Johan has a very interesting and complex morality. This is because I thought that his morality was not as complicated and intricate as it is. I shall delve into the reasons why extensively, as an attempt to try and explain how I find him, but, before doing so, I would like to put him on the grey middle section of the scale.
The reason for this is because he lacks morality. Usually, when a character is said to have no morality or is described as “amoral”, it’s used to mean that they acknowledge right and wrong, but their actions and their behaviour do not fit into either of those categories. Johan, however, is amoral in the sense that he lacks right and wrong to begin with. Despite being this way for almost his entire life, he wasn’t born this way. He had a sense of morality; he was born with it and lived with it for a short period of time, like most people. However, morality would ruin Bonaparte’s plans for Johan, and he knew that Johan was not created the way he wanted him to be, so he deliberately erased his sense of morality through his morbid stories. Although it’s possible for him to regain his sense of morality back, which is similar to what Grimmer did, Johan does not care enough to try and repair his corrupted sense of morality.
Even though he lacks morality, he recognises “right” and “wrong”, but only on a surface level. He knows that this action would be “good” and that that one would be “bad”, but it doesn’t affect his way of thinking regarding what he’s doing, which is a way in which he’s similar, almost identical, to an amoral character who recognises morality fully but chooses not to follow it. He knows that he shouldn’t be doing this, because it’s “bad”, but, due to his corrupted sense of “right” and “wrong”, he doesn’t know why it’s considered “bad”. Johan is a very logical person; he does things always with a reason, regardless of whether or not you understand that reason, so such an unreasonable thing, which is what it seems to him, would be pointless to oblige by. He cannot tell why this thing is considered “wrong” because he was never taught the distinction after it was altered in his mind.
Another thing that ties into this is his perspective on life. He believes that humans are only equal in one thing, and that is death. He sees that nothing in life matters, where the only thing that would, potentially, matter is death. He, unlike most murderers, kills due to lack of purpose. It’s pointless to keep going on the way he is, either way, and it’s pointless to prove that he ever existed by his actions and the people who knew him if it’s pointless to keep going to begin with, so he erases himself from people’s minds. He kills them, because then no one would be able to say that such a person ever existed. He wants to remove his existence from this world; he seeks “the perfect suicide”, where he could die and no one would miss him, because all those who knew him are no longer there.
I, personally, am not well versed in Philosophy yet. However, from my, rather limited, knowledge, Johan would be considered a nihilist for the way that he thinks. Nihilism aligns very well with his ideology and his view that nothing in life matters. This mindset, too, could be the reason why he wanted Tenma and Nina to kill him. There was no point in his living anyway.
Because of this mindset of his, he didn’t fix what was wrong with him and his corrupted sense of morality. He knew it was wrong; he could clearly tell that something was wrong with the way his actions were perceived. However, if nothing matters, and he is going to erase his own existence from people’s minds, why bother and fix himself? He wouldn’t benefit from it, and it’s not something that he seeks. Therefore, it’s pointless.
The last thing I would like to discuss which involves his morality is that most, if not all, of his actions are not entirely his fault. Despite being the one to carry out all of those atrocious actions, he cannot be fully blamed for them. This is because one of the biggest reasons, if not the main reason, why he behaves the way he does is because of what Bonaparte and the instructors at 511 Kinderheim instilled within him. He was built to become a monster. He was born to do this. He didn’t really have a choice within that matter. If he found a reason, he could’ve changed, much like Grimmer, but he hadn’t. He never found a purpose in life. He found everything to be pointless.
Personality and insecurities
Johan is a character who can be described by so many adjectives, yet so little would only truly fit him.
One of which is intelligent. He’s incredibly intelligent and there are numerous situations to prove that, but the one that sticks out to me the most is the one with Roberto, where he got him to help Johan by latching onto his only memory of the past, as he knew that he was incredibly attached to his past. This also shows another trait of his, which is manipulation. He’s terribly manipulative, due to both his remarkable brilliance and charming charisma. He has manipulated many people in both the manga and the anime, but the one that I find to be quite memorable is the situation with Milos. He managed to make a child, a small boy, think in a certain way and almost kill himself due to the ideas that Johan implanted in his head; that no one wants him, and that he’s unloved. A situation similar to this is when he charmed Suk while pretending to be his sister, and, thus, got information out of him. He knows how to interact with people in a manner that will get them to trust him. He analyses them and their actions, in order to understand the kind of façade he’d be putting up with them to make them do what he wants.
Aside from these prominent traits within his behaviour, he’s childish. However, he’s not childish in the traditional way. He’s childish because, when addressing himself, he uses the pronoun that little boys use. His way of speaking is both very cryptic and childish, which shows just how much his childhood trauma and what Bonaparte did to him. It shows the extent of it.
Due to the odd manner that his personality formed, and how there was nothing ever stable in his life, he became immensely attached to Nina. She’s, arguably, the only person who he would do anything and everything for, because he sees her as the only person who matters in the world, and, in his world, she’s the only other person to exist, aside from him. Tenma is someone else whom he deeply cares about, but his way of caring is a tad different. He admires Tenma greatly, and could potentially even see him as a form of father figure, but he mainly finds Tenma special due to his morality. Tenma’s morality is unwavering, and he is endlessly and continuously kind and patient to anyone. Even though he might get in legal trouble because he helped someone, he would still do it over and over again because it’s the right thing to do, and that’s something that Johan finds notable about Tenma.
Due to the fact that he grew up too fast, Johan has the emotional maturity of a child. This is because he simply was never given the chance to explore emotions like people usually would at any point in his life. This is as he views emotions as a weakness. After learning that he could take advantage of people through their emotions, he realised that it’s a weakness that would make him an easy victim. He realised that if he was being emotional and vulnerable with someone, then he was being pathetic. The only exception for this case is Tenma and how he admires him. Tenma’s an incredibly emotional person, who tries to hide that fact, yet fails, but it doesn’t make him any weaker. Matter of fact, it just shows how much he’s endured and how that affected him.
The only fear I was able to identify clearly for Johan was his fear of losing Nina. As I’ve previously mentioned, Nina’s the only person who has ever mattered to Johan. She means everything to him, quite literally too, and he doesn’t want to lose her, which is a very understandable fear of his. Something else that ties into this is his fear of hurting her, which is, also, quite reasonable as well.
I never really realised how complex Johan’s character was until I started writing this analysis. There’s so much that goes into his personality and morality, and not only that, but you can also never be certain if what you know about him is true or not, because he exists but doesn’t at the same time. He’s quite contradictory, I found, but not quite in a traditional way. He’s definitely peculiar, and I honestly think that I’ve missed many points while writing this. There’s a lot that goes into his personality, which makes him so realistic, complex and human. I always admired Urasawa-san’s character writing, but writing this really made me appreciate it a whole lot more.
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