Hiromi Higuruma, a defense lawyer in Jujutsu Kaisen, does not arrive at violence out of ambition or pleasure, but out of moral exhaustion. He has spent his career seeing the same thing over and over: people whose fate was sealed before the trial: by their looks, their neighborhood, a prior record, the label someone pinned on them before they had even opened their mouth. When he finally gains power —a cursed technique that awakens in him an obsession with judging— he does not use it to reform the courts: he builds his own, with his gavel and his executioner, and begins handing down final sentences. For labeling theory, Higuruma is a fascinating case because he begins as a critic of the system that labels and ends up turned into its most extreme version: the one who no longer defends against the label, but applies it with a blade.
// The theoryDeviance lies not in the act, but in whoever names it
Labeling theory turns the classic question of criminology on its head. Instead of asking «why does this person offend?», it asks «who decides what counts as a crime and who gets pursued?». Frank Tannenbaum (1938) called it the dramatization of evil: publicly naming, judging and punishing someone ends up fixing in them the very identity it claimed to correct. Edwin Lemert distinguished between primary deviance —the isolated act the subject has not yet integrated into their identity— and secondary deviance —the kind that appears when, after being labeled and treated as deviant, the person reorganizes their life around that label. And Howard Becker, in Outsiders (1963), gave the canonical formulation: deviance is not a quality of the act, but of the social reaction to it. Becker added two decisive pieces: the moral entrepreneurs, who hold the power to create and apply the labels, and the master status, that «criminal» label that swallows every other identity —neighbor, father, worker— and takes over how the world sees the person. Higuruma knows that machinery better than anyone: he has watched it work from the defender's seat, seeing how social reaction condemned before the evidence did.
To label is an act of power
The uncomfortable lesson of labeling is that society does not merely discover criminals: in part it manufactures them by naming them. Not every harmful act is pursued, and not everyone pursued is equally harmful; what separates one from the other is the power of whoever attaches the label. Higuruma has devoted his professional life to fighting that asymmetry: to defending those who already bore the master status of «suspect» before the proceedings even began. He knows that stigma does not describe, it produces; that a prior record shuts doors to employment and housing and pushes people to reoffend; that the official label works as a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is why his disenchantment is so lucid: he is not a cynic, he is someone who understood all too well that the verdict rarely weighs the truth, and that the machinery of punishment tends to confirm the prejudice it started with. The tragedy is what he does with that knowledge.
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// The subjectThe critic who became the court
What is revealing about Higuruma is the exact shape his power takes. His technique is not a fire or a poison: it is a court. A domain in which he acts as prosecutor, jury and —when he declares guilt— executioner, with an execution blade that only appears after the sentence. It is, in fictional terms, the literal materialization of the labeling critique: the power to name someone guilty and to make that name carry irreversible consequences. Higuruma begins as the opposite of the moral entrepreneur —the defender, the one who disputes the label, the one who demands that the act weigh more than the social reaction. But his despair before a system that will not listen pushes him to the other extreme: if no one judges with truth, he will judge. And there the theory catches him without mercy: by building his own court, Higuruma does not destroy the logic of the label, he perfects it. He replaces the diffuse, prejudiced social reaction with an individual, absolute sentence, but it is still that: a verdict that decides who is «guilty» and makes them so with the blow of a gavel. The critic of stigma ends up as its ultimate moral entrepreneur.
Hiromi Higuruma
// The crackDenouncing the label does not license dealing it out
The crack with Higuruma is the one inherent to labeling pushed to its limit. The theory explains magnificently the amplification of deviance —how social reaction enlarges what it fears— but not its origin: it does not tell us why the first act was committed, nor does it justify the real harm to the victims. Higuruma falls into both temptations. First, that of believing that if the system labels badly, any personal alternative is better: but a court of one, with no guarantees, no defense, no possibility of a correctable error, is not less label, it is more, concentrated in a single hand. Second, that of turning the diagnosis into an alibi: understanding that punishment tends to confirm prejudices does not authorize dealing out death on one's own account. To explain is not to excuse. Understanding that Higuruma got there from a legitimate moral exhaustion does not erase what he does when his gavel falls: to execute without appeal is exactly the runaway power he denounced, now without even the fiction of a process.
The honest reading holds both things at once. The system Higuruma criticizes is real: the official label closes off lives, prejudice precedes the evidence, and power decides who is pursued. But the answer to labeling is not a better executioner, it is less label: proceedings with guarantees, penalties that punish the act without marking the person for life, exits that leave a door open to return. The memory that matters here is not that of the judge who believed himself justice, but that of all those —guilty or not— whom a sentence without appeal tried to reduce to a single word.
Stigma is not fought with more stigma
Higuruma matters because he embodies a very real temptation: that of someone who, sick of an unjust system, concludes that the solution is to take justice into their own hands and hand down the label themselves. Critical criminology warns of exactly the opposite. If the problem is that social reaction manufactures deviants —that the «criminal» label swallows the whole person and cuts down their real opportunities— the way out cannot be an even more absolute and irreversible label. From that came the most fertile alternatives of the last half century: restorative justice, Braithwaite's reintegrative shaming —shaming the act without stigmatizing the person for life— diversion programs and the expungement of records. All share a watchword that Higuruma, with his executioner's blade, forgot: label the act, never the person. It is not softness; it is the only thing that breaks the self-fulfilling prophecy instead of sealing it.
Three key takeaways
- Hiromi Higuruma embodies labeling theory (Becker, Lemert): deviance lies not in the act, but in the social reaction that names it. His career as a defender is a live indictment of how power labels before the evidence speaks.
- His courtroom-shaped domain materializes the critique and betrays it: the critic of stigma becomes the ultimate moral entrepreneur, a judge-executioner who deals out the «guilty» label with an absolute, irreversible sentence.
- To explain is not to excuse. Understanding the moral exhaustion he starts from does not legitimize executing without guarantees. Stigma is not answered with more stigma, but with less: process, reparation, and a door open to return.
Sources · further reading
- Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. Free Press.
- Lemert, E. M. (1951). Social Pathology. McGraw-Hill.
- Tannenbaum, F. (1938). Crime and the Community. Ginn and Company.
- Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Cambridge University Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Hiromi Higuruma?
Hiromi Higuruma es un villano de Jujutsu Kaisen, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. He spent years defending people condemned for their face, their neighborhood, or their record before they ever set foot in court.
¿Por qué Hiromi Higuruma se convierte en villano?
Hiromi Higuruma and labeling theory: how social reaction and the «guilty» label manufacture the deviant. An exhausted defender who chose to judge and execute in person.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Hiromi Higuruma?
El caso de Hiromi Higuruma se analiza desde la Etiquetamiento. Labeling theory (Tannenbaum, Lemert, Becker) holds that deviance lies not in the act but in the social reaction that names it: the «criminal» label manufactures the criminal. Hiromi Higuruma, the defense lawyer of Jujutsu Kaisen, embodies the critique of that system: sick of watching people condemned by prejudice rather than truth, he becomes a sorcerer with a domain shaped like a courtroom that judges and executes. His figure illuminates the diagnosis —power decides who gets labeled— and at the same time its crack: the one who denounces the label ends up dealing it out as judge and executioner.
