Gin Ichimaru (Captain of the Third Division): The snake who betrayed the god for one person

Rukia Kuchiki is walking to her execution across the bridge that leads to Sōkyoku Hill when Gin Ichimaru steps into her path. He is captain of the Third Division of the Gotei 13: silver hair, eyes almost shut and a smile that never leaves his face. He says he was out for a walk and dropped by to tease her. He tells her that Renji, who tried to save her, is about to die. Then he offers her something worse: he could save her and her friends, right now, if she asked. Rukia, who had made peace with her death, starts to believe him. Then Gin tells her he was kidding (Bleach, chapter 145; episode 53 of the anime). That is Gin for hundreds of chapters: Sōsuke Aizen’s ally, the captain nobody trusts and the one who seems to enjoy other people’s fear. (Warning: this case file reveals the character’s final twist and his death.)

// The theoryThe norm is not broken: it is set aside

In 1957, Gresham Sykes and David Matza published “Techniques of Neutralization” in the American Sociological Review. Their starting point was an observation that troubled subcultural theories: many young offenders do not despise conventional norms. They feel guilt, admire honest people and choose whom to harm. If they do not reject the norms, how do they break them? With justifications that, according to the authors, come before the act and make it possible, because they neutralize the norm right when it gets in the way. They described five: denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners and the appeal to higher loyalties. The last is the most interesting, because it denies no value at all: it sacrifices the demands of the wider society to those of a smaller group, the gang, the friends, the siblings. In Delinquency and Drift (1964), Matza added that neutralization does not turn anyone into an offender; it only sets them adrift, free for a moment from the brake of the norms. Decades of research, reviewed by Maruna and Copes (2005), suggest these techniques explain persistence in crime better than its onset.

// The subjectA century of smiling

The manga shows Gin crossing the line very early. In chapter -105 (the prequel Turn Back the Pendulum, episode 208 of the anime), about a hundred and ten years earlier, the child prodigy who finished the academy in a single year has just killed the Third Seat of the Fifth Division. Aizen, then a lieutenant, finds him, congratulates him and asks what he thought of the dead man. He was worthless, Gin answers. Aizen is glad to hear it, and the vacant seat goes to Gin. Decades later, on Sōkyoku Hill (chapters 176 and 177, episode 62), Aizen pulls the Hōgyoku out of Rukia’s body and orders Gin to kill her. Gin extends his sword, Shinsō, toward her neck, and Byakuya Kuchiki steps in and takes the blow. Rangiku pins Gin from behind, but the Menos Grande rescue the three traitors. Before he vanishes toward Hueco Mundo, Gin tells her he would have liked her to hold him a little longer, and says he is sorry (chapter 178).

The third moment explains everything. In the real Karakura Town (chapters 412 to 416, episodes 306 to 308), Gin takes Rangiku aside, leaves her lying on a rooftop and tells Aizen he has killed her. When Aizen is surprised, Gin replies that he has no feelings: he is a snake. Minutes later he unleashes his bankai, Kamishini no Yari, on Aizen. He reveals that it took him decades to coax out of Aizen how to escape the complete hypnosis of Kyōka Suigetsu, which is simply to touch the sword before it is released, and that he has left a fragment of his blade in Aizen’s heart, carrying a poison that destroys cells. He tears a hole in Aizen’s chest and snatches the Hōgyoku. It does him no good: the stone, fused with Aizen, makes him evolve, and Aizen rips off Gin’s arm and runs him through with his sword. A memory then tells what Gin always kept to himself: as a child, in the Rukongai, he found out that some of Aizen’s Shinigami had torn a piece of Rangiku’s soul out of her for the Hōgyoku, and he decided to kill their leader. He became a Shinigami, he had told her, so that she would never have to cry again.

// The crackAn alibi written by the reader

The final reveal does something curious: it forces a rereading of four hundred chapters, and in that rereading it is the reader who neutralizes. The taunting of Rukia, the dead Third Seat, the blow that cuts Hiyori Sarugaki in half in the battle of Fake Karakura Town (chapter 377), all of it becomes part of the disguise of a man who was good “deep down.” But the theory calls for caution. As early as 1969, Travis Hirschi objected that many neutralizations might be rationalizations made up after the act, not permits granted beforehand. With Gin we do not know what he told himself: the manga never shows him justifying the Third Seat’s death or the blow to Hiyori, and none of those victims had anything to do with Rangiku’s debt. Loyalty explains the direction of his life; it does not prove that every crime was necessary for it.

There is another irony the theory brings to light. Sykes and Matza pointed out that the appeal to higher loyalties does not deny the value of the norm: it ranks it. Gin does not despise other people’s lives on principle; he puts them behind a promise made to a starving girl. And the result is the exact opposite of what he promised: the person he did everything for is the one who ends up crying over his body. Explaining Gin is not excusing him. His motive is understandable, almost noble; the hundred years of harm he hung on it are still his.