Ganryu Sasaki—Sasaki Kojirō—is the antagonist of Onimusha: Way of the Sword (Capcom, 4 September 2026), the rival of Miyamoto Musashi. The game's premise gives him a second life: he is resurrected by an Oni Gauntlet handed to him by the Man in White, he becomes obsessed with the power it grants and begins slaughtering humans in order to absorb their souls. Capcom conceived him as Musashi's exact opposite: both aspire to be the finest swordsman of their age, with opposite visions and opposite styles. Ganryu is elegant, supremely self-assured, obsessively careful about his appearance; his developers described his combat style as seductive, with a touch of eroticism. Behind that refinement lies one of criminology's most uncomfortable mechanisms. Ganryu does not believe that killing is fine. He believes that what he does is not killing: it is the Way of the Sword. And that belief—built, rehearsed and in place before the first corpse—is what the sociology of crime calls a technique of neutralization.
// The theoryFive alibis, learned the way crime is learned
In 1957, Gresham M. Sykes and David Matza published in the American Sociological Review an article that reversed a common assumption: that the delinquent lives by a moral code opposed to society's. Their thesis in “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency” is subtler and far more disturbing. The offender shares conventional morality—he feels shame, he honors certain people, he distinguishes right from wrong—but he learns a set of justifications that let him suspend it temporarily, in specific situations, in order to act and afterwards return to the fold without feeling like a monster. He learns these justifications the same way he learns the crime itself: from others, by imitation, by repetition. They described five. Denial of responsibility: it was not me, it was circumstances, my upbringing, bad company, forces beyond my control. Denial of injury: nobody really got hurt, it is only property, they were insured, it was just a fight. Denial of the victim: they had it coming, they are not really a victim, this is punishment and I am the avenger. Condemnation of the condemners: those who judge me are worse, the system is corrupt, the police are thugs—the focus shifts from the act to the accuser. And appeal to higher loyalties: I did it for my family, for my gang, for my honor, for a cause larger than the law. The rules were not rejected; they were outranked. Matza went on to extend the idea in Delinquency and Drift (1964) with the notion of drift: most offenders are not permanently outside the moral order but float between conformity and deviance, and it is neutralization that loosens the moorings and lets them drift. And with Sykes he had already sketched, in Juvenile Delinquency and Subterranean Values (1961), the idea that many of the values driving delinquency are not alien to respectable society but its subterranean versions: the search for excitement, contempt for routine work, the display of daring and style—values we admire in the athlete, the artist and the adventurer, pushed past their limit.
Denial of the victim
Of the five techniques, the one that best explains Ganryu is the denial of the victim, and it is worth being precise about what it does. It is not a denial that someone died—Ganryu counts his dead, he needs them. It is the denial that the person who died was a victim: that is, someone who suffered an injustice. Sykes and Matza noticed that offenders frequently reframe their target as deserving, as an enemy, as a legitimate object, or simply as something that does not belong to the moral category of “person to whom things are owed”. The operation is not emotional but categorical: it does not remove compassion, it removes the slot compassion would occupy. This is why it is so effective and so cold. The person who denies the victim does not need to hate: hatred still grants the other the dignity of an adversary. Denial is cheaper. When Ganryu cuts down a farmer to absorb his soul, there is no enemy, no offense, no revenge. There is a body that yields energy for a duel in which that body has no part. The victim has not been defeated; the victim has been deleted from the accounting. And the vanishing point of the technique is precisely this: at the end, the offender no longer perceives that he is using it.
// The subjectThe swordsman who turned people into fuel
Ganryu assembles the five techniques with almost diagrammatic clarity. The appeal to higher loyalties is his backbone: the Way of the Sword is not an excuse improvised after the fact but a genuine value system—discipline, mastery, the pursuit of a perfect duel—that he holds above any other obligation. Precisely because it is a real and demanding ideal, it works so well: it is not a lie he tells, it is a truth he uses. The denial of the victim follows from it automatically: within the logic of the duel, only two figures exist, the two swordsmen; everyone else is scenery, and scenery cannot be wronged. The denial of injury arrives through a technicality that fiction supplies and reality also supplies in its own way: the souls are not destroyed, they are absorbed, transferred, put to use—the harm is reframed as transformation. The denial of responsibility hangs on the gauntlet and on the Man in White who handed it to him: he did not ask to be resurrected, he did not forge the power, he merely received a destiny; the object becomes the agent and its bearer becomes its instrument. And the condemnation of the condemners is written into his rivalry with Musashi: whoever objects to his method is a lesser swordsman, someone who does not understand, whose moral objection is really a confession of mediocrity. Over all of this sits the layer the subterranean values explain. His vanity is not a quirk of characterization: the obsessive care of his appearance, the elegance, the eroticised style of combat are the display that Matza and Sykes identified—the pursuit of excitement and of style, of the beautiful gesture over the useful one, turned into a governing criterion. Ganryu does not kill despite his aestheticism; he kills inside it, because he has made beauty the measure by which an act is judged and beauty has no room for the farmer. Musashi, his mirror, pursues the same title of finest swordsman of the age with the opposite vision: that is the whole point of the pairing. The historical Sasaki Kojirō died in 1612 in the duel on the island of Ganryū, against a Musashi who arrived late, armed with a wooden oar. The fictional Ganryu returns from that death with the one thing the historical one never had: an unlimited supply of justifications.
Ganryu Sasaki
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// The crackThe alibi arrives before the cut
The crack here has two edges, and the first cuts in the direction nobody expects. It is tempting to read neutralization as an attenuating circumstance: if the man truly believed his own story, was he not less guilty? Sykes and Matza's answer points the other way. Their central claim is that these justifications operate before the act and make it possible—they are not post-hoc excuses offered to a judge, they are the psychological precondition of the offense. And that does not lighten responsibility: it aggravates it, because it reveals something decisive. Ganryu needed an alibi. He built it, maintained it, refined it. A man who feels no obligation to justify himself does not justify himself; the very existence of the machinery proves that ordinary morality was still in the room, still making its claim, and that he worked to silence it. Neutralization is not the absence of conscience but its management. Every technique is a small confession: the denial of the victim is only necessary where there was a victim, and the appeal to a higher loyalty is only required where a lower one was being broken. Far from being a sign that he did not know, it is proof that he did.
The opposite edge matters just as much. Not every story an offender tells himself is a neutralization, and not every neutralization is calculated cynicism. People genuinely hold values, genuinely act for loyalties, genuinely misjudge harm; treating every motive as an alibi turns an analytic tool into a lie detector that does not exist, and there is no clinical or forensic instrument that can read, from the outside, whether a given justification was a cause or a consolation. The theory describes a mechanism; it does not license us to diagnose sincerity. And there is an uncomfortable mirror in it. The duel neutralizes. War neutralizes—the enemy combatant is killable in a way the same man in a field is not. The hunt neutralizes, the market neutralizes, the ledger neutralizes. What separates Ganryu from a swordsman is not the technique itself, which respectable institutions use daily and largely have to: it is who he decides to place inside the circle of the killable. That line is not drawn by the sword. It is drawn before the sword, by someone who chooses where to draw it, and who could have drawn it elsewhere. Understanding the alibi is not accepting it: it is taking the edge off it.
Who gets inside the circle
Neutralization matters far beyond fiction because it is the most common machinery of ordinary harm. The corporate fraud that hurts “nobody in particular”, the harassment that “was just a joke”, the violence committed “for the family”, the abuse justified because “they asked for it”, the cruelty carried out under orders because “the cause demanded it”: all of them run on the same five gears, and none of them require a monster. This is precisely why prevention and intervention programs in criminology work directly on justifications—cognitive restructuring, victim awareness, restorative confrontation—rather than only on impulses: taking away the story often takes away the act, because the act was never psychologically available without the story. The lesson Ganryu offers is not that beautiful ideals are dangerous, though some are. It is that the decisive moral moment in almost every harm is not the blow but the earlier, quieter act of deciding who counts. Once someone has been moved outside the circle, the rest is technique. Naming the mechanism is how we get back to the moment when the line was drawn, which is the only moment at which anything could still have gone differently.
Three key ideas
- Sykes and Matza (1957) showed that offenders do not reject conventional morality: they suspend it temporarily through five learned justifications—denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners and appeal to higher loyalties.
- Ganryu Sasaki runs all five, anchored in an appeal to a higher loyalty (the Way of the Sword) that produces a denial of the victim: inside the logic of the duel only two swordsmen exist, and everyone he slaughters for their souls becomes fuel rather than a person. His vanity and aestheticism are the subterranean values—excitement, display, contempt for the routine—pushed past the limit.
- The ethical crack cuts both ways: because neutralization operates before the act and makes it possible, it aggravates rather than attenuates responsibility (he needed an alibi, which means he knew); but not every story is an alibi, and the duel, war and the hunt neutralize too. What distinguishes Ganryu is not the technique but who he chose to place inside the circle of the killable.
Sources · further reading
- Sykes, G. M. & Matza, D. (1957). “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency”. American Sociological Review, 22(6), 664–670.
- Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and Drift. John Wiley & Sons.
- Matza, D. & Sykes, G. M. (1961). “Juvenile Delinquency and Subterranean Values”. American Sociological Review, 26(5), 712–719.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Ganryu Sasaki?
Ganryu Sasaki (“Sasaki Kojirō”) is a villain from Onimusha, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He does not ask himself whether killing is wrong: he asks whether the cut was clean.
Why does Ganryu Sasaki (Sasaki Kojirō) become a villain?
Ganryu Sasaki and Sykes and Matza's techniques of neutralization: how an aesthetic ideal turns the people he slaughters into fuel and erases the victim from the story.
Which criminological theory explains Ganryu Sasaki?
Ganryu Sasaki's case is analysed through Neutralization. Techniques of neutralization, described by Gresham Sykes and David Matza in 1957, are the justifications an offender gives himself in order to offend while still regarding himself as decent: denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners and appeal to higher loyalties. Ganryu Sasaki, the antagonist of Onimusha: Way of the Sword, is a textbook case: resurrected by an Oni Gauntlet and obsessed with its power, he slaughters humans to absorb their souls under a higher loyalty—the Way of the Sword, the duel with Musashi—that erases everyone he kills from his account of himself. There are no victims: there is material.
