The law in Japanese film

Aaron Gerow aaron.gerow at yale.edu
Wed Oct 13 14:18:46 EDT 2004


> Is Japanese law so boring?

I think the lack of courtroom dramas in Japanese film has to do with 
the fact that the legal world has long been constructed in Japan as the 
realm of benevolent elites who operate in a different sphere from us 
everyday people. This has some relation to the fact the decision-making 
process is less "democratic" (no jury by peers). But it also has much 
to do with the extreme difficulty involved in becoming a lawyer, the 
obtuseness of legal language (until recently, laws were written in a 
rather archaic language, including using katakana instead of hiragana), 
and an ideology from the Meiji era that it is legal-trained bureaucrats 
who should be trusted as objective managers of the nation and its 
people. The different narrative of the court process may also be seen 
as less cinematic. The long series of legal decisions that defy common 
sense logic only augments the impression of this being a different 
world. The Japanese court system is aware that this impression has in 
some ways become detrimental, so there have been committees formed to 
discuss improving the image of the judicial system through specific 
measures, some of which, such as making it easier to be a lawyer and 
creating the saibanin seido (which will bring lay people into the 
decision-making process in some cases), are being implemented.

That said, there are still a number of films that have lengthy court 
scenes. A recent example is Morita's Keiho, which becomes a polemic on 
the insanity defense. Yamamoto Satsuo's Nihon dorobo monogatari has a 
long, rather humorous court scene. Of course Nakahara Shun's 12-nin no 
yasashii Nihonjin, from a script by Mitani Koki, is an imagination of a 
jury system in Japan, playing off 12 Angry Men. From around the same 
time there's Kumai Kei's Hikarikoge. For earlier films there's 
Masumura's Kuro no hokokusho or Tsuma wa kokuhakusuru, and Imai 
Tadashi's famous Mahiru no ankoku。

Aaron Gerow
Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film Studies Program
Yale University
53 Wall Street, Room 316
PO Box 208363
New Haven, CT 06520-8363
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6764
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu



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