The broken idealist: Higuruma Hiromi
And how the world of JJK viciously punishes idealists.
Before we start, let’s set some premises:
This is an essay based solely on my opinions and my own knowledge of criminal justice. I’m no professional writer/essayist.
JJK is a critique on unfair systems that reward selfishness and nurture individualistic (oftentimes destructive) behaviors.
One of the main motifs in JJK is (un)fairness.
Even when rewarded by these systems, individuals usually end up alienated (Gojo being the utmost example, but so is Sukuna to some extent).
The world of JJK punishes idealists very harshly.
I might've read waaaaay too deep into his character (apologies in advance).
I am ABSOLUTELY biased in analyzing this character because I kin Higuruma very hard and identify profoundly with many of his struggles.
[queue “Pigs” by Pink Floyd] Let's do this.
The ideal of truth and Higuruma choosing to be a criminal defense attorney
Higuruma shows up in the manga as one of the top players of the Culling Games. Throughout a few chapters, Gege introduces him to us as a former criminal defense attorney that has lost it after one of his clients gets his innocence verdict overruled and is unfairly convicted for a crime he didn't commit, triggering Higuruma's cursed technique to awake, ending up in the deaths of the Judge and Prosecutor that contributed for the wrongful conviction.
Along those chapters, we get to see two very interesting things: Firstly, the fact that Higuruma actively chose to be a lawyer, instead of pursuing a career as a judge. Second, his stance and lines about truth, especially this one: "Even if no one else does, I want to keep my eyes open."
Higuruma, for me, is a prime example of how someone moved by truth and justice can become a self-righteous, cynical individual (I'll refrain from the word "villain" because he wasn't ever an actual "villain" in the story). From the get go, when we get more information on his past, we can see his mental state slowly declining as he gets progressively more overworked fighting an unwinnable fight.
We have some very important pieces of information from chapter 158: Japan has a 99% conviction rate. The public opinion about defendants is that they're always guilty. Higuruma earns little, works a lot and his job is usually trying for a miracle, to be that 1%. And, finally, that Higuruma chose to fight an unfair system from within.
That not only has huge parallels with the world of cursed energy, but is one the most important messages I feel that JJK is building up to — you can't reform a broken system from within, because structurally and systematically unfair systems will always push things back into a state of unfairness / status quo. We see this when Gojo says, at the beginning of the manga, that even if he killed all the higher ups at that point in time, other assholes would just take their places. To a more fundamental level, we see it in Yuki's failed efforts to end curses from the perspective of a jujutsu sorcerer, and the way the story is progressing towards a complete rupture with the current state of cursed energy altogether to give place to something new.
The message is: To fight an unfair system from within and by its own rules is and always will be a losing game.
Now to Higuruma's fallout, we have a perfect storm for what happened to him — an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.
I'll dive a little into criminal law (and c.l. procedure) and make many oversimplifications to get a point across, so I apologize to any other criminal lawyers out there reading this and cringing at the oversimplifications.
In theory, the Criminal Justice System should be preoccupied with the truth. Criminal Law, in essence, is attributing a penalty (prison, fine, death, etc.) to an act (to kill, to rob) described by law as a crime. In that regard, then, one could only suffer said penalty if they actually committed the act that the law described as being a crime.
Where does truth come into place here?
To investigate if something happened in the world of facts (the real, concrete world) is essentially a search for truth, which to me is very telling of Higuruma's choice in becoming a criminal defense attorney.
In an unfair system in which 99% of people are convicted, it'd make no sense for this man to become a prosecutor. The prosecution is already benefiting from the system, considering the way the scales are tipped. That's a given.
But regarding the judgeship, things become more interesting. In a fair criminal justice system, the judge is forbidden to engage in probationary activity (which means, basically, that the judge cannot search for evidence, investigate or look for witnesses, he can solely analyze what the defense and prosecution bring to him in order to give a verdict — the judge does not engage in the most important activity in finding the truth).
Why can't the judge do that?
Because when the presumption of innocence is in place, anyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty, ergo, if there is not enough evidence to convict, the person must be acquitted. If the judge engages in that activity, they'd be taking on the prosecution's job — to prove the occurrence of a given criminal act. We have separate places for judging and prosecuting for a reason.
The scales are already in favor of the prosecution (they literally have THE STATE’S aid ikn the form of police forces to investigate and taxpayer money to foot costs during criminal lawsuits), so anything that might end up harming or weakening the presumption of innocence is strictly forbidden, including having the judge engage in probationary activity. If the lack of evidence is enough to acquit someone, then having the judge searching for evidence automatically harms the presumption of innocence, because if there is not enough evidence to convict someone, the judge MUST acquit.
In that scenario, then, the best place for someone who wants to search and defend the truth against unfairness is the Defense stand, clearly.
Everything said up until now about how the criminal justice system should work is just the theory, however. The reality of it is far sinister. The criminal justice system is a machine perfectly conceived to chew out those who fight for fairness, because fairness is not one of its main goals. It's main goal is serving as an instrument of power (in the most Foucaultian sense of the word) and control over citizens and, to some degree, appease collective concerns about crime rates and violence by making examples out of people, whether they're guilty or not (I could go on a tangent here for hours about the criminal justice system, capitalism and protection of private property by the state, but let's not do that, lol).
That's why Keita's trial is the perfect storm to break Higuruma's psyche so deeply. All the systematic unfairnesses that exist in the Japanese Criminal Justice System chomp away his ideals — one might say, what constitutes the very core of who he is — and unceremoniously spits it right back in his face.
Independent defense lawyers are systematically in a worse position regarding resources to gather evidence in their client's favor; it's easier to convict someone who's already under the gavel than to start a new investigation on somebody else and spend even more taxpayer money; to convict a person whom the people deem as guilty soothes the public opinion regarding how well the criminal justice system actually works to "keep society safe from these foul criminals" (not human beings); the appeal is a limited resource in most criminal justice systems, so after one gets their innocence verdict overturned, to get it back is extremely hard.
Everything worked perfectly to break every inch of Higuruma's ideals. It's no use for you to be the only one willing to stare truth in its eyes if everyone else looks away because it's more convenient to let the unfair gears keep turning the way they do. You'll give yourself to unnecessary suffering meanwhile nothing ever changes. This could even help draw a parallel between Higuruma's and Geto's fallouts: to realize how broken the system is, how you can't break a wall with the toy hammer the wall builders give you, and how lonely/depressing/infuriating of an experience it is to realize all this and still know there is absolutely nothing you can do.
The game is rigged, and if someone ever so chooses to not play by those rules, they're viciously punished.
Now that we've gotten to the breaking part, let's see how it manifests in Higuruma's own cursed technique and domain expansion.
The broken idealist and the cynicism
Someone had made an amazing post about how Higuruma's domain expansion was a perfect demonstration of his own cynicism at the moment his abilities were awakened, but I couldn't find it! So OP, if you by any chance end up reading this, HMU, because what you said will be featured here. (Edit: found it. Thanks, Eugie! The post can be accessed here, and @wolke17 made a deeper analysis after it, take a look at their profile)
In order to talk about Higuruma's cynicism stemming from his disappointment with the criminal justice system, we need to talk about his domain, so that's what we're gonna do now.
In his domain expansion, we meet his shikigami, Judgeman, who is an all-knowing creature responsible for giving off the verdict at the end of the debates between the two parties. According to Higuruma, Judgeman knows absolutely everything about someone's life the moment they enter his domain.
All is well up until now, isn't it? Hm, not so much. There are some very serious philosophical conundrums to having an all-knowing being bestowing judgment (skeptical catholics went crazy over this for many centuries).
Think about this: in a Courtroom, we have a judge who needs to get to know the facts, and is presented with two different hypotheses about the facts (prosecution and defense), for which the evidentiary activity (collecting evidence) is needed to support one hypothesis or the other. Given that we abide by the presumption of innocence, you don’t even have to prove the defense’s hypothesis to get an acquittal, as long as the prosecution one isn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
What’s the issue with having a judge that is omniscient?
First off, why would two hypotheses need to be confronted if the judge already knows the answer — if the person did or did not commit the crime?
On another note, now going into more of a “well he’s just judging based on the allegations”, it gets deeper. We have a judge that knows what happened, but simply decides based on the parties arguments. This is a huge issue because firstly, it obliterates the value of truth in the justice system — if criminal law is attributing to a particularly reprehensible action a penalty, and judgeman knows if that action took place or not, yet doesn’t decide according to what happened, but according to who best defends their point of view, it annihilates the very own reason for collecting evidence, the reason that a judgment needs to take place and the reason for criminal law even existing.
In Higuruma's domain, then, truth becomes the least important thing. In there, who has the better argument wins the debate. The judgment that happens within Deadly Sentencing is not about truth, it’s about the game's rules (or, more specifically, his domain's rules) and who plays them better, which makes it all the more ironic that Higuruma sees so much “potential” in the Culling Games due to its rules and established mechanics.
In a courtroom setting, having an omniscient judge is always, in any scenario, a cynical game of wits, and it fits perfectly with the philosophical fallout Higuruma experienced after Keita's conviction. His perspective got switched from "who deserves to win according to the truth" to "who plays the game better". He lost faith in the criminal justice system, and to a deeper degree, he lost faith in fairness in the world as a whole.
And that's why we can arrive at the conclusion that Higuruma is, in essence, a "broken idealist" character: he's not pandering to the idea that "the winner should be the one who plays the rules better” because he truly believes it; he's doing it out of resentment, because he got time and time again punished and was subjected to a hell of a lot of suffering for upholding his own ideals of truth and fairness. He's not acting, he is reacting to being unraveled and broken the way he was.
It also shows in his discourse regarding the weak, and the way he tries to place himself above what he dubs “the ugliness of people”, as the only one who sees the truth (“darkness is only darkness / people are ugly”). It’s a mirror: he experienced his own helplessness (or weakness) with Keita’s conviction, so in an effort to try and protect whatever is left from his own psyche, he’s actively denying how helpless he really feels by putting himself above the “truly weak”.
In the end, however, Higuruma kept his idealistic essence alive instead of giving himself over to the story that he told himself as a defense mechanism, unlike Geto, which is why it was possible to bring him back.
Even broken, he remained an idealist at heart.
written by tsukimefuku ㋡ comments and reblogs are appreciated. do not copy, translate or repost. copycatting is for losers.
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