Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit and the Totalitarian One-World Government & Mass Manipulation

Lately news media outlets have been printing out information on different media, books, movies and documentaries on viruses. Amidst this pandemic - a situation where there is a global alert halting the entire world, forcing everyone to stay inside - my mind went back through the numerous series I've consumed until I realized that we're not just talking about viruses here, but global control over human beings even in countries that appreciate freedom over anything else.

This line of thinking brought me back to this one Japanese manga series called Ikigami, written and illustrated by Motoro Mase. The series ran for 10 volumes from 2005 to 2012 in Weekly Young Sunday. The genre of this series is hard to put into words, it deals with drama and emotional weight caused by government control on its populace. It also works as a thriller and a psychological drama. Wikipedia mentions that the series is sci-fi, but I'm not so sure about that.

Ikigami takes place in an unnamed dystopian government (a government where one gets sentenced and rehibilated for committing "thought crimes") that resides near Japan in which all the children who enter primary school at a very young age get injected with syringes that have 1 in 10 000 of a chance of containing a nanocapsule. When these children age to adulthood, at random age between 18 to 24, the children that were injected with the capsule, die as the capsule reaches their heart.

The government of this story explains that the idea of injecting everyone while no one - except the government officials - knows who gets injected with the deadly chip, is that apparently the people of this nation will be able to live their life to the fullest as they will never know if they will be the ones to die. In other words the authorities feed their people propaganda about how great their morally wrong law is.

This is where the plot of this story takes place however. Ikigami themselves are not the name of the injected nanocapsule, but the notification that a government official has to hand over to the young adults who have been injected with the nanocapsule before they die. Our main character, Kengo Fujimoto, is one of these officials. Exactly 24 hours before the death of an injected person Fujimoto brings these "heroes of this national welfare law" their individual Ikigami, explaining how great their death will be for the country. These "heroes of the national welfare law" (i.e. victims of the government) are given a lot of freedom, however they tend to have a different mindset over what is going to happen to them as they tend to try to get revenge on people who did them wrong or commit other sorts of crimes.

While in its core this series's main idea is similar to to a fairly well-known movie called The Purge, which in turn is a live-action movie which takes place in a country where once a year all crime is legal - be it theft, break-in or even murder. Ikigami however throws a larger twist to the idea of this as it shows us the build up of the herd mentality to control people. It explains how we can use the idea of freedom to free us from government control while in reality feeding that to the masses is the control itself.
While the story might be questionable in its writing quality due to dealing with these types of hard-to-swallow propaganda mass manipulation concepts and crazy censorship, the presentation of the individual stories in this series are amazing. They are really emotional and pack a huge amount of impact. They exist to show us just how monstrous these types of Totalitarian One-World government laws are. 

Going into spoilers, the story at the very end brings up a very good point as it explains us that the purpose of the "national welfare law" injections was to control people into wanting to get rid of the nanocapsule, even if they don't know whether or not they have them. To offer this choice to the people, this government gives them a chance: go to war and you can pick any one person to get injected with a liquid that destroys the capsule. This controls the whole population to join the war to save themselves or their loved ones. A very grand-scale psychological control over people.

I believe now is the best time to read this series and think very carefully what is happening in the world. It is a very well crafted comic book series dealing with heavy subjects.