Sins of Kujo on Netflix says defending the guilty is the last radical act in Japanese law

Taiza Kujo does not pretend to be a good person. He describes himself, without apparent discomfort, as a good lawyer who happens to be a bad person — and the series built around him takes precisely this distinction seriously for ten episodes, refusing, at every point where the genre would normally offer resolution, to tell the audience which of those two self-assessments matters more.

This is the specific bet Sins of Kujo makes, and it is a harder bet than it looks. The defense-side legal drama has a well-worn resolution: the morally compromised lawyer is ultimately condemned by the logic of the story, the corruption is exposed, the system reasserts its authority. Better Call Saul spent six seasons building to Jimmy McGill’s confession and conviction. Training Day killed Alonzo Harris on the street he had corrupted. The genre’s formal preference is for the system’s eventual self-correction — for the reassurance that the lawyer who defends the wrong people will pay for it. Sins of Kujo, adapted from Shohei Manabe’s best-selling manga, appears to refuse this comfort. Kujo’s philosophy is not disproven. It is tested, case by case, and it survives each test intact, more troubling at the end than at the beginning.

What Manabe constructed over fifteen manga volumes — and what the Netflix adaptation directed by Nobuhiro Doi is bringing to a global audience — is a legal thriller built on a specific and documented reality. Japan’s criminal justice system operates with a conviction rate above ninety-nine percent. Defense counsel are prohibited from attending police interrogations. Suspects can be held in pre-trial detention for extended periods, under conditions that have historically produced confessions from people who did not commit the crimes they confessed to. In this system, the person who insists on providing aggressive defense to a yakuza underboss or a drug courier is not circumventing justice. They are activating the only institutional mechanism available for making the system function as it is constitutionally required to function, rather than as it has historically preferred to operate.

This is the systemic argument the series is making under cover of its case-by-case thriller mechanics. Each case — the drunk driver whose wealth complicates accountability, the nursing home employee whose abuse operated within an institution the state neither adequately funded nor adequately supervised, the gang member whose lawyer did not arrive until after the confession — is a documentary entry in a portrait of a legal system that has arranged itself to produce convictions efficiently. Kujo does not change the system. He introduces friction into it. The thriller’s question is whether friction constitutes justice, and whether justice that requires someone willing to be called a corrupt lawyer is justice at all.

Yuya Yagira, who won the Cannes Best Actor prize at fourteen for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows, carries this question in his performance with a specific gravity that the role requires. His career has been built on playing people whose moral circumstances were arranged by forces larger than themselves — the abandoned child, the police officer in a cannibal village, the young actor playing an older artist’s biography. Kujo is the first character Yagira has played who has fully chosen his own moral position and will defend it against institutional pressure, social condemnation, and the persistent doubt of the idealist partner the series places at his side. The specific thing Yagira brings to this choice is the quality of someone for whom the choice was made in full knowledge, not in ignorance. This is not a man who has rationalized himself into his position. He looked directly at the worst of what his clients have done and decided his function was not to judge them.

Hokuto Matsumura’s Shinji Karasuma — a University of Tokyo graduate and model lawyer who could be working anywhere — functions as the series’ sustained moral counterargument and as its emotional center. His relationship with Kujo is not adversarial in the standard sense: it is the relationship of someone who cannot leave an orbit they intellectually reject because the work done at its center is producing real outcomes for people their own methods would have abandoned. Matsumura has described, in pre-release material, feeling that he was still inhabiting Karasuma even after filming concluded, still gazing at Yagira’s Kujo as if the character’s internal reckoning was not yet resolved. That unresolution is the series’ structural engine. Karasuma does not convert to Kujo’s philosophy. He also does not leave. The series lives in the space between those two positions.

The specific cases Manabe selected — drug trafficking, drunk driving, elder abuse, organized crime — are not chosen for shock value. They are chosen because they represent the categories of defendant that Japan’s criminal justice system most efficiently processes without adequate defense, and because each category maps onto a documented social failure. The nursing home abuse case exists within the specific reality of Japan’s aging crisis, a society in which institutional elder care has expanded faster than institutional oversight, in which individual criminal accountability is the response offered to a systemic failure. The drug courier case exists within the reality of criminal distribution chains in which the people at the bottom carry the full criminal exposure for networks that extend far above them and are far harder to prosecute. Kujo defends the individuals at the bottom of these chains. He does not pretend this constitutes justice for the structures that produced them. He does not pretend anything.

Manabe’s prior work established the documentary method that Sins of Kujo inherits. Ushijima the Loan Shark, which ran for fifteen years in Weekly Big Comic Spirits and produced four films and multiple television series, used an unlicensed money-lender as the lens through which to document Japan’s post-bubble economic underclass — the cycle of debt, addiction, and desperate decision-making that operates at the margins of a society whose official self-description makes no space for it. What Ushijima did not do was give its central figure a philosophical position to defend. Ushijima was observed. Kujo argues. This is the evolutionary step that makes Sins of Kujo a more demanding work than its predecessor — and a more dangerous one for an audience that would prefer to watch than to be implicated.

The series compares most precisely not to any single Western legal drama but to the tradition Manabe has built across two decades: the tradition of using a figure who is understood by the surrounding society to be morally deficient — the loan shark, the corrupt lawyer — as the aperture through which the society’s own moral deficiencies become visible. In this tradition, the figure at the center is not the problem. They are the problem made legible. The audience’s discomfort with Kujo’s methods — the instinct that a lawyer who defends the guilty is somehow complicit in what the guilty did — is itself part of what the series is examining. That instinct is what the Japanese criminal justice system has historically relied on to function. The widespread social expectation that defense lawyers who work too hard are doing something morally suspect is part of why the system produces its near-total conviction rate. Kujo’s work is a refusal of that expectation. The audience’s discomfort is a registration of how deeply the expectation runs.

Sins of Kujo premieres globally on Netflix on April 2, 2026. The series is a co-production between Netflix and Tokyo Broadcasting System Television, produced by TBS Sparkle and written by Nonji Nemoto. Lead director Nobuhiro Doi — TBS’s most celebrated drama director, whose career spans three decades of character-driven television — is joined by co-directors Takeyoshi Yamamoto and Hiroshi Adachi. The production marks producer Atsushi Nasuda’s first Netflix collaboration. The main theme, “Dogs,” is performed by Hitsujibungaku. Shohei Manabe’s source manga has been serialized in Weekly Big Comic Spirits since October 2020 and currently stands at fifteen volumes with over four million copies in print.

Doi’s involvement brings a specific risk and a specific promise. His career at TBS has been built on emotional intimacy — the precise rendering of human behavior under institutional pressure, the moment of breathing and gaze that Manabe’s own endorsement singled out as the production’s defining achievement. What that career has not primarily addressed is institutional critique, the kind of systemic argument that Sins of Kujo requires its direction to sustain across ten episodes of escalating moral complexity. The hope, and the evidence from Manabe’s response to the finished episodes, is that the intimacy of Doi’s approach is exactly what the systemic argument needs: not the visual grammar of conspiracy or corruption, but the grammar of two people in a room whose different positions about what the law is for make both of them fully visible to each other and to the audience.

The question that no verdict in this series can close is the one that Kujo’s practice makes unavoidable: if a justice system produces near-total conviction rates not because it is accurate but because it has made defense difficult enough that the outcome is practically predetermined, what is the moral status of the person who makes it harder? Not innocent — that is not what is being claimed. Not heroic — Kujo refuses that designation explicitly. But something the legal culture around him has no comfortable language for: necessary. The person whose presence in the system is the condition for the system to mean what it says it means. The cases keep coming. The question stays open. The series does not close it, because justice does not.