We discover ourselves in the atmosphere (fudo).
(Watsuji, Reference Watsuji1961, p. 8)The public realm … gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak.
(Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, p. 52)Just as the city is the movement between polis and metropolis, itself always elsewhere, in the same way the subject is the movement between an excluded social presence and an included social absence, an instigator of an illusion of origin and destination, and of control and freedom that remains necessary for the movement between law and the city.
(Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and FitzGerald, Reference Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and FitzGerald2008, p. 451)Language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country.
(Sebald, Reference Sebald2001, pp. 174–175)1. Wayfinding
This essay reconstructs the atmospheric place-making of law and criminal justice in Japanese cities. In so doing, it takes place in a conversation about law and geography in urban Asia.
For more than a decade, we have paused to listen and look, intermittently observe, and, more importantly, immerse ourselves in conversations and in what Jacobs called the “intricate sidewalk ballet” (Jacobs, Reference Jacobs1961, p. 50). We have spent time in courts and with judges, police agencies, and gatherings of defence lawyers and academics; we have interviewed legal practitioners, prosecutors, judges, social workers, architects, film makers, and police officers. We have walked the streets of legal precincts in Utsonomiya, Kyoto, Kanazawa, Osaka, and Tokyo, pen and camera in hand, attentive to their rhythms and topographies, accumulating an archive of photographs. At eye level, we have observed the comings and goings outside police boxes, or more properly koban, taking notes, and composing videos. We have observed cases and courtroom proceedings, as well as protests and placards outside court buildings and the Parliament. The conduct of our research gives texture to the essay and its reconstruction of atmospheric place-making in law and criminal justice. As Bille and Schwabe write: “our approach to the atmospheric city has necessarily been both flexible and open-ended, while retaining an ethnographically founded methodological rigour and has resulted in a mix of what might be called ethnography and textual analysis” (Bille and Schwabe, Reference Bille and Schwabe2023, p. 21; see also Adey, Reference Adey2013; Edensor, Reference Edensor2012).
Our reconstruction of atmospheric place-making is carried in several parts. The essay moves across the theoretical thresholds of topography and atmosphere, before returning to the inscription of two exemplary places of law and criminal justice. It is layered throughout by atmospheric writing.
Part 2, the next section, develops the theoretical orientations through which law and geography are engaged in this essay. “Law and geography” is an open field and a well-established one. Two particular formulations are important: “nomospheres” and “lawscapes.” Their renewal of a jurisprudence of space has been welcome. A different set of encounters emerges, however, when we attend to the urban places of law and criminal justice. These are interdisciplinary and involve the study of law and humanities, jurisprudence and criminology, philosophy, and architecture and urban studies. This interdisciplinary exercise is developed further in Part 2.1 before moving to our understanding of atmospheres in Part 2.2. Our two central considerations are topography and atmosphere.
Topography is a set of practices, the writing (graphein) of place (topos). The topographical character of this essay takes shape in a variety of ways, akin to Malpas’s approach. He writes that topography “is evident in its deployment of place as a theoretical or even ‘methodological’ concept, in the appearance of place as a focus of inquiry, and in the interconnecting of a variety of different disciplinary ‘locations’ within a single compass.” (Malpas, Reference Malpas2018, p. 213). Where the topic is law, however, a jurisprudence of place necessarily emphasises that topography is a jurisdictional exercise of place-making, a matter of nomos more than normativity.
Atmospheres are, by definition, hard to pin down. Imagine moving through air. As Chryssostalis emphasises, “nomos is an air and also is of the air” (Chryssostalis, Reference Chryssostalis and Mandic2023, p. 46). Atmospheres matter within criminal justice. Three dimensions will be emphasised here. First, atmospheres embody an energy of movement signified through the affective charges that generate an ambience or mood in specific places. Consider a courtroom, a ceremonial basement, or an underground train corridor. Second, they are composed of the elements of light and air, sounds, surfaces, and signifiers, which pattern or condition an environment on the streets and throughout a city. Third, they generate the liminality of particular places of passage and transitions, such as a gateway as law moves from palace to the street or a corner forecourt as a legal official sweeps in a curve from the street to the Japan Federation of Bar Associations (JFBA) building.
Topography and atmospheres are specific jurisdictional exercises through which a public, authoritative institutions, and officials are brought into relation with each other. Legal relations of criminal justice are assembled. “The public realm,” Arendt remarked, “gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak” (Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, p. 52). Meetings are missed, meanings misrecognised, and places overwritten; law is rarely, if ever, on time. As a jurisdictional exercise, topography is both a mode of knowledge production and a material practice of inscription of place.
In Parts 3 and 4, we assemble two exemplary places: a legal precinct and koban. The notion of a precinct is somewhat familiar by now, but studies of legal precincts as a specific mode of legal practice are rare. A legal precinct is a place where the ordinary institutions of law and criminal justice are co-located; but, more importantly, it is where they gather together as a distinct legal enterprise of public administration. A koban is perhaps less familiar but is commonly known in Japan as an institution of community policing, and in English as a “police box.” There are more than eleven thousand in contemporary Japan.
We start with the legal precinct as an exercise in place-making. We have studied many legal precincts, but the precinct in Kasumigaseki, Tokyo, is our example in Part 3 of this essay. This assemblage is enframed by the grid plan of modern urban planning. However, the prefectural governance of public administration does not map onto, and is not fully identified with, the jurisdictions of courts, policing, and prosecution. Atmospheres are more place-based and specific. The energies and folds of this legal precinct emerge with topographic atmospheres. Prosecutors are busy, but their busyness is worn lightly, loudhailers announce a miscarriage of justice, and a public moves through an affective assemblage from train station to footpath to forecourt to courtroom.
Our second example takes place in Part 4. We turn to koban. The koban is an institution of community policing and law enforcement. It is small. In order to unfold koban atmospheres, we reconstruct our circumstantial narratives into three koban scenes: an officer standing watch, an empty police box, and a scene of policing the crowd. Singular police boxes open out onto an extensive network of koban so that the atmospheres of koban are intensive and public practices.
In synoptic terms, this particular essay engages with law and geography in urban Asia by working through the topographies and atmospheres of law and criminal justice in Japan, which is a final comment by way of orientation or wayfinding. The essay form used here proceeds by folding together writing about atmospheres of place with atmospheric writing. It is at the least a genre, not uncommon in studies of law and humanities as well as the criminology of atmospheres. It has enabled us to emphasise the specificities of place-making as a material practice and an embodied atmosphere. The writing does not follow a straight line (but lines are never straight; Ingold, Reference Ingold2016a, pp. 4, 156–174). Its textual figure is neither a differentiation, nor is it an identity; rather, it traces the folds of a draped robe and the intricate energies of its weave. Atmosphere enfolds writing and place as a jurisdictional exercise.
2. Setting out
Moving through laws and criminal justice in an urban environment, signposts are often helpful for those familiar with a place or topic, as well as for those less familiar or perhaps approaching the subject matter for the first time. They help cross thresholds but require time and generosity for doors to remain open. This part of the essay sets out a number of the theoretical thresholds to be traversed. They concern the encounters required in interdisciplinary scholarship, social relations between law and geography, which then open onto topography as a jurisdictional exercise. Places are written small in law, in lower case.
2.1 Encounters at the crossroads
Urban environments make possible an encounter with others, keeping them apart and stopping them from falling over each other. Of course, meetings are missed, signs are misread, and places are overwritten. This is an important dimension of what it means to form a public, to become related as members of a public realm, a common world (Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, p. 52; Arendt, Reference Arendt1973, pp. 11–38; Younès, Reference Younès2024, p. 4).Footnote 1 As in cities, so with scholarship: ideas come together, topple over, fall apart, and move on; disciplines of knowledge speak at cross-purposes; and the production of public knowledge remains a promise. Here, we suggest that, despite the rise of the social and the predicaments and weirdness that emerge, an encounter between a geography of mapped spaces and a topography of lived places has much to contribute to our understanding of the public lives of law and criminal justice.
To begin, it can be noted that the names given to urban spaces (“court building,” “workplace,” “house,” “shop,” and so on) depend upon and derive from the administrative ordering of the contemporary state through a relational geography of territorial units. In Japan, we see this at all levels of land use: from the large-scale prefectural system to the small-scale divisions of chōme (districts) and even smaller building lots and plots. Indeed, this administrative and territorial ordering is set up by law, in the form of legislation that emerged in the late 19th century and settled in soon after World War II. The legal precinct and koban that we write about nestle within this geography, and one of its effects is that their boundaries within urban environments appear socially defined and geographically identifiable.
2.1.1 Social spaces
The study of law and geography has, in a similar move, tended to build its argument by reference to the social spaces and normative orders that govern particular practices of law and criminal justice. In the turning of law towards geography, social spaces shape the practical worlds of law in all their generality. In this respect, Delaney’s neologism of the nomosphere—with its situations, settings, scapes, projects, and techniques—has been helpful in teasing out various illustrations of legal worlds (nomoi) made through the relationality of social spaces (Delaney, Reference Delaney2010; see also Delaney, Reference Delaney2004). As Delaney remarked, “Law is scrupulous in patrolling its own borders. It is, as I said, imperialistic” (Delaney, Reference Delaney, Holder and Harrison2003, p. 70; Sarat et al., Reference Sarat, Douglas, Umphrey, Sarat, Douglas and Umphrey2006, pp. 1–7). For others, the social is more problematic, whether instrumentalist or constitutive, since the turn to spatiality does not overcome the division between law and space. In his argument for “spatial justice,” Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos puts forward the lawscape, a neologism which names “the way the ontological tautology between law and space unfolds as difference” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Reference Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos2015, p. 4). More definitively,
in the lawscape neither law nor space vanish completely. The lawscape remains both law and space at all times, thus allowing a manoeuvring space for the various bodies that constitute the lawscape to affect it in various ways. Yet at points, the lawscape dissimulates its presence for as long as it can … At these points, the lawscape becomes atmosphere. (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Reference Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos2015, p. 4)
The division between law and space is overcome, in this argument, by the autopoiesis of social systems. Law underlies and gives form to the environment; the injustice of it all is that the social landscape of space is composed generally of law. Nomos is constructed by the spaces of the social, while environments are formed by the spatial logics of law and its social materialities. The spatial logics of both Delaney and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos provide their analyses with a point of purchase for the sociological and philosophical critique of law and its relational geographies. Such a critique tends to resolve the dilemmas into a spatial logic and a socio-legal ordering rather than a nomos. There is little jurisdictional thinking beyond the sovereignty of law in such a normative account. The coexistence of human and socialised subjects tends to be narrated as borders, boundaries, and straight lines of territorial sovereignties.
2.1.2 Topographies: places in lower case
For our part, when encounters take place in public, we notice places rather than social spaces, folds and flows rather than lines and spheres, and the materiality of inscription rather than the forms and world-making of socio-legal spatiality. To that end, we have attended to a topography of lawful places. We will spend some time with theoretical accounts of the tangible intangibilities of atmospheres, but we begin with the notion that, in contrast to the conventions of thinking about law and geography, nomos is neither a world nor a sphere, but is jurisdictional (Cover, Reference Cover1983). “Place is not, as might be thought, a matter of legally bound physical space,” Dorsett and McVeigh argue, “but rather it is the work of legal ordering and relationship. Jurisdictional practices create legal places through engaging with the material world” (Dorsett and McVeigh, Reference Dorsett and McVeigh2012, p. 98). Jurisdictional practices are topographic, an inscription of place in the same way that a hoe digs, cuts into, and prepares soil and ground for cultivation. What is cultivated is place, and the effect is an affective atmosphere through which public encounters of law and criminal justice signify and become embodied.
In our ethnographies in Japanese cities, it became apparent that neither legal precincts nor koban are identical or coterminous with the taxonomies and boundaries of an administratively organised geography. As Malpas writes,
The starting-point for philosophical reflection is not a world of empty space or inhuman objects, nor a realm of purely subjective sensation or ‘sense-data’. Instead it is a world given in relation to activity; an objective world grasped from a subjective viewpoint, a world of other persons and a world in which we find ourselves. (Malpas, Reference Malpas2018, p. 214)
Noticing and attending to something other than geography and urban planning is made possible by thinking through topography, which here can be understood as the interpretive relation of human subject to place. It is through topography that places become atmospheres, and, as Malpas characterises this relation,
There are obvious ways, of course, in which the environment determines our activities and our thoughts… but there are other much less straightforward and perhaps more pervasive ways in which our relation to landscape and environment is indeed one of our own affectivity as much as of our ability to effect. (Malpas, Reference Malpas2018, p. 1) (emphasis in original)
As practised in this essay, topography is a material inscription of place (see also Rush, Reference Rush2022). It names both a place and a modality of writing, either speech or documentary. Topics are places both for public speech and argument and for the ordering of public speech itself.Footnote 2 Even the knowledge of law is topographic. What needs to be emphasised here is that the inscription of place is both an apparatus and places, both disposition (or dispositif) and the matter of places. Topography, from Greek topos + graphein, is both a place or environment (such as the Greek agora or the Roman forum) and the topics of argument in classical rhetoric (such as the commonplaces that remain in contemporary discourse). Like rhetoric, places are not inert; they are forces of attraction, instances of attachment, and a “holding environment” (Winnicott, Reference Winnicott1953; Winnicott, Reference Winnicott1971; Honig, Reference Honig2017, pp. 37–57) for the cultivation of value and sometimes meaning. Places form relations—articulating nodes in a mesh, plugging in some elements, and unplugging others. The relations we are concerned with are not so much social and spatialised (Lefebvre, Reference Lefebvre1991; Butler, Reference Butler2012) as the material relations of law and criminal justice. To be precise, they are jurisdictional practices. The relations of public lives to criminal justice and law are patterned by places or scenes and their atmospheres. In a more contemporary idiom, atmospheric places bring together people and form a public; in so doing, they make an assemblage:
a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogenous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns—different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descents, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. (Deleuze and Parnet, Reference Deleuze and Parnet1987, p. 69)Footnote 3
In the next section, we turn to the building of a theoretical frame for the reflections on atmospheres that have animated our writing about the urban places of criminal justice and law. In doing so, we draw out what it might mean to say that legal precincts and koban are not merely nestled within a social geography but also enfolded within an assemblage comprising the topographies of places and their atmospheres. We then turn, in Parts 3 and 4, to the modes of existence through which a legal precinct and koban are inscribed.
2.2 Moving through air: lawful atmospheres
Chryssostalis begins her account of nomos with the common-sense narrative—“famously of the earth: related to it, bound to it, rooted in it” (Chryssostalis, Reference Chryssostalis and Mandic2023, p. 34)—but then works upwards from the earth through music and via the ear to a proposal “that nomos is an air and also is of the air” (Chryssostalis, Reference Chryssostalis and Mandic2023, p. 46). Her argument is located with specific reference to hearing as a mode of sensing; our investigation of air moves from its sensory conduit and towards jurisdictional practices of atmosphere so that we might make sense of law and its urban topographies. It should not come as a surprise that Kasumigaseki—the site, gateway, and name of the legal precinct we inscribe here—carries a reference to the mist and haze through which law passes as it moves from palace to precinct.
Atmosphere has received considerable scholarly attention in various fields of cultural production.Footnote 4 According to Anderson, “atmospheres are spatially discharged affective qualities that are autonomous from the bodies that they emerge from, enable, and perish with” (Anderson, Reference Anderson2009, p. 80). In these formulations, atmosphere is something that can be entered into, felt, and left behind. While we agree that atmospheres can be spatial and are affective, nevertheless, in our account, the relation of bodies with atmosphere is not so much autonomous as constitutive and associative. Neither subjective nor objective, an atmosphere’s mode of existence—to use a phrase that Latour has made popular from phenomenology—is both conduct and feeling. Bille and Simonsen characterise it as a “felt space,” where it is “not only something humans feel, …but something humans do” (Bille and Simonsen, Reference Bille and Simonsen2019, p. 10). For Zhang, atmospheres “are real and really there, but their very mode of existence can seem to be a kind of unreality. And although they are intangible and cannot be localized, they are also readily sensible and can impinge on us with great force…” (Zhang, Reference Zhang2018, p. 124). Atmospheres are activated but hard to pin down. “Nomos is an air,” writes Chryssostalis (Chryssostalis, Reference Chryssostalis and Mandic2023, p. 46). Within and between the apparatus of topography, atmosphere and place and writing are assembled and enfolded.
Within criminal justice, atmospheres matter: the formality of a courtroom, the positioning of the camera in a police interrogation room, and the lack of air conditioning in a sweltering prison. Atmospheres emerge from the coming together of countless elements, and they work on the bodies of the subjects that are interpolated, hailed, and interleaved. It is not only air that is conditioned in modernity, but bodies and subjects in place and in time. Attending to atmospheres means noticing the ways through which elements, such as sounds, smells, lighting, bodies and gestures, inclinations and colour, clothing, scale, position, and more, are generative of a scene or place. Atmospheres are not only produced by their elements, but, in turn, they also produce values and meanings.
Perhaps such an atmosphere works as air does, wafting in and out, or changing rapidly in its temperature or force. Adey says: “this air is more than just air but constitutive of the material affective relations that animate the experience of the city in a way which we might say is atmospheric” (Adey, Reference Adey2013, p. 293, emphasis in original). Ito compares the feel of some places in Japan to “a mist” (in Sand, Reference Sand2013, p. 31) and Connolly speaks of “infusion” (in Zhang, Reference Zhang2018, p. 131). Or is atmosphere an invisible liquid that fills up a space or an event such that we are immersed in it (Ingold, Reference Ingold2016b, p. 12)?
Such accounts communicate a sense of the permeability of the human subject within an environment and the ways atmosphere connects and traverses human and non-human elements of a topography and its scenes (echoing Spitzer, Reference Spitzer1942). Since the human subject takes place within the world through atmospheres, any hard and fast sense of separation between humans and atmospheres is misplaced: atmospheres are both produced by the subjects within them, along with all the other elements that comprise them, and productive, engendering experiences that act in the human subject and then become an ongoing part of the atmosphere.
In fact, the significance of atmosphere is carried in and expressed through language. How could it not be? The Japanese term used most commonly to connote the English sense of atmosphere, ambience, or mood, is funiki (雰囲気), a compound of fu denoting wind but also an emotionally charged topology of place (Marinucci, Reference Marinucci, Griffero and Tedeschini2019, p. 104); and iki denoting breath or air. It denotes surrounding air, connecting an affectively charged place to the haze or mist of air around it. Tetsuo Wasuji’s philosophical and anthropological study of atmosphere as fudo associates it with climate and the formation of character and nation (Watsuji, Reference Watsuji1961; Johnson Reference Johnson2018). We discover ourselves in the climate, he writes. In the same way, the ideograms for Kasumigaseki (霞が関) connote a dwelling place of gates and haze. Whereas these connotations concern the surrounds, they are also signifiers of liminality, in between times and places. In short, funiki or atmosphere carries and signifies in different registers of language: in one, the energy of movement signified through the affects and emotions that charge an ambience or mood; in another, the elements of air and its associated movements and conditions (mist, haze, and wind); and in yet another, the liminality of a place: the doors and gates and other places of passage and transition through which the elements move.
All this is signified by funiki, and yet there is a recurrent inclination that tries and fails to pin down, to define, atmosphere. This is of a piece with a substantial strand of scholarship that defers to the notion’s spherical quality: it surrounds, it englobes, and it is a world. But we have been more concerned to notice the liminal rather than the global, the places and times in between with their mists and haze. These characterise the dwelling places of precincts and kobans. We have spent time studying atmospheres by “taking seriously their slipperiness, their porosity, and the haziness with which they often seem to present themselves to us” (Bille and Schwabe, Reference Bille and Schwabe2023, p. 21). Over the years, we have spent researching in prisons and courtrooms, police boxes, prosecution offices, judge’s chambers, and legal precincts, with defence lawyers in bar associations, on screens, and in streets, and we have been chasing a constantly disappearing haze. “Being intangible and always changing, atmospheres are by definition difficult (if not impossible) to grasp in any straightforward way; they tend to resist attempts to pin them down” (Bille and Schwabe, Reference Bille and Schwabe2023, p. 20), but sometimes we managed to catch hold of an atmosphere’s material traces.
In the next two parts of this essay, rather than definitively pin down in a general way what the atmospheres of law and criminal justice comprise, we perform an inscriptive practice that carries something of the atmospheric sensorium within which legal precincts and koban take place. Here, taking place denotes how place is made topographical and thus atmospheric. Our task is to write in the registers of metaphor and metonymy, condensation, and displacement: writing as if we can, together, move through these atmospheres of law and criminal justice, across and through the topographies in which they sit and dwell. It is time to put on hold the environment of method and framework, and to pause at some exemplary legal places.
3. Precincts or a meeting place of law
A legal precinct gathers people and places together: streets intersect, buildings line up, guards stand watching, inhabitants or officials move in the usual rituals of arrival and departure, and pedestrians flow through according to various vectors, sometimes orbiting a corner and swirling across a forecourt. There are lines and points, ten to sen (Matsumoto, Reference Matsumoto2022). In the space of appearance, the common world of the precinct “prevents us from falling into each other” (Arendt, Reference Arendt1958, p. 52), although the various publics often stumble, meetings are missed, meanings misrecognised, and trains may not arrive on time let alone early. It is time to pause in Kasumigaseki and to reconstruct the precinct assembled there—not only its grid plan but also its energies or atmospheres.
3.1 Law according to a plan
A first and common-sense approach associates a legal precinct with governance or municipal administration. The association is carried by etymology and the discourses of urban planning. Kanku is the Japanese term for precinct and is composed of the ideograms for “ward” (ku) and “management” (kan). We could translate precinct as an administrative district, as the translation also carries its English etymology on its sleeve. Precinct in English is from the Latin praecingere (to encircle), from prae (before) and cingere (gird). It emphasises a ward system of administration rather than the Greek democratic and Roman republican ideations of the agora and the forum (Carter, Reference Carter2013). Wards are a territorial unit of administration and political representation through Japanese urban planning.
Such a spatial geography is, however, a jurisdictional practice that remains thoroughly juridical. The prefectural and ward system in its contemporary articulation is named and created by legislation, specifically the Local Autonomy Act 1947. Prefectures importantly are defined by the statute as general public bodies. There is also a taxonomy—the todōfuken system—which combines the names of four different types of prefecture, namely to, do, fu, and ken.Footnote 5 They are typically associated with urban and regional instantiations of local government and public administration. Prefectures are then distributed into wards (ku) and thence into districts (chōme). For example, the Tokyo prefecture has 23 wards, but Tokyo’s wards are designated as “special” wards: they were formally wards (ku) but now have a municipal status in their own right, with mayoral and assembly elections and jurisdiction.
In sum, the prefectural system classifies national and local governance according to administrative and territorial units. The law courts, for example, are located in relation to this territorial layering of governance and administration. Each prefecture has at least one court of first instance (the District Court or chiho saibansho). The appellate courts (High Courts or koto saibansho) are located in major metropolitan centres: Tokyo, Nagoya, Sendai, Sapporo, Takamatsu, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Osaka. Kyoto doesn’t have a High Court. The Supreme Court of Japan is in Kasumigaseki chōme in the Chiyoda Special Ward of the Tokyo Prefecture. Clearly, though, a legal precinct doesn’t precisely reproduce and map onto the geographical taxonomy of prefectural administration.
Kasumigaseki is the locus classicus of a legal precinct in Japan. It is in Tokyo. At ground level, it is a flat expanse, three blocks long and three wide, inscribed by a grid of streets and boulevards. It’s rectangular, but the north-western corner is cut by the curve of the moat that surrounds the Imperial Palace. The grid is bisected, split down the middle, by Sakurada-dori, a six-lane street on a north–south axis running south from the Imperial Palace in the north. The western part of the precinct is occupied by the parliamentary district, the gardens and building of the Diet, and further west following the curve of the imperial moat is the Supreme Court of Japan. One side of Sakurada-dori is occupied by national and metropolitan policing agencies, as well as government ministries and commissions. On the other side are the Ministry of Justice and Tokyo’s District and High Court building. On the block behind these major court and ministerial buildings of law and criminal justice are the tall, shiny towers of the Prosecutor Offices, some more courts, and the JFBA with its sweeping corner forecourt and internal access to Kasumigaseki train station. All these latter buildings look out over and are bordered by Hibiya Park. This rectangular park is composed of thickly treed gardens, golden gingko, ponds, paths, a concert arena, tennis courts, and public hall. It has been the site of public protests. At the north-eastern intersection is a koban and remnants of castle ramparts. North of Hibiya Park is the Imperial Palace, and to the south is a block of corporate buildings. To the east is the Tokyo Imperial Hotel and then the Ginza district. The administrative and governmental ordering puts Kasumigaseki in a set of geographical relations. In this version of the precinct, law takes place according to a plan, and specifically a grid plan. Indeed, it has been planned to within an inch of its human life. As a judge said to us, smiling, Kasumigaseki is “the city that doesn’t sleep” (眠らない街).
There is, of course, a legal history to the placement of Kasumigaseki and its geographical relations. It’s a history caught up in the currents that brought about the Emperor’s move from Kyoto to Tokyo, and the subsequent opening up of Japan to the west by the Meiji Restoration. The plan for the legal precinct emerges in the aftermath. The initial plan, formulated in 1880, determined that Kasumigaseki will be placed in its current location alongside the Imperial Palace. Eight years later, the same year when the new Imperial Palace was completed, the 1888 Tokyo City Improvement Ordinance designated Kasumigaseki as the site for government offices (Sorensen, Reference Sorensen2002, pp. 60–84). The placement can be understood as an offshoot of Meiji restoration debates about modernization and civilization at the end of the 19th and into the 20th centuries. Japanese governance was much vexed by the symbolic representation of its new imperial and governmental authority as well as by the lessons from Europe—Britain, France, Germany, London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—for the modernization of the authority of architecture and urban planning. As Chun summarises, the government “sought to invent a new topological order for the imperial capital by adding to its centre a monumental boulevard, public buildings, and a parliamentary building, a park and a central train station connecting the northern and southern parts of the city” (Chun, Reference Chun2021, pp. 177−178). This order remains legible in the blueprint by Ende and Bockmann, a Berlin architectural firm; Bockmann came to refer to his blueprint as Forum Japanum. This “forum” is today’s legal precinct with its concentration of government offices, the use of boulevards or avenues to frame and separate districts, the location of the National Diet, a law court, and a Ministry of Justice. Hibiya Park was included as a public park that limned the precinct. In brief, the grid plan, the spatial layout, of Kasumigaseki remains to this day despite the subsequent transformations in urban planning over the past 70 years. In fact, these transformations and the controversies around public engagement with redevelopment projects in Tokyo are enframed by legal reforms (Ilunga et al., Reference Ilunga, Almazán, Shikida and Zuna2024). Yet strikingly, the redevelopment projects have encircled Kasumigaseki, leaving it untouched. Something about the plan of a precinct is baked into the topography of this precinct.
3.2 Law as an assemblage
So many boundaries, so many points and lines (ten to sen). But, as remarked earlier, topographies do not observe the lines drawn by planners and bureaucrats. The legal precinct slips past the edges of its territory and flows towards other places, carrying with it the images and atmospheres of law. In Tokyo, when you are visiting the High Court to attend a court case, you exit Kasumigaseki train station coming along corridors from underground to surface.
There are many ways to approach Kasumigaseki, as well as many exits. Law often arrives early, sometimes an accessory after the fact. Some approaches are more freighted than others. Kasumigaseki was one of the stations in the sarin gas attack by Aum Shinrikyo in March 1995, an event that has remained prominent in public culture, not least because of the trials and death penalties meted out by the Kasumigaseki courts. Another approach to the precinct brings you up within the JFBA building on the south-east corner of the precinct. Yet another will take you onto Sakurada-dori, the boulevard that bisects the precinct.
Before you emerge from underground platforms, in any event, you’re already aware that you are in a legal precinct. Directional signs indicate which exit will take you to which building, agency, ministry, commission, and court: Exit A1, as a sign indicates, will get you to Government Offices No. 6 Red Brick Building, Tokyo Summary Court (Criminal), Kasumigaseki 1 Intersection, and Sakurada-dori Ave. Another sign indicates Elevator to Surface for the Tokyo District Court. The signs don’t mention it, but the Tokyo High Court is in the same building as the District Court.
Pedestrians surface. Nobody breaks their stride, propelled by the energies of the underground corridors and stairs up to the street. They’re a funnel out onto the footpath, where groups form a linear crowd along the pavement. Tripods line up with the media. You encounter a civil society network, the Katsumata Defence Association. There’s an air of possibility. A loudhailer’s megaphone adds to the febrile atmosphere. The Association is passing out a pamphlet, about the Katsumata case, although not everybody takes one, indifferent or simply going to work. In black pants and a white shirt, a man twists at the hip to look back on the gauntlet you have passed through. The case is a very public one: advocacy groups, media and their journalists both televisual and print, academics, filmmakers, and the curious have gathered on the streets and footpaths and congregate in the forecourt of the High Court. The case you are about to witness is a koso appeal—in this instance, a review and retrial of the facts, law, and decision in the lower court trial by the Utsonomiya District Court (Tochiji Prefecture). The District Court had found Katsumata guilty of the murder and sexual assault of a young girl. The pamphlet reproduces a letter from the accused: “I’m going to write my feelings. I did not kill [victim’s name redacted].” After three and a half years in detention, his “head is becoming strange.” He can’t think clearly; he is perhaps delusional. The script is like that of a child. His mother has repeatedly and publicly protested his innocence. The atmosphere is not uncommon at public hearings in miscarriage of justice cases.
The current Tokyo High Court building is on the former site of the Supreme Court of Japan, the place where the Japanum Forum had planned a superior court for the legal precinct. Like many District and High Courts, its forecourt is separated from the street by a raised hedge behind which lies a semicircular courtyard, and looming over the entrance is the flat face of a tall building and its shadow. Public access to this koso appeal is by lottery. On the first day, some 120 people turned up. They gather in the forecourt, all of us waiting in small vibrant pools swelling and dissipating with those joining and departing. The chatter is amplified by the enclosed space, spilling out onto Sakurada-dori. Opening time approaches. The pools are corralled into four parallel lines, near the entrance door of the building, and under the awning a rope separates them from the officials administering the lottery. You have already obtained a numbered ticket. Ordinarily, tickets are placed in a barrel and then drawn out and entered on a sheet of paper for reading to the assembled lines. This time, it’s a computer randomly selecting the numbers. Officials in uniform confabulate, and their movements come to a halt. Quiet. The numbers are called out. Only 67 people will be permitted to enter. Pause. Your number has come up but not that of the person you are with. Those in the know and who miss out have backup plans: journalists from Asahi Shimbun or Mainichi will normally have more than enough tickets, and today they share one with your companion. Having made the cut, you proceed within. Inside, the building enfolds—like a fur-lined winter glove or a flowing voluminous robe—the atmosphere of the outside, forecourt, lottery, pavement, underground corridors, and platforms and human congregations. You are passing through an affective assemblage produced within a legal topography.
3.3 Atmospheres of a legal precinct
The energies and folds of topographies and assemblages might be readily overlooked in favour of the boundedness of geographical relations in social spaces. The spatial geography, the administrative and territorial governance, of urban environments places a legal precinct in a set of legal and political relationships. These gridded relationships can obscure or render illegible the topography of place—and its atmospheres. However, the built environment of a legal precinct does not quite replicate or precisely map onto the territorial administration of urban planning. Rather, the urban environment of the prefectural system of urban planning is cross-hatched with various layering of court, prosecutorial, and policing administrations. Legal precincts may extend across wards (ku) and districts (chōme) as well as city (shi) and prefecture. Courts with varying jurisdictions perform their work in the same physical buildings, which may also contain Prosecutorial Review Commissions.Footnote 6 Sometimes, a city has a High Court, and sometimes it doesn’t. In any event, many of the court buildings are withdrawn from the public places by a spatial narrative of separation. Atmospheres however generate a narrative of attachment: place-making enfolds legal precincts within an atmosphere.
In a sense, the legal precinct in Kasumigaseki generates and carries an atmosphere of authority. In large part, this is a reality effect of the grid plan. For good measure, it is also called the “government sector.” Nevertheless, it is possible to find and notice other affective atmospheres of this precinct, in the forecourts, sounds, signs, and gestures that embody the jurisdictional practices of place-making. We now turn our attention to these atmospheres.
The jurist and criminologist walking the street, no less than the pedestrians and officials, are constantly hailed by surfaces and signifiers in the process of becoming signs. Pinned sheets of paper curl to the point of unreadability, even when they are behind a pane of glass. So, there are many public clues to what’s going on inside. A woman posts more notices; she doesn’t speak, struggling with gusts of wind. At the other end of the precinct, a student stands checking out the list of successful examinees for the most recent Bar exam. The student’s friend takes a photograph. Mugshots, pasted on the walls of a koban, in colour or black and white, even faded photocopies, are accompanied by short narratives as if the photos were illegible: criminal wanted. Area Guides at crossroads tell you where you are, although they are rarely read and no one is lost: everybody walks with purpose. Guards stand at entrances that punctuate the tall buildings and their flat faces. Sometimes a pedestrian stumbles across an invisible line outside the buildings of the public prosecutors’ office; a guard races out to accost you with crossed-arms, a forbidding gesture. Prosecutors emerge from vans with boxes, on the run, passing into their tall building in a delicate balance of motion (Rosen, Reference Rosen2023): they are busy, the scene says, busy but not too hurried or burdened by the contents of the boxes. What we are doing is important, but we are not weighed down by our duty. Is this a dissimulation of the lawscape, as suggested by Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Reference Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos2015, p. 4)? The lawscape here isn’t heavy. The atmosphere of prosecutorial significance, it seems, must be worn lightly.
Our sound recordings capture the tread of passers-by, vehicles, and the call and response of traffic lights sounding when to hurry and when to go. There’s assonance and discordance to the echolalia: successive and simultaneous notes, in dark and light tones. But speaking on the streets is rare here, and audio is not permitted inside the courts: the silence of some courts, on some days, at specific times, is palpable, as if the signifier had already become a sign. In Kasumigaseki, civil society is announced by a loudhailer attached to a speaker. One of them keeps up a running address, to no one in particular, without pause or surcease, looking straight ahead. The soundwaves cross the street and bounce off the curved entrance of the government building opposite, only to return. It adds volume to the atmosphere, not so much spherical as an envelope or fold within which this public is immersed. Around the corner, as the flow moves from footpath to train station steps, bodies trip a recording urging you to take care. This one will take you down to the station beneath the JFBA building. In the elongated and underground corridors of the train station, walls are lined with posters. Many include Pipo-kun, an image character or masukotto identifying the police (Rush and Young, Reference Rush, Young, Pearson, Giddens and Tranter2018). Stop! Assaulting is a crime. We need your will to eradicate terrorism. Keep left here. No smoking on the street. 7 m above sea level. In the ceremonial basement of the Supreme Court of Japan, Isamu Noguchi’s six fountains recall the imperial and shogunate moats still legible nearby and turn the watery topography of law inside out. In other Japanese cities, a legal precinct will be riverine and riparian (Rush and Young, Reference Rush and Youngforthcoming). At the top of this Supreme Court’s solid granite blocks, a skylight opens the outside for its Grand Chamber. Sometimes you can take notes by the refracted light from the ceiling. On a good day, you can read the room.
It takes time to walk the places of this legal precinct and its criminal justice. Marches will often proceed along the footpaths, pausing at intersections and waiting for gatherings of two and three to catch up before moving forward. Rhythm is discontinuous: no one keeps on walking without pause; the syncope is a condition of walking. As the anthropology of lines teaches us (Ingold, Reference Ingold2016a), direction is anything but straight. Although police will corral marches and rallies into single lines, the lines pulse with a stop–start motion that expands and contracts their energies, a mopped brow, a placard raised, and an umbrella shared. Even for the solitary pedestrian, even when there is a grid plan, your approach needs to be repeated, reversed, and crossed. Walking immerses you in atmospheres of image and place, no matter how prosaic. Like walking, atmospheres work through both axes of language: condensation and displacement. They can never be pinned down, like the curling notice on a noticeboard. Atmosphere embodies the way law lives with the public; the precinct embodies the way the public lives with law.
4. Koban or assembling the scene of community policing
Koban have been called “the smallest unit of Japanese policing” (Yoshida and Leishman, Reference Yoshida, Leishman, Jones and Newburn2006, p. 232) and “the heart of police activities in Japan” (National Police Agency, 2018, p. 13). They are indeed small, often only about six or seven metres in height. They usually contain two offices on the ground floor, one of which is used for interactions with members of the public, and a sleeping area and bathroom upstairs. Their petite size, relative to the taller buildings of corporate downtown areas as well as the tall towers and flat rectangles of law courts and prosecutorial skyscrapers, has become part of their architectural character. In 2005, there were some 14,000 across Japan, but this has decreased in recent years. Now, there are approximately 1,100 koban in metropolitan Tokyo, and around 11,000 in total across Japan.
Koban are complex assemblages that signify both “community policing” and “the enforcement of law” (Young, Reference Young2022). The signifying work of koban is produced by their architecture and design, location, aesthetics, and history. In short, the pluralised signifying practices of koban combine to create a range of topographies of law and criminal justice within the cities and towns of Japan. As with the legal precinct, these topographies can be read and understood as atmospheric. In what follows, we include a sense of the scene at each location, in which material elements of place, signifying practices and devices, and spatial location flow into an atmospheric topography of community and policing.
4.1 The koban in the crowd
Is the area at the front of Shibuya Station ever not crowded? It exemplifies the image of Tokyo as populous. The forecourt seems perpetually to be filled with a roiling mass of people, buildings, flyovers, and cars. Five or six multi-lane streets converge here. At any one moment you can see and hear gigantic video billboards, neon signage, the vertical neon layers of multi-storey zakkyo buildings, pop bands advertising from small trucks that play their music through loudspeakers, and tourists shrieking their excitement as they cross the road at the famous “scramble” intersection.
The forecourt sits atop the vast station, in which dozens of train lines intersect. People flow through the train station from the time of the first early morning train at 5 a.m. until the station closes at midnight. In the early hours, people are still wandering around: salarymen who have missed their last trains, and friends or revellers who’ve decided to pull an all-nighter. Shibuya is never empty. At its busiest times, the crowd fills and overflows the place.
The koban is built into the structure of Shibuya Station and faces out into the mass of people assembling and reassembling. There are always officers outside; sometimes as many as eight or ten. While they stand in a line across the doorway, the blinds on the windows and the door itself remain closed off. The line of officers also constitutes a defensive positioning of bodies. The line sometimes moves forward as a group and sometimes breaks into smaller clusters. They shuttle outwards and backwards in small sallies and forays; but the koban is the space to which they belong, and the crowd is the problem to be managed. Policing here takes a conventional, or even classical, form: a spatialised practice of law enforcement as social defence.
4.2 “I am on patrol”
In the koban near the Tokyo Tower in Minato-ku, a sign taped inside the front window announces “I am on patrol” (パトロール中です). The notice explains the absence of officers; no time for their return is given, but its reassurance works through confirming that absence is temporary. An officer will return, and it’s just not certain when. The koban is located amid greenery and parks, with a steady flow of people: guests tramping up and down the steep street to the nearby hotel, and people coming to the temple to pray. Perhaps the somewhat defensive tone of the sign’s plea—“I am on patrol!”—is needed in a society where koban officers are criticised for laziness and “empty koban” are represented as a problem (Kawamura and Shirakawa, Reference Kawamura, Shirakawa and Wilkinson2008, p. 165).
When officers are not visible to the public, does the koban disappear? To imagine it disappears would conflate officer and building. A koban exists both when its human subjects are visible and when they are elsewhere (in the back office, on patrol or responding to a call). “I am on patrol”, said the sign. Its literal referent is the human subject of the police officer, and the sign itself is a marker of reassurance policing in action.
The koban’s non-human elements persist. Being on patrol emphasises that within built forms there is usually air: we call this a room. The air between the walls acts as an interval in its “builtness,” but it is still a dwelling place. The absence of one component in the koban’s atmosphere of reassurance does not fracture the affective connection with members of the public by disregarding the role of the police boxes themselves, as “spatialised intensities” (Anderson, Reference Anderson2009, p. 80). Patrol routes are the tactic by which intensities become extensive, thinning the mesh and widening the net, in the topographies of an affective atmosphere. The koban building contains ma, an interval or void as a component of the koban’s atmosphere, at the same time that the koban atmosphere travels with the officer.
4.3 Nothing is happening
A man in uniform stands with a stiff back, facing away from the small koban at the Konan East exit of Shinagawa station. Inside, another man sits behind a desk. There is scarcely anyone else in sight. One passer-by has paused nearby to take a call on his mobile phone. Another is walking through, backpack mounted on his shoulders.
In this moment, the scene recalls the koban’s central role in the history of community policing in Japan. In the middle of the 19th century, after a prolonged period in which Japan had only limited contact with other nations, the advent of the Meiji period involved a move away from a shogunate-based social system to one with a legal system adopted from French and German legal codes. A consolidated police force replaced the squads of warriors loyal to local shogun. Police boxes were installed in cities and towns, small structures where police officers would “stand watch” (ritsuban). These places were called kobanshō (a compound word, meaning “a place where police stand duty”). They were originally called hashutsujō (meaning “despatch station”); however, the strength of the association between the original gesture of standing watch and the place at which such watching occurred meant that hashutsujō became colloquially known as koban. In the 1990s, this term was painted onto the little buildings and was adopted as their formal name. The advent of the koban was synonymous with watching and with community policing. An officer might perform the act of “standing watch,” while sitting at the desk in the koban’s front room, but some officers still undertake it by standing outside the police box, holding the keijo (a long wooden stick, similar to a broom handle in shape and approximately three to four feet in length), just as police officers performed the watch in the late 19th century.
At Shinagawa, then, the man stands, stiffly staring outwards from the building. What is important is not only the gesture performed—standing watch—but also the atmosphere that encompasses his posture, the koban building, the neighbourhood, his gaze, the individuals walking past, and the buildings nearby. He faces outwards into a semicircular open plaza. It is formed of paving stones arranged in a curved pattern evoking the raked gravel of a Zen temple. He is poised at the boundary edge where the semi-circle’s curves adjoin the rectangular forecourt of the koban. Standing here, he belongs both to the building that is called koban and to the Shinagawa neighbourhood that opens up beyond the plaza.Footnote 7 Standing watch is thus a performance not just of looking but also of belonging.
Time passes. The officer moves inside the little building. His withdrawal into the koban’s interior does not mean he is no longer part of the neighbourhood’s community. Koban are designed to be permeable; their architecture signifies accessibility to the citizens of the city. Design features include sliding doors that are easy to open, transparent glass windows, ground-level entrances with no security obstacles, and small rooms. Such architectural features contrast with district police stations, which often have opaque windows, multi-level buildings, a lack of signage, and securitised entrances. Citizens respond to the koban’s invitation by knocking on the door, sliding it open, asking questions, seeking directions, handing in lost property, and reporting crimes. Sometimes they enter the front office; at other times they hover at the threshold. Each such action by a citizen renews the semiotic message: the building is open to you.
Officers also shuttle in and out of the koban. From the interior front office, one officer notices a woman with a white-capped stick approaching the station; he leaves the koban to assist her and, her hand on his shoulder, walks her to the station entrance. Another officer heaps a woman’s shopping bags onto the back of his familiar white bicycle, and heads off with her, perhaps to her apartment. The atmosphere that is being sensed—by us, by the officers, by the residents and visitors to the area, and by the citizens—is a visible, tangible, sensible atmosphere of the intensive mode of law enforcement that we call “community policing”.
In and out, to and from: the koban sits static, constant, attentive, and waiting, a point to and from which officers and citizens move. Think, now, of any single koban as not just a point within a neighbourhood but also as a knot in a net or mesh of more than a thousand koban spread across Tokyo. Each one creates an atmosphere of place in its immediate locale; together, koban creates an atmospheric mesh that permeates the city, an extensive urban atmosphere of law enforcement. It is easy to focus on the apparent insignificance of any “event” at a single koban: it’s just a small building in a district, usually with not much going on. But koban are simultaneously single and plural. At Shinagawa, although the officers move inside the building or go out on patrol, so that it seems “nothing” is happening in the vicinity of the koban, no one steps in to ask for directions or to hand in a found wallet. The officers do not move from the desk. People walk past without stopping, not giving it a passing glance. Nothing is happening; thanks to the building’s architecture, it is almost not even there. The koban is an almost nothing, and yet… part of its spatialised intensity relates to how its singular presence creates a continuous potentiality, a vibrating point within the plural extensiveness of koban as network. When we consider the koban as a signifying assemblage, an atmosphere can be sensed. Specific physical elements may vary, but in their intensive and extensive topographies, koban are productive of, and produced within, a deeply embedded and steadfastly constant affective atmosphere of community policing as law enforcement.
5. Leaving places
The genre of this article has been an essay and an experiment. It was initially developed for a workshop at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, on the theme of “Law and Geography in Urban Asia.”Footnote 8 It was presented in the final workshop panel. Importantly, the panel took up three ways of writing, and specifically writing about spaces and places: cartography, calligraphy, and topography. This essay has addressed topography both as a mode of knowledge production and as a material practice of inscription of place. It has done so by engaging with theories of place-making and atmospheres, in particular places of law and criminal justice: legal precincts and koban.
The practical knowledge of place-making is specific. As a genre of legal writing, it is a jurisdictional practice that puts places into legal relation even before they are social and normative. The study of law and geography, no matter how generally formulated, is inscribed in precise places and times. Debate is often simply a conflict of genre; many genres have addressed relations of law and geography. There has been no critique of them here; at most they have been returned to their own social and normative genres. This has left space for their own devices, while we have argued that topography is a practice appropriate to and embodied in law and its criminal justice. One strand of our essay then has been a contribution to the recent renewal of a jurisprudence of the places of law and criminal justice.
Our specific places have been twofold: a legal precinct and koban. Koban are distinctive of criminal justice in Japan but have rarely been addressed in terms of their place-making. The study of legal precincts is rare in both the English- and Japanese-speaking worlds. In fact, when we first began working with the topic in Japan, we were told that there was no legal precinct in Tokyo. However, engagement with numerous studies of urban planning put paid to such a bold statement; scholars of urban planning have treated Kasumigaseki in Tokyo as an archetype of a precinct if not a legal precinct. In this essay, we have however downplayed the significance of urban planning—not because it is unimportant but in order to focus on the material practices and knowledge production of law and criminal justice. In this respect, the grid-like formation of Kasumigaseki is only one mode of existence of the precinct and has little to say about law. It is however evident that the legal precinct in Kasumigaseki, Tokyo, is a form of place-making by law, a jurisdictional practice that brings the public, institutions, and officials together in precise and embodied ways. As you will have read, precincts and koban are meeting places of law, characterised by the energies and folds of topography. This has been the second strand of analysis that we have taken up and layered throughout the essay.
A third strand concerned a twofold approach to atmosphere. A place embodies a sensibility and affective energies. In contrast to place, which is often pinned down by a grid plan or Global Positioning System coordinates, atmospheres are mobile, fluid, and affective. We did not wish to pin them down; nevertheless, they can be held to the place-making of precincts and koban. Atmospheres are important to the study of legal place-making because, to put it succinctly, they are how the public lives with law and law lives with places. This has been one approach in this essay: an argument about atmosphere. Yet we have also interleaved the pages of the essay with atmospheric writing about koban and precinct, and law and criminal justice. This approach has responded to a necessity that joins atmosphere to topography. No matter how prosaic the narration and signification of places, they are productive of a knowledge that both includes and excludes, and notices and ignores. That knowledge, however, is not so much social or scientific. Nor is it “evidence-based,” to use the contemporary idiom of policy institutions. It is not general but circumstantial, detailed, and precise. As such, it retains or holds onto the material traces of a conduct of legal life that can be worked through. Law and criminal justice are vibrant, or they are nothing. Atmospheric writing is attuned to the condensations and displacements, metaphors and metonymies, through which knowledge is produced and undone as a material practice of inscription. The form of interdisciplinary study offered in this essay, of topography and atmospheres in specific places, renews legal relations between law and geography. The meeting places of law and criminal justice have been assembled.
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