In the middle of the invasion of the Soul Society, several members of the Twelfth Division surround Uryū Ishida and Orihime Inoue, two of the kids who have come to rescue Rukia. They do not know they are carrying bombs. Their captain, Mayuri Kurotsuchi, sets them off to catch the intruders, and when Orihime’s shield protects the pair from the blast, he takes a collector’s interest in her. He offers to make her his test subject on terms he swears he has never offered anyone: he would limit her to eight doses of drugs a day and five hours of machine experiments a day, and do his best to avoid any modification that might kill her (Bleach, chapters 120 and 121; episode 43 of the anime). Mayuri is captain of the Twelfth Division of the Gotei 13 and president of the Shinigami Research and Development Institute: the Soul Society’s great scientist, his face painted black and white, and one of the cruelest characters in the series. And he is not a villain by allegiance. He fights with the Shinigami, on the heroes’ side, to the very end. (Warning: this case file reveals events from the final arc, including Nemu’s death.)
// The theoryConscience has a price too
Classical rational choice pictured the offender weighing what he stands to gain against the risk of being caught and punished. In 1990, Harold Grasmick and Robert Bursik proposed adding two punishments that courts do not impose: shame, the punishment we inflict on ourselves when we break our own norms, and embarrassment, the loss of respect from the people who matter to us. In 1996, Raymond Paternoster and Sally Simpson carried the idea into corporate crime. They gave hypothetical cases to business students and executives and found that moral inhibitions weighed heavily: people who thought the act was wrong paid little attention to the threat of sanctions, because they never even considered it. The model does not abandon rational choice; it extends it. And it leaves a troubling prediction. If for most people the brake is conscience, anyone whose conscience term is zero will depend entirely on outside brakes. Jack Katz (1988) added the other side: transgression also carries a pleasure of its own, on top of the payoff.
An equation with one term at zero
Mayuri’s equation has an enormous benefit, knowledge, and almost always a second one that legitimizes it, the defense of the Soul Society. In the cost column, other people’s lives count as material, guilt never shows up and outside sanctions are neutralized by his position: he is a captain, and his results are useful. When the moral cost is zero and the institution is also running the numbers, the math always comes out in favor of the experiment.
// The subjectEverything is a sample
The fight with Uryū shows how he does the math. Mayuri wounds Uryū with his sword, Ashisogi Jizō, and also his own lieutenant, Nemu, who was holding Uryū, and then stomps on her when she asks for medical help. He made her himself, he explains; she is his “daughter,” and no one is going to tell him how to treat her. Then, standing over a paralyzed Uryū, he boasts that he has finished studying the Quincy: he drilled into their skulls while they were alive, made them burn their own children and vivisected them until they were pulp. Among them was Sōken Ishida, Uryū’s grandfather and teacher. Mayuri shows him a photograph of what was left and tells him it was his doing that the Shinigami arrived too late to save him (chapter 123, episode 43). Years later, in Hueco Mundo, he faces Szayelaporro Granz, the Eighth Espada and a fellow scientist (chapters 299 to 306, episodes 196 to 200). He arrives with fake organs, because he studied his rival’s technique in advance through bacteria he had planted in Uryū during their first fight. When Szayelaporro is reborn inside Nemu’s body, he discovers that Mayuri had loaded it with drugs: one of them sharpens his senses so much that a second lasts him a century, and Mayuri drives his sword into his heart very slowly while explaining why a scientist must never call himself perfect.
The final arc takes the math to another scale. When the Quincy begin erasing Hollows and the balance of souls between the worlds threatens to break, Mayuri mobilizes his division to eliminate 28,000 souls in the Rukongai, the outer districts of the Soul Society. Captain-Commander Yamamoto asks why he did not request permission, which he would have granted, and Mayuri answers that he could not take responsibility for whatever got worse while he waited (chapter 489; episode 369, the third of Thousand-Year Blood War). Facing the Quincy Giselle Gewelle, he drugs the captains she has turned into zombies and puts them to work fighting for him (chapters 594 to 596, episode 389). Against Pernida Parnkgjas, the left arm of the Soul King, he paralyzes Kenpachi Zaraki with his sword to stop him, then presents that paralysis to the enemy as a moving sacrifice that demands, in return, that it hand itself over as a test subject (chapters 636 and 637, episode 400). Nemu dies in that fight, protecting him until she is torn apart. Mayuri uses what is left of her body as bait against Pernida’s clones, rescues her brain and walks off with it in his hand (chapters 642 to 644, episode 402).
Mayuri Kurotsuchi
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// The crackThe day the math cost him something
Bleach tests the theory at exactly the moment the calculation finally costs Mayuri something. Nemu saves him from an arrow by cutting off her own arm, and he scolds her: she does not have his permission to die of her own accord, and it would be incredibly difficult to create and raise another one like her (chapter 640). When she falls, a vision of Szayelaporro appears to tell him this is simply a chance to create something better, and Mayuri admits that a half-baked scientist has made him see his own hubris (chapter 643). Is that a moral cost, guilt surfacing for the first time, or the loss of decades of research capital? The theory cannot tell the difference, and that is its known crack: turning ethics into arithmetic describes someone with no brakes well, but it explains poorly what happens when affection enters the ledger disguised as an investment.
The most uncomfortable part, though, is not Mayuri but who lets him work. A hundred and ten years earlier he was locked up in the Maggots’ Nest, the prison for Shinigami deemed dangerous, and he was the only inmate kept chained in a cell; Kisuke Urahara got him out to make him vice-president of his newly founded institute (chapter -105). And at the end of the fight with Pernida, Hitsugaya, whom he drugged while he screamed, steps out of his pod freed from zombification alongside Rangiku and thanks him (chapter 644). The Gotei 13 runs its own cost-benefit analysis on Mayuri: his crimes are the price of his results. Explaining Mayuri is not excusing him, or those who use him. A harm that pays off for the winning side is still a harm.
Knowing gives no right
From 1932 to 1972, the United States Public Health Service studied the course of untreated syphilis in hundreds of Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who were left untreated even after penicillin had become the standard cure. The researchers were not villains by allegiance: they worked for an institution that accepted the price. Research ethics, since the Nuremberg Code of 1947, exists because Mayuri’s question, how much is what we learn worth, always finds someone willing to pay for it with other people’s lives. Informed consent is a cost imposed from outside precisely because no one can trust the researcher’s conscience to impose it.
Three key ideas
- The moral cost-benefit model (Grasmick and Bursik, 1990; Paternoster and Simpson, 1996) adds shame and guilt to the calculus of crime; for most people that brake is enough, and anyone who has it at zero depends only on outside brakes.
- Mayuri Kurotsuchi, captain of the Twelfth Division, experiments on Quincy, enemies, allies and Nemu, his artificial daughter; in the final arc he eliminates 28,000 souls in the Rukongai, and the Captain-Commander tells him he would have given permission.
- The crack: the theory cannot tell whether what Mayuri feels when Nemu dies is guilt or the loss of an investment, and his case shows that the institution is also calculating, and that keeping him pays off.
Sources · further reading
- Grasmick, H. G. and Bursik, R. J. (1990). “Conscience, Significant Others, and Rational Choice: Extending the Deterrence Model”. Law & Society Review, 24(3), 837-861.
- Paternoster, R. and Simpson, S. (1996). “Sanction Threats and Appeals to Morality: Testing a Rational Choice Model of Corporate Crime”. Law & Society Review, 30(3), 549-583.
- Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. Basic Books.
- Simpson, S. S. (2002). Corporate Crime, Law, and Social Control. Cambridge University Press.
- Kubo, T. (2001-2016). Bleach. Shueisha, Weekly Shōnen Jump.
- Studio Pierrot (2004-2012; 2022-). Bleach and Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War (animated series). TV Tokyo.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Mayuri Kurotsuchi?
Mayuri Kurotsuchi (“Capitán de la Duodécima División”) is a villain from Bleach, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He blows up his own men to catch two kids and offers one of them a “special” deal as a test subject.
Why does Mayuri Kurotsuchi (Captain of the Twelfth Division) become a villain?
Mayuri Kurotsuchi, of Bleach, and moral cost-benefit: the captain of the Twelfth Division weighs every life against what he can learn from it. And he does the math on the good guys’ side, which signs off on it.
Which criminological theory explains Mayuri Kurotsuchi?
Mayuri Kurotsuchi's case is analysed through Moral cost-benefit. The moral cost-benefit model (Grasmick and Bursik, 1990; Paternoster and Simpson, 1996) adds to the calculus of crime the costs that courts do not impose: shame, guilt, the loss of other people’s respect. Mayuri Kurotsuchi, captain of the Twelfth Division of the Gotei 13 and president of the Shinigami Research and Development Institute in Bleach (Tite Kubo), is what is left when that term is worth zero: a scientist who turns Quincy, enemies, allies and his own artificial daughter, Nemu, into lab material, and who does it in the service of the heroes’ side.
