#this is canon and a reference to Aum Shinrikyo

[relatableanimethings]

Iyami being a terrorist and justifying murder👍

[stillness-in-green]

On Riots and Resolutions (Part Two)

The remaining ask round-up portion, building on the answers from last night's post.

Content Warnings: Discussion of real-life hate groups; one ask conflates mental illness with radicalism and makes some bald statements that there can only be one correct opinion about the canonical material in question.

This post has its usual share of footnotes, but I’ve put them at the end of their associated ask reply rather than all at the end like usual.

Two thoughts: Firstly, Japan’s extremists, as I understand them, tend to be either rampantly nationalistic—war crime deniers, people who hate Japanese residents who don’t match up to what the nationalists see as really Japanese (*waves to Part One*), sometimes they like the U.S. but they don’t want to be seen as being submissive towards it, that sort of thing—or outright cultists.

Using the nationalists as a model is tricky because, as so many have said, heteromorphs aren’t of a different ethnicity/nationality, so they nominally shouldn’t be objectionable to those whose chief issue is people/influence from other countries.  (Nominally.  *waves to Part One again*)  They’re also a very fraught group to parody, given Japan’s to-say-the-least unresolved issues with exactly those nationalistic sentiments, historically speaking.

As to the cultists?  Well, Japan has piles and piles of those.  Indeed, the country has so many that one of the most common terms for alternative spirituality groups, new religious movements (NRMs), is actually a direct translation of the term Japan itself uses, shinshūkyō.  So far as I’ve been able to gather, the proliferation is a result of the country having been loosed from the mandate of following the state religion (Shinto) just as a huge influx of Western theology came flowing in after World War II.  That developed further in the 60s and 70s—indeed, it’s quite easy to see Western ideas of what religion is and how it looks coming to Japan in the same general period as New Age spirituality in the West forming with elements borrowed ideas from Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions.

While Japan has hundreds and hundreds of NRMs—over 2000, according to one op-ed I read—the country also has a sizeable suspicion of them, for one big, glaring reason: the sarin gas attacks carried out on the Tokyo subway in 1995 by Aum Shinrikyo.  Those attacks led to a huge backlash against new religious movements in the country, including the passing of some very targeted laws.

Obviously, with so many of them around, I can’t say for sure whether or not Horikoshi based the Creature Rejection Clan on any of them in particular, but Twice does point out that they have some religious elements, and certainly there are plenty of NRMs in Japan that hew to the arch ethnonationalism of the country’s extreme right.  The kegare thing, too, can hardly be called secular; it stems directly from Shinto belief.  There aren’t any NRMs I’m personally aware of that use gothic trappings and skull masks, but then, neither did the KKK.[1]

That all leads into my second thought, which is, “Well, is the CRC based on the KKK?  Or is that just us assuming because it’s what we relate them to?”  As I said a few times in Part One, I can’t read Horikoshi’s mind—but I have reservations about just assuming that some random Japanese guy is that familiar with a U.S.-based hate group that has never been active in his country.

Horikoshi is a noted fan of American comics, so I suppose it’s possible he’s heard that anecdote about Superman taking on the KKK, but if I were reading an American comic with a plot about a doomsday cult planning an attack on a public transit system, I wouldn’t assume it was a reference to Aum Shinrikyo just because I knew the author liked anime, you know?

For another example of Western fans projecting their own concerns onto a non-Western work, it was widely assumed among American readers that the Ishvalan plot in Full Metal Alchemist was a comment on the Iraq War. However, when asked about it, Arakawa actually said she based it on the way Japan treated the Ainu.  That desert setting completely fooled people!

So, even if the CRC feel a little too on the nose to not be based on the KKK, it’s worth considering that Horikoshi could have any number of inspirations there.  He may well have been just picking and choosing the visual indicators he liked to get the point across, and the ones he landed on say “KKK” to a U.S. reader without them having been an intentional model.

-- 1:  The Nazis, now, they used skull trappings, and are of course much more known for black uniforms, too. --

Would that such were more normalized!  But even if it were, the time crunch on Shonen Jump publication is such that I doubt most of its authors would have the leisure to do a bunch of back and forth with sensitivity readers anyway.  I imagine a lot of those authors have pretty limited hours and energy to spend all week working on their manga to also add a bunch of supplemental reading that also basically counts as “work for the manga” as opposed to literally any other kind of media intake that would let them turn off for a while.

I’m not going to say readers shouldn’t ask for better, or should just shut up or go read something else if they have problems with what an author is writing.  Obviously!  That would be massively hypocritical of me, given all the time I’ve spent complaining about this very issue, or the mass arrests, or whatever-all else.  But then, I’ve always approached the issues Hori raises with his villains with the view that they’d fall flat eventually.  Shonen Jump is just too mainstream an environment for me to think that Horikoshi would be allowed to say anything truly radical, if he even wanted to to begin with.

And maybe he’ll get feedback on this aspect of the story from readers and reviews and rethink some of it.  I’ll always remember this article about an interview with the author of Sword Art Online, Kawahara Reki, in which he talked about how visiting American conventions had inspired him to try to do better by his heroines.

Of course, some people double down instead, like One Piece’s Oda Eiichirou, or reflexively lash out when criticized, like Vanillaware’s George Kamitani.  Maybe Horokoshi will just go on thinking like he does because he doesn’t work in an environment that’s going to challenge him on his views; maybe he’ll seek out more mature environments to tell the more mature stories he clearly wants to tell.

In the meantime, though, it’s not as though he’s the only game in town.  There are other manga out there, ones that have lists upon lists at the back of their volume compilations detailing the resources and contacts the authors used as they were writing their stories.

Just of what I read or have read, Blue Period, Golden Kamuy, Ancient Magus’s Bride, Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu, and any of Mori Kaoru’s historical works, like Victorian Romance Emma or Otoyomegatari, come to mind.  Shonen Jump stories can be fun, but I don’t exactly read them expecting the manga equivalent of high literature, you know?

…On the other hand, even fellow Shonen Jump series Akane Banashi credits a rakugo supervisor every week.  I suspect this speaks to a certain uncomfortable truth that many authors are going to be a lot more aware of their own ignorance—and, crucially, far less defensive about accusations of being hurtful, irresponsible, or discriminatory—when it comes to portraying things like art, specialist hobbies, historical periods or foreign countries: subjects that are legitimately distant from their day to day lives.  That, in turn, may make them more willing to do the research with an open mind, as opposed to just winging it on things they believe they already understand well enough or have already formed opinions on, like the lived experience of minorities or how the legal system treats (or should treat) people who break the law.

The fact that lazy or offensive portrayals might come out of privileged ignorance rather than maliciousness doesn’t make them less lazy or offensive, of course, especially if an author chooses to double down after criticism!  But I’ll get into that more in the last ask in this post.

--

H’ooookay, I’m going to lead with saying that, while I agree with your broad point that this resolution is messy and disappointing, I have some significant issues with your points here, things that I cannot just let stand in good faith.

Firstly, as far as comparing heteromorphs to burakumin goes, I have not and would never say that they’re only an analogue to burakumin because I don’t think heterophobia is a 1:1 analogue for any kind of discrimination.  It takes elements from a lot of different things: anti-burakumin sentiment, racism, ableism, ethnocentrism, and so on.

I talked about burakumin discrimination in the post you’re responding to because the kegare thing is burakumin-specific.  While I’m sure you could find individuals willing to level that word at groups they don’t like, I’m not aware of any other groups that have had kegare weaponized against them on such a widespread, systemic, legally codified level; therefore, burakumin are the reference I used to talk about kegare as it’s used against heteromorphs to police their movements/contact with others.

Secondly, saying burakumin have “the benefit” of looking like everyone else unless they’re outed feels insensitive to me.  It’s the same thing as mixing up genuine privilege with being in the closet.  Yes, burakumin lineage is something that’s not immediately visible right on their faces,[1] but that’s not the same thing as them being able to live openly without fear of discrimination, especially when there are still resources on the internet that purport to list burakumin neighborhoods, resources that are easily findable on a web search for e.g. the company hiring director vetting job applicants or the paranoid parent who wants to make sure their daughter isn’t getting involved with someone Undesirable.

Thirdly, conflating Qanon extremists with mental illness is a big, wholehearted NOPE for me, especially in saying only individuals who are mentally ill would attack innocent people.  I’m certainly not going to say that no one who has ever carried out a mass attack was mentally ill, but it’s absolutely not an identical vector as radicalized resentment.

Fourthly, “making up a massacre” is, I suppose, true in that we’ve never heard of the incidents Scarecrow cites before now, but it’s not as though it’s completely out of the realm of the possible based on what we knew before this arc.  We knew law and order broke down around the time of the advent of quirks; we knew there were (and still are!) groups that committed hate crimes against heteromorphs; we knew there had been bloody conflict for years upon years by the time things finally started to settle down circa Destro and the legalization of Pro Heroes.

Hell, the longer I gather evidence and mull it over, the more it seems likely to me that Horikoshi was aware of heteromorph discrimination from almost the very beginning.  Shouji’s character profile, in which he pointedly did not have a face reveal and Horikoshi dropped hints about “Shouji’s episode,” came out in Volume 3.  Ultra Archive, which talked about how Shouji was told he had a scary face since he was young, was released in 2016; Ultra Analysis, which first raised the crying little girl angle, in 2019.  We’ve known for ages that Horikoshi likes to think about the stories of background characters, even if he can’t find room to show them.

Historical massacres?  We may not have heard about them specifically before now, but it’s not like it’s a big reach.  The CRC really ought to have clued everyone in that heteromorphic discrimination is much worse than Deku, the viewpoint character, ever knew, so I remain aggressively baffled at the constant accusations that all this is “coming out of nowhere.”  Yes, I think it could have been more thoroughly developed in advance, but I really do think it’s not that Horikoshi didn’t know, or that he “made it up”; it’s just that he failed to incorporate it organically.

If the story were still the elegantly constructed narrative we were enjoying up through the Endeavor Agency Arc and the early stages of the war, I’d be more skeptical, because Horikoshi back then really was much better at those early hints and teases.  But everyone can tell that the story has been a garbled, rushed mess since then, so it’s no big surprise to me that a better-paced exploration of heteromorphic discrimination was a victim of whatever kind of compressed timeline Horikoshi’s now operating under.

Finally, I broadly agree that the portrayal of this conflict was a damn mess on both sides—I particularly share your frustration that fifteen thousand members of an oppressed minority would be willing to attack a hospital under the direction of a known villain yet have given the optics of that attack so little thought that one (1) high-schooler and the sight of a handful of hospital employees standing well away from their line of advance could change their minds—but I’m wholly uncomfortable with your intimation that anyone who doesn’t agree with your specific read on the sides involved doesn’t know what they’re talking about.  If you didn’t mean it that way, that’s cool, but I don’t see much other way to parse, “People who empathize more with one side or the other are either uneducated or don’t have discrimination in their daily reality/family history.”

“If anyone disagrees with me, either they’re white people whose opinions don’t count because they’re white or they’re people of color whose opinions don’t count because they’re ignorant,” is just not an opinion I’m going to back up.  I saw plenty of POC on twitter and tumblr both who definitely did sympathize more with one side or another and had perfectly cogent, self-aware articulations as to why; declaring their opinions de facto invalid is no way to engage in media criticism OR fandom discourse.

-- 1:  Though back in the days when burakumin were legally required to dress and style their hair in certain ways to make themselves obvious to those around them, you would have been able to tell they were burakumin just by looking at them, unless they were actively breaking the law and thus subject to punishment if they were discovered. --

Everyone is, of course, going to have their own read on this, but for my part, I’d rather see people try and fail than just never try at all.  That’s assuming, anyway, that the attempt is made in good faith, which I think this plot was—at the very least, it never felt malicious towards the crowd of heteromorphs themselves,[1] though I am still squinting distastefully at the whole Outside Bad Actor element AFO/Skeptic/Scarecrow/Spinner present.

Of course, it’d be nice to know whether Horikoshi’s going to learn anything from this portrayal or whether it’ll just be a full round of backpats for a job halfway done, but saying he should just never have tried at all—well, it’s the same with his writing of women, really.  There are some enormous problems, but I’d still rather read the version with all the flaws than the version without all the women.

That’s the long-time fandom participant in me, I’m sure; my stance will always be to take what works and jettison what doesn’t.  For all that this resolution desperately does not work, all the reasons that it was something worth looking forward to and getting invested in are still there, too!

But again, that’s something everyone has to draw their own lines on, and I have nothing but sympathy for the frustration of those who, like myself, would never have believed such a facile resolution could be offered to such a fascinating set-up.

-- 1:  I’d be more willing to assume malice if the heteromorphs were the only civilians in the story portrayed as so desperately gullible and impulsive, but Horikoshi’s been writing civilians that same way from the beginning. --

-----------------------------------------

That wraps up the asks in my inbox about this plot, at least the ones that were expressing specific anger with Horikoshi or fellow fandom members. I have one or two left that are more directly about the material, which I'll be getting to in the order in which I received them soonish.

I do apologize if these posts came off as preachy in that, "I am allowed to complain, but suddenly when I have anons in my inbox complaining, it's time to talk about nuance and context," kind of way. I do, perhaps, have a certain feeling that I can and will complain about the material to my heart's content, but I don't want to get too pulled into spiraling bitterness about Horikoshi personally because he didn't deliver the challenging resolution I never really believed his editors would let him deliver to begin with.

I promise I still hate the way the arc fell out! And I appreciate you all sharing your thoughts with me. 'Til next time, everyone.

[askaceattorney]

Dear roundpi,

There are currently two of your letters in the queue, and they’re right next to each other -- one to Apollo, and one to Klavier.  We can delete either or both of those if you’d like us to.  It’s hard to say how many letters are from the same people, but we definitely have a few consistent writers -- some who send them at least every other day.  (I can’t blame them, of course, since I used to do the same thing.)

Also, I honestly didn’t realize how changing one word in this blog’s name would give it the same initials as the Wright Anything Agency.  It’s too late to actually change it at this point, but that’s still pretty fun to think about.

Dear Anonymous,

Glad you brought this up, because that’s one of the last things we want to convey about ourselves or this blog.  Sexuality is a topic I generally try to steer away from when answering letters, partly because it’s one that I only have a limited understanding of and I want to avoid saying something that can be easily misinterpreted (again), and partly because it’s a fiercely debated topic, and I don’t want to perpetuate that debate here.

And partly because it’s a discussion I’ve rarely come out of without some serious sparks flying...

With that in mind, unless a character’s sexuality, political views, religion, etc. has been explicitly defined in the game(s) they’re from, we can only make our best guesses about them.  In Athena’s case, judging by what we’ve seen of her in the games (her reaction to Hugh O’Conner’s claim that she likes him, her history of getting love letters meant for Junie, etc.), she seems like a guy kind of girl to me.  There’s every chance that I’m wrong, of course -- in fact, she may not even know herself -- but I imagine that’s at least how she views herself.

...Woah, that got Persona-esque all of a sudden.

In any case, if anything we post here comes off as homophobic, you have my word that it isn’t meant to be.  We also don’t want to emphasize one headcanon over another (whether it’s mine, yours, the Modthorne’s, or the Mod’s), but sometimes we just have to pick one and stay consistent with it.  If it disagrees with yours, then it’ll just have to disagree, but that’s our reasoning behind it.

Dear Ethan Starbright,

Really?  Huh...  That was how it looked when I found it in the queue, so unless you’re thinking of a different letter, I have no idea how that happened.  Sorry.

Dear Director Hickfield,

I always assumed it was something the Mod came up with for Apollo’s hair.  I can check to see if it’s based on an actu--

I don’t feel so good...

Dear yuesworld,

Please do!  And thank you very much for helping to increase our audience’s scope this way.  It’s very considerate and humbling for us when someone offers to do something like that.  Much appreciated!

My physical response to this letter was way more emotional than that, by the way.  It looked something like this:

(Only without the hair-touching.)

Dear rogerthegg,

I didn’t realize who you were, actually.  Good on you for joining Tumblr!

I do my best to keep an open mind with how Capcom develops its characters, but if I were in charge of how Athena’s life and career continued on from Spirit of Justice, it’d probably be something along these lines:

We’d see her a few months after the events in Khura’in, looking as cheery and confident as ever, but slightly older and more mature-looking.  As we heard her voice narrating, she’d shove the doors of the courthouse open with a look of pure confidence, wave to the policemen as she climbed the stairs (being extra careful to watch her step), and wait for her moment to enter the courtroom.  She’d then walk up to the defense’s bench with a smile, slam her fist into her hand, and announce proudly, “The defense is ready to go, Your Honor!!”

Then Widget would ruin the mood by blurting out, “I’m so sleepy!”

During the trial, she’d learn that her defendant is from somewhere in Europe (whatever country you prefer), that he/she is a friend of her family there, and that some unusual things have been going on with them.  This would lead her to request a leave of absence so she can visit them, perhaps taking Phoenix or Simon along as a chaperone.  From there, she’d find herself in a series of new situations, including (but not limited to) having to defend a member of her family from murder charges, having Widget stolen from her and being forced to do a therapy session without him, discovering a hidden crime ring (that a member of her family might be involved in), and so on.  In the end, she’d come out of it with more knowledge about herself, being a lawyer, and holding on to her faith in others until the bitter end.

It could be that I’m just anxious to see what sort of people she’s related to and if they’re as wild and energetic as she is, but I’d also love to see how Athena handles herself in a new environment, especially one as culturally (and visually) diverse as Europe.  That’s just my idea of a good Athena-centered game, though -- I’m sure there are plenty of others out there that would be just as exciting to see.  I mean, it is the Cykester we’re talking about here.

Here are a couple of letters that I found particularly heartfelt, plus another that was heartfelt and silly at the same time.  There are plenty more that were written before I got here, of course, such as this one and this one.  I love how this blog gives us a chance to see how some touching non-canon character conversations might take place.

(Previous Letter)

Dear Lice Hice,

You’re correct.  They’re called Happy-Happyists, which is probably the most ironic name possible for a cult that wanted to “paint the town blue.”  Or maybe that was on purpose.  Who knows?

The tag was actually referring to the cult of Athena, which apparently existed in different parts of ancient Greece.  I was completely unaware of the Aum Shinrikyo cult and the parallels that could be drawn between them and the one in Earthbound.  Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, isn’t it?

(Previous Letter)

Dear Anon,

....................

Dear Inferno,

Yep, it has the link in there.  Thanks for asking.

-The Co-Mod

P. S. The Modthorne’s on vacation, in case you’re wondering.  She’ll be back next week!

[stillness-in-green]

Ahistorical, Absurd, and Unsustainable (Thanks + Sources and Further Reading)

This post concludes the essay-as-written. I'm going to try to get a full version up on AO3 within the next few days, which I will link here (ETA: here) and on my tumblr generally. It will have properly hotlinked footnotes and a table of contents. It will also probably be all in one chapter, as it was intended to be read, with the exception of the resources below.

Thanks to @codenamesazanka, who provided me a lot of useful links to resources on Japanese law when I was still just spitting overheated hypotheses into the void. Thanks also to @robotlesbianjavert, @aysall and my tumblr-less BF for their game beta-reads, their catches of some grammar and spelling mistakes that would have ranged from annoying to mortifying, and for the checks on my thought process and organizational flow. Thanks to everyone in my chat group for putting up with me when I had a mini "oh god what am I doing I'm not a lawyer" meltdown over my first draft Logistics conclusions.

And thanks to all of the people on tumblr who read and reblogged this! If any of you want some further reading on the topics I discussed, or if you just want to double-check my information, see below to conclude:

Ahistorical, Absurd, and Unsustainable: An Examination of the Mass Arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front

Introduction and Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four and Conclusion

Sources and Further Reading

I tended to start with Wikipedia and then either follow their source links or Google for further information when I needed more detail or to clear up the occasional bit of conflicting information. Unfortunately, I wasn’t thinking quite far enough in advance to save a link to every single source I used, but I’ve done my best to either dig them back up in retrospect or find another source relaying similar information.

All direct quotes, excerpted panels and canonical information comes from Viz's official translation of My Hero Academia or My Hero Academia: Vigilantes.

///

Overviews on the pre-war Japanese incidents I cited for comparative purposes:

The March 15 Incident

The February 26 Incident

The Rice Riots. Further information sourced from the rather more detailed Japanese page.

The formation and immediate ban of the Farmer-Labor Party.

///

General reading on uprisings, riots, coups, and protests that otherwise got out of hand.

The Era of Popular Violence

Rebellions in Japan

Attempted Coups in Japan

///

On Aum Shinrikyo and the sarin gas attacks:

Wikipedia has some basics, but further information was sourced from a Congress report on Aum some seven months after the attack and this Aum retrospective written last year.

The Wikipedia page on Underground.

For another story wrestling with these topics, consider giving the anime Mawaru Penguindrum a whirl. Without explicitly telling you that's what it's doing, it deals with the difficulties—stigma leading to ostracization, depression and radicalization—faced by the children of a fictionalized Aum Shinrikyo expy some years following an equally obvious fictionalized expy of the sarin gas attacks, as well as critically depicting the state of society that may have lead members of Japan’s “Lost Generation” to cults like Aum to begin with. There’s a good but spoilerific breakdown on that aspect of the show here.

///

International referents:

India’s Million Man March, and a BBC report on the arrests/detainments.

An article about a lawsuit brought by the ACLU over the Baltimore arrests, and the cite on 24-hour releases.

This article is my source of the 1,200 number on the mass trials in Egypt. This one is a more in-depth look at the problems with the trials, while this one shows that the mass trial problems are still ongoing.

///

Japan’s laws:

The Peace Preservation Laws

English translations of the Penal Code and the Subversive Activities Prevention Act.

An overview of the state of criminal conspiracy law in Japan circa 2007, looking at the first incarnation of what would eventually become the 2017 law.

A scathing opinion piece on said 2017 law.

A citation on the Subversive Activities Prevention Act being invoked against Aum, and only Aum. Dated year-of, but there have been no invocations of it since, despite Japan seeing a marked upswing in anti-new religious movement sentiment after the sarin gas attacks.

///

Japan’s penal system:

A broad overview on Wikipedia.

Two sources for numbers, one less recent, but with more context and detail here; another with the most recent numbers available here.

Cite for 2018 number of arrests.

///

The trial process and criminal justice:

An exhaustive report on the structures, status, and proceedings of criminal justice in Japan at every stage from the initial arrest to post-release services circa 2019.

The Wikipedia article on pre-trial detention cells in Japan, which has a decent overview of why they’re controversial. See also the entry for the role of confessions in the indictment process.

Cite for the number of deaths caused by law enforcement in Japan in 2018.

An overview on lay judges, and an article on the Japanese public’s broad discomfort with the system.

A good article on the high conviction rate and what activists call “hostage justice.”

Another good article on the conviction rate, this one touching on several of the aspects I mention about lenient sentences and coerced confessions, as well as some that I didn't, like corrupt or compromised judges.

A broad look at attorneys in Japan and, buried in an article on the lay judge system because I could not for the life of me find the interview I read that talked about it, a citation for the unpopularity of defense attorneys. (Footnote 365)

A Wikipedia page for Yasuda Yoshihiro, who I quipped about in a footnote and refrained from explaining further. Long story short, he’s maybe the example of an unpopular defense attorney in Japan, an anti-death penalty activist who has served as defense in a number of high-profile cases, absolutely the most notable of which was that of Asahara Shoukou, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo.

An interview with the CEO of Cross Career, an employment agency founded by an ex-convict and dedicated to helping others like him find work. Talks some about the stigma around felons and how it impacts recidivism in Japan.

///

On children in Japan:

An exhaustive rundown on the state of alternative childcare in Japan.

An article about the way children’s independence is founded on a strong faith in their community, and a post that mentions the TV program Hajimete no Otsukai (My First Errand).

///

On AEDs:

An article from relatively early on—back in 2007—in the rollout. From the following year, there’s this rather drier but informative article from a medical journal discussing the effectiveness of the movement thus far and steps that could be taken to make the public more confident in using the devices.

///

Further relevant My Hero Academia meta:

Tumblr user @codenamesazanka has posted some excerpts and discussion about Murakami’s Underground and how the issues Murakami raises can also be seen in My Hero Academia.

My take on the MLA and quirk supremacy, part of a much longer piece covering my general lore on the MLA, its members, and its history. For some more specific discussion on why I think the series itself supports the view that the MLA at large was not as hardline quirk supremacist as Geten claims, see Geten’s section “On Quirk Supremacy (and Re-Destro, still)” in this post about my headcanons for the canonical MLA members.