The Haitani brothers are introduced with a figure that sounds like urban legend: they took over Roppongi as kids. Ran, the elder, is the visible half of the pair—tall, long-haired, theatrical, smiling even while using the collapsible baton he is associated with. Rindo is the other half. In Tokyo Revengers they appear as a unit: they join Tenjiku together, fight together, cover each other, and on the rare occasions they are seen apart the impression is that something is missing. That inseparability is what makes Ran a textbook case, and not from a psychiatric textbook. In a series full of enormous gangs, hierarchies and initiation ceremonies, the Haitani brothers prove that learning to offend requires none of it. One other person who matters to you, and to whom you matter, will do. For Edwin Sutherland's differential association, that is precisely the minimum—and sufficient—size of a school of crime.
// The theoryCrime is learned, and learned with people you love
Edwin Sutherland formulated differential association in 1939 and gave it final shape in the fourth edition of Principles of Criminology (1947), as a list of nine propositions. The first is the most provocative for being simple: criminal behaviour is learned. Not inherited, not invented, not sprung from a defect. The second adds that it is learned in interaction with other persons, through a process of communication. And the third holds the heart of the theory: that communication occurs principally within intimate personal groups. Not in newspapers, not at the cinema, not in neighborhood statistics: among people you are bonded to. The fourth proposition expands what is transmitted, and this is where the theory parts company with any mechanical notion of imitation: what is learned includes the techniques—sometimes complicated, sometimes very simple—but also the specific direction of motives, drives, rationalisations and attitudes. That is: not only how to do it, but why to do it, when it is fine to do it, and what to tell yourself afterwards.
The explanatory core arrives in the sixth proposition: a person becomes delinquent through an excess of definitions favorable to violating the law over definitions unfavourable to it. We all receive both. What decides is not the presence of bad company but the balance, and that balance is weighted by four variables Sutherland enumerated precisely: frequency, duration, priority—the earlier in life, the heavier—and intensity, meaning the prestige of and emotional bond with the source. Here one sees why two brothers can suffice. A brother scores maximum on all four: he is there every day, he has been there from the beginning, he does not leave, and what he says matters more than what anyone else says. Sutherland closed the list with a warning the hurried reader tends to skip: criminal behavior expresses the same needs and values as non-criminal behavior, so it cannot be explained by them. Wanting money, respect or belonging explains nothing—honest people want them too. What explains is the learned repertoire for obtaining them.
Favourable definitions: the excuses are taught too
What separates differential association from a simple "bad company" story is the notion of a definition. A definition is neither a technique nor an order: it is a way of framing an act that makes it acceptable. "Round here that's how it's done." "He was asking for it." "If we don't, somebody else will." "Nobody really gets hurt." Sutherland held that such phrases are transmitted as naturally as a procedure, and that they are more decisive than it—because a technique without a favorable definition goes unused, and a favorable definition finds its technique. In the Haitani case, what the brothers learned from each other was not only how to fight: it was the whole frame in which fighting for Roppongi at fourteen is an admirable biography rather than a problem. And one detail completes the mechanism: between two people, every favorable definition is emitted and received at once. Ran does not merely have a brother who teaches him; he has a brother who confirms him. That loop of mutual ratification is why criminal pairs are so stable and so hard to pull out of the trade: each is, for the other, permanent proof that he is not mad.
// The subjectThe visible half of a unit of two
Ran embodies the elegant end of the pair: the one who talks, who performs, who smiles while negotiating and while striking. Rindo is quieter and more explosive. They function as a single offender with two bodies and two registers, and that division of roles is not cosmetic—it is the natural outcome of a shared apprenticeship that specialized over time. When they join Tenjiku as Heavenly Kings, they do not arrive as recruits to be trained: they arrive with the trade complete, with prestige earned earlier and elsewhere, and that grants them an autonomy inside the gang that others lack. They obey neither out of loyalty nor fear: they cooperate while it suits them, because their primary unit is not Tenjiku but the pair. Therein lies the most useful criminological reading of the character. What the series presents as professional coldness is, in Sutherland's terms, the effect of an intimate group that was never replaced: no later gang can compete on frequency, duration, priority and intensity with the brother who has been there since before the gang existed. Which is why Ran does not break when Tenjiku falls. His school is still standing.
Ran Haitani
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// The flawThe channel is not the agent
Differential association has an enormous virtue—it dismantles the offender-as-biological-anomaly and replaces it with an ordinary learning process—and a flaw that surfaces the moment it is used as a defense. Saying "he learned it from his brother" describes the channel through which the favorable definitions arrived. It does not describe the person who accepted them, repeated them, improved on them and collected on others for years. Sutherland was explicit in the proposition most often misquoted: the learning of criminal behavior involves all the mechanisms involved in any other learning. That is, learning to offend resembles learning a trade, not catching a disease. And nobody would tell a carpenter his father owns the authorship of his furniture. There is also a technical problem later research has stressed and which should not be hidden: the theory struggles with the direction of causation. Do we offend because we associate with offenders, or associate with offenders because we already offended? Ronald Akers reformulated the model as social learning (1966, with Burgess), adding reinforcement and punishment to account for that dynamic. In Ran's case, with a brother present from the start, priority resolves much of the problem—there was no "before" without Rindo—. But that makes the explanation more complete, not the responsibility smaller.
Understanding the school is not absolving the pupil
Ran matters because he displays the commonest and least spectacular mechanism in real crime: it is learned, and learned from someone close. No founding trauma, no ideology, no pathology. Two boys and a great many hours. That banality is exactly what makes the theory so useful and so easy to convert into an alibi. Useful, because it points at where to intervene: if crime is transmitted in intimate groups, policies that only stiffen sentences never touch the channel, while programs that build alternative bonds do. Easy to convert into an alibi, because "he didn't choose his brother" sounds reasonable—and is—and from there it slides toward "so he chose nothing", which is not. KRIMINIS holds the distinction. Reconstructing how Ran came to consider normal what he did is criminology's job. Concluding from it that Roppongi's victims were somehow fewer is not. Learning explains the available repertoire. The choice of when to use it, on whom, and how far, still belongs to whoever made it—brother or no brother.
Three key takeaways
- Ran Haitani embodies differential association (Sutherland, 1939/1947): crime is learned in intimate personal groups, and the duo with his brother Rindo is the smallest possible unit—two people suffice to transmit techniques, motives, rationalizations and attitudes.
- A brother scores maximum on Sutherland's four variables: frequency, duration, priority and intensity. That is why no later gang replaces the pair, and why Ran retains autonomy inside Tenjiku: his primary group was never the gang.
- The flaw: describing the channel does not dissolve the agent. Learning to offend resembles learning a trade, not catching a disease—and nobody would deny a carpenter authorship of his furniture because his father taught him.
Sources · further reading
- Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of Criminology (4th ed.). J. B. Lippincott.
- Sutherland, E. H. (1939). Principles of Criminology (3rd ed.). J. B. Lippincott.
- Burgess, R. L. & Akers, R. L. (1966). “A Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory of Criminal Behavior”. Social Problems, 14(2), 128–147.
- Matsueda, R. L. (1988). “The Current State of Differential Association Theory”. Crime & Delinquency, 34(3), 277–306.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Ran Haitani?
Ran Haitani is a villain from Tokyo Revengers, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He is always smiling.
Why does Ran Haitani become a villain?
Ran Haitani and differential association (Sutherland, 1939): the elder of the Roppongi brothers did not learn to offend on the street or in a large gang. The smallest intimate group there is was enough.
Which criminological theory explains Ran Haitani?
Ran Haitani's case is analysed through Differential association. Edwin Sutherland's differential association (1939) holds that criminal behavior is learned, and learned in interaction within intimate personal groups: not only techniques, but also motives, drives, rationalizations and attitudes. A person offends when definitions favorable to violating the law exceed the unfavourable ones. Ran Haitani—elder of the Roppongi brothers and one of Tenjiku's Four Heavenly Kings in Tokyo Revengers—is that mechanism reduced to its minimum unit: two brothers who taught each other the trade and ratified one another for years. The flaw is precise: describing the channel through which something was learned does not dissolve the one who learned it—Sutherland insisted that learning is not being pushed.
