, and identity. From Pikachu, to instantly identifi able manga memes, to the darkness of adult anime, 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. Within these foci, questions of law have often not been far from the surface: the crime and justice of Astro Boy; the property and contract of Pokémon; the ecological justice of Nausicaä; Shinto’s focus on order and balance; and the anxieties of origins in J- horror. This volume brings together a range of global scholars to refl ect on and critically engage with the place of law and justice in Japan’s popular cultural legacy. It explores not only the global impact of this legacy, but what the images, games, narratives, and artefacts that comprise it reveal about law, humanity, justice, and authority in the twenty-first century.

    Table of Contents

    Preface

     

    List of Figures

    List of contributors

     

    1. Crime Fighting Robots and Duelling Pocket Monsters: Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture
    2. Ashley Pearson, Thom Giddens and Kieran Tranter

      Possibilities of Justice

    3. The Symptoms of the Just: Psycho-Pass, Judg(e)ment, and the Asymptomatic Commons
    4. Daniel Hourigan

    5. Pirates, Giants and the State: Legal Authority in Manga and Anime
    6. James C Fisher

    7. Traumatic Origins in Hart and Ringu
    8. Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk

    9. Justice in the Sea of Corruption: Nausicaä as Ecological Jurisprudence
    10. Thomas Giddens

    11. Masterful Trainers and Villainous Liberators: Law and justice in Pokémon Black and White
    12. Dale Mitchell

      The Legal Subject

    13. Doing Right in the World with 100,000 Horsepower: Osamu Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), Essence, Posthumanity and Techno-humanism
    14. Kieran Tranter

    15. Caught in Couture: Regulating Clothing and the Body in Kill la Kill
    16. Rosie Taylor-Harding

    17. Holy Trans-Jurisdictional Representations of Justice, Batman!": Globalisation, Persona and Mask in Kuwata’s Batmanga and Morrison’s Batman, Incorporated
    18. Tim Peters

      The Power and Problem of the Image

    19. ‘Finding the Law’ through Creating and Consuming Gay Manga in Japan: From Heteronormativity to Queer Activism
    20. Thomas Baudinette

    21. Regulating Counterpublics in Yaoi Online Fan Communities
    22. Scott Beattie

    23. ‘Is Yaoi Illegal?!’: Let’s Get Real about the Potential Criminalisation of Yaoi
    24. Hadeel Al-Alosi

    25. Constitutional Analysis of Secondary Works in Japan: From Otaku to the World
    26. Yuichiro Tsuji

      Specificities of Law and Justice in Everyday Japan

    27. ‘The World is Rotten’: Execution and Power in Death Note and the Japanese Capital Punishment System
    28. Ashley Pearson

    29. Debts, Family, and Identity after the Collapse of the Bubble: Miyabe Miyuki’s All She Was Worth
    30. Giorgio Fabio Colombo

    31. Rules and Unruliness in Manga Depictions of Community Police Boxes
    32. Richard Powell and Hideyuki Kumaki

    33. The Image-Characters of Criminal Justice in Tokyo

    Peter D Rush and Alison Young

    Index

    Biography

    Ashley Pearson is a PhD candidate at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia.

    Thomas Giddens is a Senior Lecturer at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, United Kingdom.

    Kieran Tranter is an Associate Professor at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia.