1st Edition
Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture From Crime Fighting Robots to Duelling Pocket Monsters
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
- Crime Fighting Robots and Duelling Pocket Monsters: Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture
- The Symptoms of the Just: Psycho-Pass, Judg(e)ment, and the Asymptomatic Commons
- Pirates, Giants and the State: Legal Authority in Manga and Anime
- Traumatic Origins in Hart and Ringu
- Justice in the Sea of Corruption: Nausicaä as Ecological Jurisprudence
- Masterful Trainers and Villainous Liberators: Law and justice in Pokémon Black and White
- Doing Right in the World with 100,000 Horsepower: Osamu Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), Essence, Posthumanity and Techno-humanism
- Caught in Couture: Regulating Clothing and the Body in Kill la Kill
- Holy Trans-Jurisdictional Representations of Justice, Batman!": Globalisation, Persona and Mask in Kuwata’s Batmanga and Morrison’s Batman, Incorporated
- ‘Finding the Law’ through Creating and Consuming Gay Manga in Japan: From Heteronormativity to Queer Activism
- Regulating Counterpublics in Yaoi Online Fan Communities
- ‘Is Yaoi Illegal?!’: Let’s Get Real about the Potential Criminalisation of Yaoi
- Constitutional Analysis of Secondary Works in Japan: From Otaku to the World
- ‘The World is Rotten’: Execution and Power in Death Note and the Japanese Capital Punishment System
- Debts, Family, and Identity after the Collapse of the Bubble: Miyabe Miyuki’s All She Was Worth
- Rules and Unruliness in Manga Depictions of Community Police Boxes
- The Image-Characters of Criminal Justice in Tokyo
Ashley Pearson, Thom Giddens and Kieran Tranter
Possibilities of Justice
Daniel Hourigan
James C Fisher
Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk
Thomas Giddens
Dale Mitchell
The Legal Subject
Kieran Tranter
Rosie Taylor-Harding
Tim Peters
The Power and Problem of the Image
Thomas Baudinette
Scott Beattie
Hadeel Al-Alosi
Yuichiro Tsuji
Specificities of Law and Justice in Everyday Japan
Ashley Pearson
Giorgio Fabio Colombo
Richard Powell and Hideyuki Kumaki
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.