#i don't have a witty tag for the bnha prison topic

[stillness-in-green]

fandom going to disembowel me for this but I think ujiko deserves to get help too.

I mean, he’s a horrible old troll, but he is an old troll; get that man a cot for his prison cell.

I jest, but only in tone.  There’s no getting around the fact that he’s committed atrocities, though I at least tend towards thinking that they’re maybe not quite the ones fandom thinks.

(See under the cut for more discussion of Ujiko's various horror stories.)

For example, all Ujiko’s Noumu experiments seem to have been carried out on corpses, not on living subjects, and the living subjects we do see him working with—AFO, Shigaraki and, at least in the tie-in manga, Nine—agree to the procedures beforehand.  I think the only exception there is Vigilante’s Six, where we don’t know exactly where Ujiko came across him or under what circumstances his modifications began, and in any case, from the one shot we get of his face when Ujiko’s explaining his agnosia to AFO, he’s almost certainly too young to meaningfully consent anyway.  Still, even with Six, you have things like AFO offering him his choice of quirks, so it’s possible that most of that was being framed to Six as a procedure to give him a “self” like he wanted; we just don’t know enough to say whether Six was unwilling in his own mind.

Of course, Ujiko doing the bulk of his work with corpses elides the suggestions that some of those corpses had arranged deaths to bring them into his hands.  Certainly with the hindsight of Ujiko’s comments to Present Mic, it sure does look like Garvey was beelining for Aizawa in the battle that got Shirakumo killed.  There’s the matter of Tsubasa as well, and AFO’s hand in the Vigilantes underground fighting ring.  So the mere fact that Ujiho hasn’t been shown as strapping screaming, struggling, protesting victims down and cutting into them as they beg him to stop is only the barest of steps away from what he has been doing.

All that said, I don’t exempt Ujiko from anything I’ve ever said about humane treatment of villains.  AFO came to him in a time of extreme vulnerability, the same as he has all his other victims, and we don’t thus far have any way of knowing how long it took Ujiko to wind up where he is.  That is, did he dive headfirst into human experimentation the instant AFO provided him the means?  Or did it take AFO years to coax him in that direction, with a series of small steps, arguments presented and excuses offered, to gradually pull him away from whatever ethics he once professed?

Ultimately, though, I don’t think his backstory matters to how the system is obliged to treat him.  Harm reduction, deciding what kind of society they want to be when faced with one of their most egregious imaginable criminals—it does no one any good to deprive Ujiko of something as simple as a goddamn bedroll in his cell. 

Yes, it certainly seems improbable that Ujiko could ever come around to a place of wanting to atone, or that he could ever be able to even if he wanted.  One life is not enough. On the other hand, he’s physically only in his early 60s, and even a weaker clone of him didn’t immediately croak the second his Longevity quirk was erased.  That is to say, assuming he has double a normal lifespan, he’s got decades yet in him—a lot of time, in other words, with which to pay for his many, many crimes and try to use that prodigious mind of his to put something good into the world.

I’m not saying he should be kept in palatial comfort, but he doesn’t deserve Tartarus conditions because no one does, and anyway, a society that rubber stamps people into a crime-against-humanity prison like Tartarus is a society that’s doing far more damage to its own soul than someone like Ujiko ever could.

[stillness-in-green]

i’m very curious if death penalty by hanging is still a thing in my hero japan. and if it has the same support as current japan. maybe not bc of tartarus so hm.

Well, we certainly know the death penalty itself still exists, as Moonfish was identified as an escapee from death row.  Likewise, that rando Tartarus guard yelling at AFO back in Chapter 94 presumably wouldn’t have said, “You’d be getting off easy if they gave you the death penalty!  This place is where your kind of scum gets locked up!” if the death penalty wasn’t an option.  Between him and the text description opening Chapter 297, Tartarus seems like it exists and is as awful as it is only partly as a security measure (see again: there is no such thing as “quick-canceling cuffs” in this setting), while the other part of it is a really grim punitive measure not only for people who are so dangerous they “can’t” be kept in lighter conditions, but for people who had the temerity to threaten the status quo in a major way.(1)

Every part of that is, of course, horse shit, but I assume you didn’t send me this ask just to hear me complain about Tartarus.

(Hit the jump for considerably more discussion of real-life capital punishment and some supposition about why the prevailing attitudes are, I feel, unlikely to have changed much in Japan as it exists in My Hero Academia.)

We don’t, I suppose, have much way of knowing exactly how the death penalty in HeroAca!Japan is administered, but I don’t see a significant reason for it to have changed; Japan’s been doing it that way for almost 150 years, after all.(2)

There are, of course, many quirks in the world that would normally make hanging their bearers difficult to impossible, so assuming they’re not willing to hang drugged people, and also given all those deterrent guns pointing at inmates in Tartarus, one might suppose that the number of available methods has been expanded somewhat, depending on the specifics of any given sentencee.

As to whether the death sentence still has public support?  I have to imagine so.  I don’t think “what would be most realistic” is necessarily going to be accurate to a series targeted at teenage boys, of course, especially where the minutiae of its legal processes are concerned, but it’s always seemed logical to me that, in a country that already has an incredibly harsh view of criminals, writing overheated appeals to morality like “Hero” and “Villain” into its actual legal code is going to exacerbate said country’s views considerably.  This supposition is largely borne out by BNHA’s explorations of Hero Society’s bias against “villain quirks” and its enduring issues with heteromorphobia.

At most, you could say that this is not intended to be read as being worse than the current real-life state of affairs, but rather as representing them through an allegorical lens.  Given that real life Japan sure as shit doesn’t have a Tartarus analogue, though,(3) I think we’re well beyond allegory.

One of the reasons the death penalty endures in Japan—indeed, it’s even included in the official sentencing guidelines—is appeals towards “the sentiments of the bereaved.”  The state can and does use the anger of victims as a justification for putting criminals to death—and as we see in Endeavor’s press conference, the victims are as angry as they ever were.(4)  I imagine, then, that the practice of prosecutors trotting out victims to weep in front of a court in hopes of getting a death sentence is as intact as ever.

Frankly, I suspect the main difference between the treatment of defendants in real life Japan and in HeroAca!Japan is twofold: firstly, that Villains are probably much less likely to be allowed their constitutional right to be present at their own trials because of the danger that quirks represent; secondly, that either much more lengthy and dragged out trial proceedings or much more brutally swift ones have become common as a result of the court systems getting clogged up with the skyrocketing crime rate after the advent of quirks.  Hence Tartarus, the indefinite detention torture prison, combination government dumping ground and release valve for Hero Society’s vengeful anger at the villains left to rot there.

But yes, for people the government can’t justify dumping in Tartarus,(5) it seems the death penalty is still in use.  In fact, if anything, I wonder if isn’t being used more.  Given the way Japanese deployments of it increased in response to e.g. a spike in street crime in the early 90s and the sarin gas attacks of 1995, it’s all too easy to imagine a similar rise coming in the wake of the sharp increase in crime brought on by the rise of quirks.  That’s especially the case when you consider factors within the story like Kamui Woods calling a purse-snatcher pure evil, the apparent ease and rapidity with which political parties can be summarily disbanded, the enthusiastic acceptance and commercialization of the violence used by Heroes against Villains, and the dazzling variety of breaches of the rule of law carried out in secret by the HPSC.  All of that points in the direction of a society that holds less respect for the lives of its criminals than ever before.

To wind this down, a quote that stuck with me, read while researching this response: A single life weighs more than the entire earth.  This was written in a Japanese Supreme Court decision in 1948 upholding the constitutionality of the death penalty, but suggesting that it should only be used in the most extreme of cases, and with the most extreme caution and deliberation.  But Japan’s process for administering capital punishment doesn’t even live up to that call for caution in real life.(6)  Far less so does the Japan we see in My Hero Academia, in which its heroes and heroic institutions don’t even wait for the trial to start pronouncing death sentences.

Thanks for the ask, anon, somewhat grim though the material be.

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1:  See, for example, the case of Moonfish himself.  He was only in a regular ol’ prison’s death row back when he was just a cannibalistic serial killer; it’s only after his escape and subsequent association with the League of Villains that he secured his spot in Tartarus.

2:  That’s a number with some caveats; I chose it based on revisions to Japan’s Penal Code made in 1873 to declare beheading or hanging the only legal methods of capital punishment; today, it’s solely hanging.  If you wanted to be strictly accurate, the last confirmed legal use of decapitation as capital punishment was in 1881, and an exception in which people in the Japanese Army and Navy could choose firing squad as an execution method seems to have been abolished in 1908.  So perhaps closer to 115 years.

3:  Per some research before answering this ask, it seems even death row inmates are sometimes, albeit rarely, allowed visits from family or loved ones, and are allowed a couple of books, per a Wikipedia citation to a no-longer-online article written in 2006.  Even after some attempts at reform, it’s still a pretty horrifying state of affairs, prolonged solitary confinement and the much-discussed “culture of silence” and all.  It’s still not Tartarus, though.

4:  As well they might be, since certainly e.g. Gigantomachia’s rampage far outstrips any real life equivalents.  Dabi alone has killed more people than any Wikipedia-listed Japanese serial killer, with the sole exceptions of a pair of midwives/baby farmers tried and executed for repeat infanticides.

5:  It is, of course, difficult to imagine who such people could possibly be, given everything about Overhaul’s situation.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, “People the government doesn’t want to dump in Tartarus.”

6:  That claim is based on this paper, The Culture of Capital Punishment in Japan; it also contains the quote I mentioned in the above paragraph.  It’s a very good if heavy read, going into some detail on the flaws and falsities of the system, as well as some comparison to the United States’ own retention of the death sentence, comparing and contrasting the two countries’ justifications, failures, and approaches to the state-sanctioned taking of a life.