Rampo Kitan and the hypocrisy of justice

Written by A. H. on 06 Oct 2015

WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Rampo Kitan: Game of Laplace, and specifically episodes three and four of the series. If you're planning to watch the show, we'd advise coming back to this piece after you've finished episode four.

No matter where you sit on the spectrum of other important topics, be they religious or political, the concept of justice is one that none of us can escape from, and this is particularly true when we talk about criminal justice. Even if we've never personally found ourselves embroiled in either side of the legal system as a perpetrator or victim of crime, we still instinctively have strong opinions about it if only out of sheer preservation - we all enjoy the feeling of safety that laws provide us with, and the prospect that this legal system might fail us, or even worse work against us, is an abhorrent one.

Of course, one person's sense of what is "just" is very different from another's, and the concept of justice is one that runs deep throughout anime - it's impossible to count how many series contain characters that see themselves as either arbiters or paragons of justice in some shape or form. Foremost amongst them is, of course, Death Note; aside from its snappy, edgy concept of a notebook that allows you to kill anyone whose name is written within it and the cat and mouse games which ensue between its major characters, much of that series' popularity also stems from the core question that it presents about justice.

One side of Death Note's argument surrounding how to deliver justice and what this could mean for society is a simplistic one - if criminals are killed and their punishment shown for all to see, what could be a better deterrent? Besides, who's going to stand up and argue that known criminals should be protected from harm given that they have made a choice to do harm to others for their own personal gain? When a single person holds that power over the populace, then there are no "ifs" or "buts" that can enter the conversation - judgement is swift, absolute and unequivocal.

The flip side of this argument is considered the more humane one - where punishments should be considered rather than knee-jerk responses or sweeping decisions, and those punishments should only be meted out after a fair and thorough trial overseen by unbiased parties. No one person should have the ability to choose whether another lives or dies; after all, doesn't that make the person in question as bad as the murderers that they seek to bring forth justice against?

One suspects that if you interviewed most people on the street and asked them a broad question about whether they'd prefer to see criminals brought to justice via a thorough judicial process or through a single individual with the power to choose life or death for any individual brought before them, the vast majority of people would prefer the former option with little to no debate.

However, if we rephrased the question a little and asked those same people how justice should be served to, say, a paedophile or a terrorist, one suspects the answers would quickly change from an even-handed one to calls to invoke capital punishment, death penalties and the like. No matter how calm, reserved and logical our arguments might be when faced with generalities, we're all still human - emotional creatures, easily affected by circumstances, fear, and a desire to protect our loved ones.

"But you'd never catch me calling for the death penalty, I'm far too rational for that!" I hear you cry... and you might be right. I'd consider myself just such an individual, who wouldn't support the death penalty under any circumstances and regardless of the crime in question and would happily point you to evidence of why capital punishment is an archaic and downright bad idea.

However, that faith in my own thought processes has (thankfully) never been tested directly, and I've never been put into a situation where my personal circumstances might sway my feelings on the matter. Hopefully it never will, but this is where the importance of fiction comes into play, to offer an opportunity for all of us to indirectly experience events that will test our logic and beliefs and perhaps reveal some surprising things about how we react when faced with a given scenario.

This brings us to Rampo Kitan: Game of Laplace, and a pair of episodes which do exactly this - provide us with a scenario that tests our sense of justice as it pertains to the most heinous of crimes in particular, largely by manoeuvring the viewer into a well-realised situation where they'll be left to make a snap judgement which belies any underlying logic to reveal the core of their beliefs.