Hanami is one of the special-grade curses in Jujutsu Kaisen, and its origin makes it unique among the show's villains: it was not born of hatred for a person nor of a dead man's grudge, but of the collective fear humanity feels at the damage it inflicts on nature. It is, literally, the planet's dread made flesh —a plant-like entity, serene, almost placid, moving among forests and roots with the slowness of one who has centuries ahead—. And its goal is as simple as it is terrifying: to protect the earth by exterminating humans, the species that poisons it. For green criminology, Hanami is a fascinating case precisely because it does not dispute the diagnosis —environmental harm is real and massive— but pushes it to a monstrous conclusion: if humans are the criminals against nature, then wiping them out is doing justice.
// The theoryWhen the greatest harm is not, technically, a crime
Green criminology was born in 1990, when Michael Lynch coined the term and authors such as Nigel South, Rob White and Piers Beirne developed it. Its decisive turn was to change the question the discipline had been asking for a century: not «what is crime?» but «what causes harm?». Because polluting a river, razing a forest or heating the planet can be done with every permit in order and ruin millions of beings —human and non-human—. That is the uncomfortable finding: the greatest ecological devastation is perfectly legal, and appears in no penal code. Rob White proposed looking at harm through three justices: environmental (the injury to humans, unequally distributed), ecological (the damage to ecosystems themselves) and species justice (the suffering of non-human animals). Hanami embodies, deformed, that third view: the one that recognizes nature as a victim with rights of its own, not as a mere resource.
The inversion of the criminal frame
What makes Hanami singular is not that it causes harm, but from which frame it does so. Green criminology denounces how the law pursues the pickpocket while leaving corporate and state ecocide untouched: there is a brutal mismatch between the scale of the harm and the legal response. Hanami takes that denunciation and turns it completely around. For it, the criminal subject is not the curse that attacks the jujutsu students: it is humans, who fell, burn and poison without restraint. From its plant-like perspective, it commits no crimes —it punishes them—. It is the fantasy of a nature that finally has agency, that stops being passive scenery to become judge and executioner. The problem, of course, is that this inversion does not distinguish: it does not judge the «conveyor belt of production» Lynch describes, nor the corporations that profit from the harm; it condemns the entire species, the child and the activist just like the executive. The green frame points to concrete culprits; Hanami sees only a plague.
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// The subjectEco-extremism made monster
Hanami barely speaks, and that terseness makes it more unsettling: there is no sermon nor manifesto, only a botanical, patient resolve. When it acts alongside the other curses —it shares a cause with Jogo and enlists in the plan of Mahito and his allies— its motivation stands apart from theirs: it seeks neither power nor despises the weak, but pursues an end that, in isolation, would sound almost noble. It wants a world where the forests can breathe. That is the trait green criminology both illuminates and fears: eco-extremism, the drift by which a legitimate environmental cause turns into a license for violence. Hanami represents the point where the defense of the earth abandons the terrain of justice —reforming the law, prosecuting ecocide, broadening the idea of harm— and settles into that of extermination. It does not ask that the powerful be judged; it decrees that humanity, as a whole, is incompatible with the life of the planet. It is the darkest conclusion that can be drawn from a true diagnosis, and that is why it is both seductive and false.
Hanami
// The riftA legitimate cause does not absolve the violence
Here is the rift, and it is double. The first temptation is to be swept along by the diagnosis: since the environmental harm Hanami denounces is real —ecocide exists, species go extinct, the climate is breaking— one might feel its fury is, at bottom, justified. It is not. Green criminology seeks to hold harm accountable with more precision, not less: it wants to point to the corporations and States that commit it, to codify ecocide as an international crime, to give voice to the victims both human and non-human. None of that runs through killing. Hanami does not widen justice: it replaces it with collective revenge, and in doing so commits exactly the error the theory denounces in reverse —confusing a whole category of beings with the harm only some of them cause—. Explaining where its rage comes from does not exonerate it of a single one of its victims.
The second rift is the opposite: using Hanami to discredit the entire environmental cause, as if caring about the planet led inevitably to eco-extremism. It is a comfortable and dangerous fallacy. The vast majority of green criminology is reformist, legal, civil: it asks for laws, not corpses. Confusing the defense of the earth with the terror of a plant-like curse is as deceitful as confusing the denunciation of a crime with its commission. The honest reading holds both things: the harm Hanami names deserves to be taken seriously as the great crime of the century, and its response is a horror that no cause legitimizes. Memory, here too, is for the victims —its own, human—, not for the executioner who claims to speak in the name of the forests.
Taking harm seriously without falling into extermination
Hanami matters because it dramatizes green criminology's hardest dilemma: how to maintain that environmental harm is a most serious crime —perhaps the greatest of our era— without that certainty degenerating into misanthropy. The character is the warning made villain: when a just cause believes itself authorized to dispense with limits, it stops being justice and becomes another form of the very violence it claimed to fight. The answer the theory offers is the opposite of Hanami's. It is not about declaring humanity criminal, but about writing laws that pursue harm whoever commits it: the corporation that dumps, the State that authorizes, the industry that profits. Recognizing nature as a victim with rights does not require denying them to people. Hanami's lesson is that ecological indignation, without the brake of justice and proportion, can end up producing exactly the kind of massive, indiscriminate harm it meant to prevent.
Three key takeaways
- Hanami, the special-grade curse from Jujutsu Kaisen born of human fear of environmental harm, embodies green criminology (Lynch, South, White) inverted: for it, humans are the criminals against nature and their extermination an act of justice.
- The theory changes the question from «what is crime?» to «what causes harm?» and singles out corporate and state ecocide —almost always legal— as the great invisible crime. Hanami takes that true diagnosis and pushes it to the monstrous conclusion of eco-extremism.
- To explain is not to excuse. That environmental harm is real does not legitimize total violence, and that Hanami is a horror does not discredit the environmental cause. Green justice wants laws that pursue harm with precision, not revenge against the species.
Sources · further reading
- Lynch, M. J. (1990). «The Greening of Criminology: A Perspective on the 1990s». The Critical Criminologist, 2(3).
- White, R. (2008). Crimes Against Nature: Environmental Criminology and Ecological Justice. Willan.
- South, N. & Beirne, P. (eds.) (2006). Green Criminology. Ashgate.
- Higgins, P. (2010). Eradicating Ecocide. Shepheard-Walwyn.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Hanami?
Hanami es un villano de Jujutsu Kaisen, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. It was born from the fear humans feel at the damage they inflict on the earth.
¿Por qué Hanami se convierte en villano?
Hanami, the special-grade curse from Jujutsu Kaisen, and green criminology: when environmental harm reads as the real crime and nature «responds» by exterminating those who kill it.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Hanami?
El caso de Hanami se analiza desde la Criminología verde. Green criminology (Lynch, South, White) shifted the question from «what is crime?» to «what causes harm?», and singled out ecocide —almost always legal— as the greatest crime of all. Hanami, the special-grade curse from Jujutsu Kaisen born of human fear toward the destruction of nature, completely inverts the frame: for it, humans are the criminals against the earth, and their extermination an act of planetary defense. It is the eco-extremist fantasy taken to the limit: a legitimate environmental cause turned into an alibi for total violence.
