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Law and
Justice
Akiko Miyake
Seeing my title, maybe you are afraid that I will discuss a very difficult argument of law. No! Sir! Relaxation, please! I am talking about a film production of Les Miserables, which was on the show in Sannomiya last winter.
Once I enjoyed reading this novel, every word of it in translation. It was in l945, the last year of the war. Kobe was already burnt to the ground. The radio was screaming that we should all die for the Emperor. All this never stopped me reading Les Miserables. I was learning the precious lesson of humanism which the militarist education of Japan never taught us.
Yet even to a teenager, this novel seemed absurd. Jean Burjean is too good to be true, and Inspector Javel is too cruel to be human. It was a great surprise for me that this new movie production of Les Miserables made the story very convincing, for it describes Jean Burjean to be an intelligent and complex character.
Of course he was a wild thing when he stole bread for hunger for the first time. He tried to break loose from the prison in vain, increasing his wretched term repeatedly. When he was set free on parole, he found his parole paper made it impossible to be employed. So when Bishop Miliere forgave his new stealing and let him pledge to start a new life, Jean Burjean tore up the parole paper with almost cynical calm, forged quietly his new identity. He decided the law to be unjust, and chose to keep violating the law.
On the contrary, Inspector Javel,
was a simple and square man. His
duty was certainly to arrest Jean Burjean, violating the law. Years later, at a street fight of Paris, in order to
bring in a new revolution, the young revolutionaries caught Javel, a
policeman. There at the barricade, the
two men met face to face. Jean Burjean
accepted the work to execute Javel, but silently let him go.
Javel was amazed and confused for the first time. It was now Jean Burjean, a criminal, who represented justice with his
forgiveness. On the same day, the two
made the second confrontation. Jean Burjean was carrying the wounded fiance
of his adopted daughter. Javel could
arrest him, but he did not. He practiced
Jean Burjean’s justice, which is
forgiveness. But he punished himself for
not enforcing the law, by drowning himself in the river.
So it is the conflict of law and justice that is the theme of Les
Miserables. At the University of Cambridge, in different seminars, I learned that the Western Intellectuals believed
that law and justice must go together. Otherwise the whole West would collapse!
This is a dream of paradise, which the Westerners blessedly inherited from
the ancient Greeks, and which we, timid Asians, could never dared to dream.
It is true that Law and Justice are in conflict in the novel, but the author
was a revolutionay. He fascinated us
suggesting that the grand ideals of the French Revolution would certainly
realize the paradise for the whole human kind where Law and Justice come
together.
（1999年 5月10日 関西トーストマスターズクラブ 例会 スピーチ原稿 B4）
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