ABSTRACT
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
chapter 1|15 pages
Crime fighting robots and duelling pocket monsters
part I|75 pages
Possibilities of justice
chapter 6|18 pages
Masterful trainers and villainous liberators
part II|60 pages
The legal subject
chapter 7|17 pages
Doing right in the world with 100,000 horsepower
chapter 9|27 pages
‘Holy trans-jurisdictional representations of justice, Batman!’
part III|58 pages
The power and problem of the image
chapter 10|13 pages
‘Finding the law’ through creating and consuming gay manga in Japan
part IV|63 pages
Specificities of law and justice in everyday Japan