[KineJapan] Orochi

[Thomas Ball]

Buntarô Futagawa's 1925 film is a deserved classic of Japanese silent cinema. IMDB's thumbnail description of it states, "The story of a decent samurai who is widely considered a scum and a criminal. His bad luck and numerous misunderstandings drag him down the social ladder straight to the gutter." 

This Youtube version of the film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC2mWJfd6vA&t=222s has wonderful Benshi narration to go along with the English subtitles. The voiceover intonations greatly clarify the latent meaning of the action. 

Even in translation, the subtitles are stark in their depiction of Orochi's predicament, "Fair or not, this is a world of classes. If you don't toe the line, they will crush you...There's nothing wrong with me. Even if I did what I was told not to do, it was a matter of honor...Is there no justice in this world?  It makes no sense at all...One day you'll know the real me." 
A biblical interpretaion of Orochi's sense of injustice would typify it as a manifestation of the "Matthew Effect", the Gospel parable summarizable as "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer."

Related to the Matthew Effect is psychologist Edward Thorndike's 1920 paper about the halo effect, "the name given to the phenomenon whereby evaluators tend to be influenced by their previous judgments of performance or personality.” The halo effect, which has a counterfactual in the 'devil effect', is one of the few law-like regularities posited by the psychological sciences that has been replicated so often, many today aren't even aware of its origins in Thorndike's work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect  

More recent behavioral scientists might classify Orochi's predicament based on heuristics and biases such as anchoring, the bandwagon effect or confirmation bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases  

While a modern economist such as Thomas Piketty might describe it as a variant of wealth inequality. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674273559
However, these are all Western descriptions of what is clearly a cross-cultural, trans-temporal constellation of human behaviors and phenomena. 

Is there an original Japanese concept analogous to, but predating these Western frameworks? 

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