Law

Law in hanyo town is seen by the Survivors as a system for poisoning justice and making it subservient to the money system. Hanyo justice is designed to control groups of people while hanyo reward (that is money) is designed to control individuals.

The hanyo theory of justice

Hanyo justice exists to ration revenge. Revenge is a type of winning, and therefore it must be denied to victims and losers. The law system does this by defining only certain types of wrongdoers as punishable, that is, they are defined as the kind of victim it is okay to hurt. Small crimes and their perpetrators are treated as a threat to society, while large crimes set precedents and powerful criminals make laws. This is became both hanyo law and hanyo money originate from the first crime: the turning of weapons of the hunt on the defenceless producers of food and babies, the destroying of their protectors and nurturers and the penning of the weak and the young into corrals where they have to produce food and babies on command, or suffer punishment.

Once this crime had been carried out, the holders of weapons had to remake all of society and culture to justify their action. They also had to find a less violent way to share out the loot. They did this by issuing tokens that entitled their holders to a share in the gains of the original theft. This was the origin of money. Money was backed up by weapons, because anyone who tried to claim loot without having the required token was offered violence. In later times, such people were defined as thieves and punished by the law. Their worthiness to share in the loot did not depend on whether they had in fact created any equivalent value and thus deserved a share: they could only acquire the share if they had the right token of privilege. The law therefore existed to enforce the rules of the masters, who were the original thieves.

Because hanyo society is organised around the idea of winning, the legal system is organised like a combat tournament. People pay representatives to fight it out for them, and the best, most ruthless and cleverest champion wins. However, this 'winning' does the victim no good since hanyobait society is free to go on punishing the victim by shaming them if they so chose: all the 'victory' did was (perhaps) squeeze some money out of the wrongdoer and give a tiny cut to the victim (most of it going to the champion), Mostly the victim was meant to console herself with the idea that bad things might possibly be happening to the wrongdoer as he passed through the legal system. Or not. Since the legal system was not allowed to concern itself with any behaviour not predefined as punishable, the wrongdoer, once he was out of the system, could come back and punish the victim is many creative ways, without fear of social shaming or condemnation. The system left no space for remorse, since winners are not obliged to feel remorse.