Turbo Granny (ターボババア) opens Dandadan in episode one as a textbook urban legend: a tunnel in Shono City, a hunched old woman who runs at 100 km/h, and a curse that strips whoever enters her territory of their reproductive organs. Momo Ayase goes in to prove ghosts do not exist, Ken Takakura—Okarun—goes in to prove aliens do, and by the end of the episode the legend has stopped being a story. But Dandadan builds its supernatural on a premise that makes it unusually useful for criminology: in this world a yokai's power is a function of what people believe about it. The rumor is not a report on the monster. The rumor is the monster's power supply. That is labeling theory with the mechanism made visible.
// The theoryDeviance is not in the act
Labelling theory—associated above all with Howard S. Becker and his Outsiders (1963), with roots in Frank Tannenbaum and Edwin Lemert— makes a claim that still unsettles people: deviance is not a quality of the act a person commits, but a consequence of the application of rules and sanctions by others. Becker's formulation is blunt: social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and then applying those rules to particular people and labeling them outsiders. The deviant, he writes, is one to whom that label has successfully been applied. Two consequences follow. The first is that the label is distributed unevenly: the same act draws a name for some people and a shrug for others, and who gets named depends on who has the power to name. The second is Lemert's secondary deviance: once the label sticks, it reorganises the person's life around it. Doors close, the old identity stops being available, and the behavior the label announced becomes the most accessible one. Tannenbaum called this the dramatisation of evil: the community defines, identifies and makes self-conscious the very traits it complains of, and the person becomes the thing described.
The self-fulfilling prophecy
The engine of labeling theory is the self-fulfilling prophecy, named by Robert K. Merton in 1948: a definition of a situation that is false at the outset provokes behavior that makes it true, and the prophet then points to the outcome as proof he was right all along. Applied to crime, the sequence is depressingly ordinary. A boy is named a troublemaker; teachers watch him more closely; he is caught at things others get away with; his record grows; the schools that would take him stop taking him; the only company left is other boys with records. Years later the file reads like a prediction fulfilled, and nobody can point to the moment the description became a cause. Turbo Granny makes the mechanism literal instead of statistical. She does not become fast because people say she is fast in the sense of a metaphor: in Dandadan, saying it is what makes it so. The legend specifies the speed, the territory and the mutilation, and the yokai is issued exactly those powers. Strip the tunnel and the rumor away and what you have left is a very small, very foul-mouthed old woman in a lucky-cat doll.
// The subjectThe story nobody told
What makes Turbo Granny a case rather than an illustration is the biography underneath the label. Seiko Ayase, Momo's grandmother and the series' working medium, supplies it almost in passing: Turbo Granny used to seek out the spirits of girls who had died in terrible circumstances, in order to comfort them. That is why she was in that tunnel at all—she fused with the earthbound spirit trapped there—and it is the single fact about her that the legend omits entirely. The rumor had room for her speed, for her territory and for what she took from trespassers. It had no room for what she was doing there. Everything else about her follows from that omission. She is cruel, filthy-mouthed, boastful, and she cheats at tag by miscounting; she is also the one who, once the fight is over, tells Momo how to save Okarun. The character does not change between those two scenes. The label changes. Once her power is sealed and her consciousness is stuffed into a maneki-neko—a lucky cat, the most domestic object in Japan—she stops being the thing in the tunnel and becomes a rude little advisor who lives on a shelf, and she behaves accordingly. Nothing about her nature was corrected. She was given a different place to stand.
Turbo Granny
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// The crackThe label explains the career, not the act
Labelling theory has a failure mode, and it is worth naming because Dandadan flirts with it. Pushed too far, the theory dissolves the offense into the reaction: if deviance is only what gets labeled, then the harm itself seems to evaporate and the victim disappears from the account. That is not what Becker claimed and it is not defensible here. Turbo Granny genuinely mutilated people who walked into that tunnel. The men who entered did not suffer a social construction; they suffered an assault, and no amount of reasoning about rumor-as-power-supply gives them their bodies back. The honest version of the theory is narrower and stronger: the label rarely explains the first act, but it does a great deal to explain the career. Something put her in that tunnel; the legend is what kept her there, hardened the role, and made any other way of being unavailable to her for as long as people kept telling the story.
The second edge is the one Dandadan actually gets right, and it belongs to John Braithwaite. In Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989) he distinguishes stigmatizing shaming, which marks the person as permanently bad and pushes them towards those who share the mark, from reintegrative shaming, which condemns the act while keeping the door to the community open. Momo does not forgive Turbo Granny and does not pretend the curse did not happen; she beats her, takes her power, and then—crucially—offers her a deal and a place to live. That is reintegration, not absolution. It is also why the character works afterwards: a villain who is defeated and expelled stays a villain, and a villain who is defeated and given somewhere to stand can become something else. The point of tracing how a rumor built a monster is not to hand her an alibi for the tunnel, but to notice that the same machinery that built her could have been pointed somewhere else—and, in the end, was.
What we do when we name someone
Turbo Granny matters because the mechanism she dramatizes is entirely real and entirely mundane. Criminology has spent sixty years documenting the costs of the label: the effect of a criminal record on employment long after the sentence is served; the way early contact with the justice system predicts later contact better than the original offense does; the gap between who commits an act and who ends up named for it. None of that requires a tunnel or a curse. It requires only that we go on telling a story about someone until it is the only story available to them, and then treat the result as confirmation. The practical question labeling theory asks is not is this person bad? but what is this name going to do to them? — and whether, once we have condemned what they did, we have left them anywhere to go afterwards. Momo leaves her somewhere to go. That is the whole difference between the thing in the tunnel and the thing on the shelf.
Three key ideas
- Labelling theory (Becker, Lemert, Tannenbaum) holds that deviance is not a property of the act but the result of a rule being applied to a particular person by those with the power to name. Turbo Granny literalises it: in Dandadan a yokai's power is whatever the rumor says it is.
- The legend of the Shono tunnel specified the speed, the territory and the mutilation, and erased the fact that she went to dead girls to comfort them. The self-fulfilling prophecy does not only predict behavior; it deletes the biography that would have contradicted it.
- The crack: the label explains the career, not the first act, and the people she mutilated were really hurt. What Momo does is Braithwaite's reintegrative shaming—defeat her, refuse to excuse her, and still leave her somewhere to stand.
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. Columbia University Press.
- Merton, R. K. (1948). "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy". The Antioch Review, 8(2), 193-210.
- Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Cambridge University Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Turbo Granny?
Turbo Granny (“la Turbo Abuela”) is a villain from Dandadan, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. Before she was Turbo Granny she was the yokai who went to the spirits of girls who had died horribly, to keep them company.
Why does Turbo Granny become a villain?
Turbo Granny and labeling theory: an urban legend decides that a monster running at sixty miles an hour lives in that tunnel, and the monster duly appears. What the label erased was the one who comforted the ghosts of dead girls.
Which criminological theory explains Turbo Granny?
Turbo Granny's case is analysed through Labeling. Labelling theory holds that deviance is not a property of an act but the outcome of someone with the power to name declaring it deviant. Turbo Granny is the limit case: in Dandadan a yokai's power depends literally on what people say about it. The urban legend of the Shono tunnel does not describe a monster, it manufactures one—and erases the being who comforted the ghosts of dead girls along the way. When Momo pulls her out of the tunnel and puts her in a maneki-neko, she is not punishing her: she is changing the label, and with it the behavior.
