The law in Japanese film

Mark Anderson ander025 at umn.edu
Thu Oct 14 14:46:28 EDT 2004


Kurosawa's Scandal has a pretty large chunk of the narrative devoted to
to class and the quality of legal representation one can afford (plus Ri Ko
Ran in her
second life as Yamaguchi Yoshiko).

There is also a TV comedy drama called something like Onna bengoshi. It does
address issues of class and gender being worked out before the bench. The
main character's father was a lawyer
who often argued before the big city judge she usually argues before and,
like
her father, she and the judge have a love/hate relationship. She is supposed
to
be a very ethical/moral person (like her father) from Okinawa whose personal
sense of right and wrong consistently conflicts with the formalism and
procedural points that ultimately decide the cases. Most of the episodes
turn on how her standing up for principle affects the attitudes of the
participants in the cases such that the formal legal procedure accidentally
ends up coming to the just conclusion. There is also a rivalry with another
female lawyer who is a state prosecutor and they have absolutely no use for
one another. It's often silly, but I found it interesting from a
sociological and gender angle.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Aaron Gerow" <aaron.gerow at yale.edu>
To: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2004 1:18 PM
Subject: Re: The law in Japanese film


> > 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
>
>



More information about the KineJapan mailing list