Shadowing Practice: Why Good People Stop Caring (The Higuruma Complex) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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You've seen the Statue of Lady Justice, sword in one hand, scales in the other, and a blindfold over her eyes.
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The story we're told about that blindfold is beautiful.
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It means she doesn't see race, doesn't see money, doesn't see whether you're powerful or broken.
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She weighs the facts, just the facts.
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It's a great story.
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Hiromi Higuruma believed in that story with everything he had.
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He passed one of Japan's hardest bar exams, took impossible cases, defended people nobody else would touch.
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Not for money, the people he defended rarely had any.
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But because if the law could be just, then someone had to make it just.
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One day, he looked at that blindfold and understood something.
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The blindfold isn't there so justice can't see your face.
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It's there so justice doesn't have to look you in the eye when it destroys you.
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A man who spent his whole life holding up the scale and what happened when he finally let it drop.
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Before anything else, you need to know one number.
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99%.
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In Japan's criminal court system, 99 % of defendants who go to trial are found guilty.
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Not because 99 % of defendants are actually guilty, but because prosecutors in Japan don't bring cases they don't already control.
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Judges are career government employees who answer, in subtle and not -so -subtle ways, to the same institutions that fund the prosecution.
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Once you're accused, the machinery is already moving, and the only question is how much it's going to hurt.
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Higuruma knew this.
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He knew it the way a surgeon knows that some patients don't survive.
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He went in anyway.
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His last case was a young man named Keita Owe.
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Keita was accused of murdering a mother and daughter in Morioka.
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Wrong place, wrong profile.
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Higuruma took the case.
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He built a defense.
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Real evidence, real arguments.
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The prosecution offered the same shaky arguments, the same circular logic, the same verdict, guilty, life in prison.
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So Keita Oe, who may have been completely innocent, was going to spend the rest of his life in a cell.
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Higuruma, who had given everything to stop that from happening, had to stand in that courtroom and watch it go into the record.
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But the worst part wasn't the verdict.
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The worst part was the look.
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Keita turned to Higuruma from across the room, and in his eyes, not rage, not even hatred exactly, just sorrow and disappointment.
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Why couldn't you save me?
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What happens when a person who genuinely wants to do good is placed inside a system
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that uses their goodness as raw material, and spits out suffering.
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Higuruma didn't fail Keita.
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The system failed Keita.
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But the system has no face.
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Higuruma does.
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So the sorrow in Keita's eyes landed on the one person in that courtroom who had actually tried to help him.
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Quick pause.
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Understanding the burden Higuruma carries makes us look at Jujutsu Kaisen in a much more real way.
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If you want to see more videos diving into these characters minds, leave a like and subscribe.
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Since we're at the start of the journey, giving this video a hype helps the algorithm understand that this type of analysis has value.
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Let's get back to the moment he decided to break the rules.
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Higuruma reached into his bag, and pulled out a gavel.
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Not the judge's gavel, his own.
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He slammed it on the table and told the court.
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Behind him, something unfurled.
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A cursed technique awakening the way they always do in JJK, at the exact moment a human soul reaches its absolute limit.
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A Shikigami called Judge Man appeared, and Higuruma, still in that courtroom, killed the judge and the prosecutor.
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He snapped because he finally reached the conclusion
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that a man can only reach after years of watching the scale tip the same wrong way.
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The game is rigged.
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And the only honest response to a rigged game is to stop playing by its rules.
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A philosophical idea lives behind this, not a complicated one, just an honest one.
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When the rules you've dedicated your life to turn out to be a lie, following them more carefully isn't virtue anymore.
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It's complicity.
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Higuruma decided to stop being complicit.
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The execution was wrong.
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He knew that.
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He would carry that weight for the rest of his life.
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But the ideology behind it, I will no longer pretend this system is justice, that part was completely, painfully rational.
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Look at what he builds with his power.
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His domain expansion is called deadly sentencing.
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Inside it, a courtroom exists, guillotines lining the walls.
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Not a space for rehabilitation, execution.
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He assumes the role of prosecutor, the side he never played in real life,
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the side that had access to tax money and state power and always won.
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The Shikigami, Judge Man, floats above it all with its eyes sewn shut.
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It only opens its eyes to deliver one thing, a guilty verdict.
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Higuruma built his trauma into his power.
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He created a system that mirrors everything he despised, rigid, presumptuous, allergic to innocence, and then installed himself at the center of it.
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He thinks it's wrong, but he's given up on the idea of right.
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He's projecting his own disillusionment onto the entire world.
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If the real system was corrupt, then everyone inside it was corrupt.
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If humans built a rotten institution, then humans are rotten, including him.
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He enters the culling game not as a hero, and not as a monster,
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as a man who has decided that the world deserves deserves exactly what it built.
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Yuji Itadori walks into his colony.
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In the context of the Culling Game,
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a death tournament where sorcerers fight for points to survive in a world that Kenjaku turned into a killing field,
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Yuji is trying to add rules to the game.
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Reduce the casualties.
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He needs points.
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He goes to Higuruma.
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Higuruma, who has been dismantling sorcerers without much interest, activates deadly sentencing almost as a formality.
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He expects what he always gets in a courtroom.
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Lies.
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A defendant reaching for any exit available.
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Judge Man reads the first charge.
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Yuji entered a pachinko parlor as a minor.
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It's a small crime.
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But Yuji gets tripped up in his defense, loses, and Judge Man confiscates his ability to use cursed energy.
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He fights back with pure physical instinct, holds his own, but realizes he can't win like this.
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So he uses a rule of the domain.
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He demands a retrial, back inside the courtroom.
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But Judge Man doesn't repeat the first charge.
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It reads a new one.
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Mass murder.
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The Shibuya incident.
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Hundreds of civilians kill.
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Higuruma leans in, where defendants lie.
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I wasn't in control.
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It wasn't really me.
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The circumstances were, Yuji Itadori confesses.
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Guilty.
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Judge man's sewn eyelids tear open.
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Confiscation.
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Death penalty.
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The worst punishment the domain can deliver.
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Higuruma now holds the executioner's sword.
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One hit, no surviving it.
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He approaches Yuji.
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And he stops.
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From a legal standpoint, Yuji isn't guilty.
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Sukuna took over his body.
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Sukuna made those choices.
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Yuji wasn't even conscious for most of it.
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But Yuji doesn't know how to live in the gap between legal guilt and moral weight.
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He feels responsible.
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So he said responsible.
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To Yuji, what happened in Shibuya happened with his hands.
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And no technicality in the world changes the fact that he's been carrying every single one of those deaths since.
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Higuruma has spent years watching defendants twist language to escape accountability.
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He's watched the guilty walk free and the innocent get buried.
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Now a boy stands in front of him who isn't guilty under the law, and who still confessed.
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That does what years of fighting in court couldn't.
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It creates dissonance, his entire model of the world.
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Everyone is selfish.
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Everyone protects themselves.
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The system is just a mirror of human corruption.
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That model doesn't have a slot for Yuji Itadori.
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Higuruma already knows the truth.
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His domain gives him all the facts.
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He knows Sukuna committed those murders.
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But Yuji's confession breaks the trial.
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Higuruma dispels the executioner's sword.
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The one thing he built his identity around, the one thing that separated him from the corrupt judges he hated, was defending the wrongfully accused.
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And the wrongfully accused is standing right in front of him.
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He can't execute that.
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He won't.
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And in that moment, in the silence between the gavel and the blow, Higuruma's eyes open.
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After the trial, Higuruma does something unexpected.
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He gives Yuji points, changes the culling game rules to allow it.
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He tells Yuji he can't stay with him.
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He says...
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Yuji's presence, this person who carries guilt so purely, so completely, reminds Higuruma of every place he went wrong.
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Higuruma isn't punishing himself out of performance.
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He genuinely feels that what he did with his hands, the murders he chose, with full consciousness driven by ideology,
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cannot be footnoted away.
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The system corrupted itself.
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Keita Oe was probably innocent.
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The judge and prosecutor were complicit in an unjust verdict.
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And Higuruma still pulled a trigger he chose to pull.
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Both things are true at the same time.
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And he's not willing to be the kind of person who collapses the first truth to escape the second.
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From here on, there will be manga spoilers.
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If you want to avoid them, skip to the timestamps on the screen.
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He eventually joins the alliance against Sukuna.
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If something in this world represents the complete absence of law, the complete rejection of any accountability,
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it's the king of curses, who kills for aesthetics.
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In the final confrontation, Higuruma opens his domain against Sukuna.
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For the first time, he wears both hats at once.
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He's the prosecutor, putting Sukuna on trial for Shibuya.
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He's also the defense attorney, protecting Yuji, making sure the right person is finally held responsible.
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But the plan hits a legal loophole.
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If a defendant holds a cursed tool, Judge Man confiscates the weapon instead of their cursed technique.
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Sukuna keeps his power.
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The prosecution fails on a technicality.
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But what does Higuruma do before everything falls apart?
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He gives Yuji the executioner's sword.
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He couldn't use it himself, but trusting someone else to carry it is the most radical thing a man who once stopped trusting everyone can do.
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He found his way back, not to the idealist who thought the law could save everyone, to something quieter and harder and more honest.
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The man who knows exactly how bad he's capable of being, and still chooses to use what's left of himself for something good.
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Higuruma isn't a villain story, he's not a redemption arc in the traditional sense.
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What happens to idealism when it collides with reality at full speed?
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He entered the law believing that rules, applied correctly, produce justice.
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He spent years discovering that rules, applied correctly, mostly produce paperwork.
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The system didn't just fail him, it failed through him.
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It made him the face of its failures years.
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It handed him the grief of people he couldn't save and said, that's your fault.
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A lot of people know that feeling.
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Not in courtrooms necessarily, but in jobs where you care more than the institution does.
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In systems, hospitals, schools, governments, where you entered with a compass and slowly watched the compass become a libel -bility.
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A specific kind of exhaustion comes from realizing the thing you believed in doesn't believe in anything.
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Higuruma didn't fall because he was weak.
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He fell because he cared too long in a place that punished caring.
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The laws are written by humans, which means they carry everything humans carry.
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The selfishness, the bias, the fear, the desire to protect people who already have power at the expense of people who don't.
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True justice was never in the gavel, never in the statute, never in the blindfold.
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It's in the choice.
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The daily, exhausting, thankless choice to look at a person the world has already written off,
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to see them clearly, with all their guilt and all their innocence, and to decide that they deserve someone in their corner anyway.
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Higuruma lost that choice for a while.
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A boy who couldn't stop carrying guilt handed it back to him, and the man who broke the scale picked it up again.
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Do you have to kill people in your own way?
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Yes.
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That's right.
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It's the worst feeling, right?
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Why Good People Stop Caring”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: Higuruma, Yuji, judge, guilty, rule. This video has 201 sentences and 2062 words to shadow. The speech runs for 14:17. The speaker talks at a steady 144 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 77% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| courtroom noun | The room where a judge presides over hearings and trials, sometimes with a jury. | |
| defendant noun | /dɪˈfɛnd.ənt/ | In civil proceedings, the party responding to the complaint; one who is sued and called upon to make satisfaction for a wrong complained of by another. |
| domain noun | /ˌdəʊˈmeɪ̯n/ | A geographic area owned or controlled by a single person or organization. |
| curse noun | /kɝs/ | A supernatural detriment or hindrance; a bane. |
| prosecutor noun | /ˈpɹɑ.səˌkjuːˌtəɹ/ | A prosecuting attorney. |
| sword noun | /soɹd/ | A long bladed weapon with a grip and typically a pommel and crossguard (together forming a hilt), which is designed to cut, stab, slash and/or hack. |
| corrupt adjective | /kəˈɹʌpt/ | Willing to act dishonestly for personal gain; accepting bribes. |
| guilt noun | /ɡɪlt/ | Responsibility for wrongdoing. |
| verdict noun | /ˈvɜː.dɪkt/ | A decision on an issue of fact in a civil or criminal case or an inquest. |
| accuse verb | /əˈkjuz/ | To find fault with, blame, censure. |
| defend verb | /dɪˈfɪnd/ | To ward off attacks against (something or someone). |
| innocent adjective | /ˈɪnəsənt/ | Free from guilt, sin, or immorality. |
| prosecution noun | /ˌpɹɑ.sɪˈkju.ʃən/ | The act of prosecuting a scheme or endeavor. |
| mirror noun | /ˈmiɹɚ/ | A smooth surface, usually made of glass with reflective material painted on the underside, that reflects light so as to give an image of what is in front of it. |
| technique noun | /tɛkˈniːk/ | The practical aspects of a given art, occupation etc.; formal requirements. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| fall apart verb | To disintegrate, to break into pieces. |
| get back to verb | Return to (an activity) |
| hold up verb | To wait or delay. |
| pull out verb | To withdraw; especially of military forces; to retreat. |
| take over verb | To assume control of something, such as a business or enterprise, and sometimes by force. |
| write off verb | To reduce the book value of (an asset) to zero. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | has been dismantling · he's been carrying |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | man who spent · person who genuinely · man who has |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are found · was accused · is placed |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | You've seen · you've dedicated · has decided |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 41 contractions and reduced forms, such as doesn't, isn't, couldn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/, aesthetics /ɛsˈθɛt.ɪks/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: prosecution /ˌpɹɑ.sɪˈkju.ʃən/, institution /ˌɪn.stɪˈtʃuː.ʃən/, execution /ˌɛk.sɪˈkjuː.ʃən/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/, corruption /kəˈɹʌpʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: prosecutor /ˈpɹɑ.səˌkjuːˌtəɹ/, prosecution /ˌpɹɑ.sɪˈkju.ʃən/, institution /ˌɪn.stɪˈtʃuː.ʃən/, execution /ˌɛk.sɪˈkjuː.ʃən/, genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like courtroom, defendant, domain.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.