„To the average Japanese adult, Teru Mikami was a child with a strong sense of justice, who was able to determine between right and wrong. And compared to the average Japanese, Teru has been through and seen far greater miseries…. and deaths. Whether Teru was a person who drew death or whether it was all a coincidence– No, even though he wished for the death of others at times, he never killed anyone with his own hands. It was all a coincidence.“
-Death Note 84 ‘Coincidence’
That is the official English translation of the narrative text that introduces us to Teru Mikami. In only few lines, the manga establishes most of the important keywords that have characterized this man’s life from childhood to death. Mikami’s story is that of someone who twists all coincidence to hold meaning because he cannot face the pointlessness of the reality that awaits him otherwise. Saying it with Tsugumi Ohba: „To put it bluntly, Mikami gets everything wrong.“ (HTR13, p. 81.)
In this essay, I focus only on the manga and the approach I will follow is largely a biographical one, following Mikami’s internal structures as they develop throughout his life. For the most part, I aim to work closely with canon, but some statements may be more speculative in nature. I don’t aim to present this reasoning as the only possible one, I merely mean to present one plausible reading of the character.
So where do we begin? Kyoto, Japan – roughly around the year 1990. Teru Mikami is in elementary school. We are told he is raised by a single mother, a father or even the father’s fate is never mentioned. This already gives us a clue about the financial situation of the family.
According to this article from 2015, 54% of fatherless Japanese households fell below the poverty line, over 20 years after the years described in Mikami’s childhood. This New York times article from 1996 is significantly closer to our target time and also firmly states that single mothers in Japan face ‘economic and social discrimination’.
(But even though the second article covers a more adequate time frame, I judge the source value of the first more highly as it was written directly by a Japanese person.)
The likeliness of poverty shows in the way Teru dresses as well:
His pants are too big for him – buying larger clothes for children to grow into is a practice very common in households that cannot afford buying new sets of clothes regularly. It is also common for poorer children to wear second-hand or passed-down clothes that weren’t bought to fit them specifically.
Whatever the exact situation of Teru’s birth, he is not born into a wealthy household. While his mother’s work situation is never mentioned, we can pretty safely assume she is working her butt off to be able to pay for herself as well as her child. This in turn means that she likely has to stay out late working even during Teru’s formative childhood years. This seems significant in connection with the panel that first describes his morality:
While it is said that Teru reflected ‘on his surroundings’ the images we are shown are exclusively images from television. News images as well as super hero series are displayed.
And to me, that makes a significant amount of sense. With his mother out and no other significant figure in his life, it is more than likely that a lot of Teru’s early knowledge about the world stems from media – in a sense, it is probable that he was at least partly raised by the television.
This, in turn, means that he was confronted with a very polarized view of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – subtleties and grey zones often enough get lost in sensationalist TV coverage and a lot of children’s shows tend to simplify ‘good’ and ‘bad’ for a learning effect.
This is the world that Teru reflects on and bases his moral views on – it leaves a profound impact on this bright child who comes to understand that people need to strive to be ‘good’. He probably doesn’t have too much influence in his life that would teach him a more subtle way of categorizing and binaries are typical and easier to grasp for children either way.
So Teru takes this attitude with him into life away from his home and television.
We branch out from this child’s home life to his life in school. First we learn that he is class president for all of elementary and takes great pride in it. This is where we are introduced to Teru as an overtly ambitious person.
And not only is he very ambitious, he also applies these expectations to those surrounding him. Judging by his smile, he seems to do so with a sense of naive optimism. I can imagine him assuming that since becoming the best is the good thing to do, the others should want it just as much.
Another word on his clothes: while we cannot know if this style was his or his mother’s idea originally , it’s noteworthy how he wears a dress-shirt in a way that seems to emulate a school uniform. His elementary school doesn’t have one. The desire to be proper and mature already manifests in his voluntarily worn clothes in childhood.
Teru makes good on his ideals in elementary school. He has no tolerance for bullies and will jump in at the defense of classmates even when it means getting himself harmed. This stage of his life is when Teru is first confronted with the fact that his ideals are not self-evident to other people.
The narrator goes out of his way to specify that Teru notices how the other students look at him as they stand by instead of coming to his and the victim’s aid. At this point, he is not jaded by it and instead chooses to fight harder to make people understand that justice prevails after all, even if the situation looks hopeless. His validation does not come from bystanders, it comes from those he assists. Perceived external validation of his ideals will become a leitmotif of Mikami’s life from here.
The gratitude of the victims is what fuels him at this point. Obviously, he’s just being a good kid but from a cynical point of view we can already see that Mikami thrives on the affirmation that he did good. It’s just that at a later point in life, he has ceased to receive or want this affirmation from the human beings directly surrounding him.
Keep these two panels in mind because these are two things we will never see again: Mikami valuing someone else’s opinions on his actions and Mikami seeing value in physical comfort as he pats the other kid on the back. Sweet innocence.
In elementary school, it still is possible for Teru to get by with these kinds of actions. It is even stated that ends up convincing most of his classmates so that the troublemakers are eventually shunned. Even if there were downsides, Teru overall receives a lot of positive reinforcement that cements his ambitious righteousness mindset – it is not challenged in a significant or impactful way, Teru never has to change his position.
This is the thought pattern he enters middle school with and this is the thought pattern that absolutely does not fly with his peers there.
This far, Teru has been in a helper position. The way he saw himself, he’s been a superhero. On the side of justice, destined to win in the end by sole virtue of being the good one.
In middle school, Teru stops being a helper. He graduates to being a victim.
Bystanders had been passive people to be convinced before, now they are a danger. Teru meddling with bullies’ affairs is not received well – it makes Teru a new target. As a target, he is marked possession of his bullies and mingling with him or the victims puts bystanders at risk of becoming targets themselves.
Teru has entered the victim’s position via standing up for another victim. In turn, nobody stands up for Teru so the same fate can be avoided. Picking on Teru is what’s needed to buy safety for oneself.
Fear shuns Teru from his other schoolmates. There is no positive reinforcement anymore.
Instead there is painful torture. I don’t really need to emphasize how heavy the abuse described in this panel really is, I think we can all imagine the magnitude of what’s happening to this boy.
(As a side note, look at the property damage – glasses are expensive and this is money Ms. Mikami doesn’t really have – Teru gets the additional conflict of knowing this full well.)
And here’s where his mindset starts to graduate from the naivety of his child self. It’s important to emphasize that while Teru always did the good/evil splitting, there are somewhat fluid borders between the two. It is stated that he brought people in elementary school to his side, allowing them the chance of standing for justice after all. It was only the actual bullies who were shunned and rejected for their actions, though it stands to reason that if they changed their ways they would have counted towards the people brought to Teru’s side as well. There is not yet any indication that good and evil are fully rigid fixtures.
This begins to change here. I think it is a fairly common thought pattern among bullying victims to want their tormentors to disappear. And right now, this is only an abstract idea to Teru – a very plain one. ‘If the bad people disappeared, there would be no more suffering.’ It’s ridiculously simple. While the word ‘delete’ is strong, this does not translate to conscious death wishes just yet. It remains subtly on the border to it.
Now why is Teru even still keeping up his hero act? For one, dropping it now would likely not help his situation anymore since he has already been established in his position as a victim.
But more important on a psychological level is that the belief to be right is all Teru has anymore. There is no positive reinforcement he receives from the outside. In this life of suffering, he has one saving grace and that is being the moral superior. If he lets go of that, he lets himself down to the level of bystanders that doubtlessly disgust him by now. No, being stronger than that is his strength.
It’s the mantra he can tell himself in order to endure just about everything. He’s right, that’s what counts.
And Teru seems to be determined to get through it alone. We can infer this by the timing his mother confronts him – which is…. late. For one, we already established that the woman is probably working a lot so she and Teru don’t see each other too much. But still, the manga describes that Mikami has been beaten ‘innumerable times’ over a span of months if not over a year. He bruises and his mother would certainly have picked up on it had he not made an effort to hide this or make excuses for the marks. Further proof of this is that we see the right half of his glasses broken by the bullies, but find it repaired by the time his mother confronts him. Had he named the real reason for his broken glasses, the confrontation would have happened prior to the repair, so it is likely he has made another excuse for the damage.
Mikami is determined to get through his alone – he is not willing to acknowledge that his position shifted from savior to victim long ago. He doesn’t want to admit that he is the one in need of support because this in turn means acknowledging he is not receiving it. It’s easier to be a martyr for a good cause than to deal with the idea of being left alone – both by people and by the concept of the justice that’s supposed to be winning. In his head, Teru hasn’t lost yet, he’s still fighting and he wants to come out as the winner on his own through the power of his righteousness, in order for its strength to be proven.
On the topic of support that he could or could not receive, I also find it jarring how the narration states his mother was ‘the only one’ who worried about him – this rules out any teach staff ever trying to barge into the abuse happening in their institution. Teru was truly on his own.
But eventually, his mother finds out. Teru is wearing the summer uniform, so I assume this is about a year after entering middle school – but this is speculation, we can’t really be sure.
So Ms. Mikami, genuinely concerned, confronts her son. He still seems unwilling to tell her overall – his body language pretty clearly states that he’s been sat down to have this talk and is not comfortable with the fact that he’s been found out.
Still, he trusts his mother. Even if the two of them couldn’t spend too much time together, they appear to be somewhat close.
Now we are at the turning point of Mikami’s life. His mother does not back up his rhetoric of heroic enduring justice. She can see that her son is driving himself to ruin in every way. As an adult she can tell that his notion of underlying justice is childish and not nuanced enough. She knows that to survive Teru needs to adapt instead of solely expecting the world to adapt to him.
These were the wrong things to say. I personally think she could have said them with more empathy for her son, but ultimately these judgments hardly matter because Teru would have rejected her for it either way – what she has to say may be sensible enough, but it does not fit Teru’s grand narrative.
Teru feels betrayed. His mother has become one with the bystanders, people who he has condemned every day for their weak-mindedness. Only people like him are righteous, those who will stand up to injustice no matter what. He spent weeks and weeks hammering this thought into his own head and the fact that his mother does not match the scheme is unthinkable.
To him, his mother is now someone who accepts the suffering in this world as normal instead of making it a priority to fight it.
Her behavior, to him in that moment, represents everything he detests about the world.
And he starts to deny her in his heart. For this moment, the falling out is absolute since to Teru the betrayal is absolute. His mother has rejected everything he’s clung to defining himself around.
At this point, I want to emphasize that Teru is a boy starting middle school. He is around 13 or 14, a child in development. Had his life progressed differently, it is not at all unthinkable that he would have at least partly reconciled with his mother and learned to compromise. This situation could have been the wake-up call in both of their lives to change things up and progress into a more favorable direction. Right now, nothing is lost yet for Teru and his mother even if Teru would like to think so – how many times do children think they will never ever forgive their parents and then do?
It’s mere coincidence that any making up in the Mikami family remains nothing but a ‘what if’.
Coincidence shapes Mikami’s life more than nothing else from here on.
Namely, shortly after this argument, Ms. Mikami is hit by a car and dies. (Mikami is still wearing the summer uniform – while the time-span between this conversation and his mother’s death is never specified, it can’t have been a very long period of time so it’s only natural no reconciling had taken place yet.) It’s a terrible coincidence. There were many times or ways his mother could have died without leaving the specific impact she does right now, but it’s this. It influences Mikami forever.
The accident that kills Teru’s mother is caused by his four bullies who also all lose their lives.
And Teru’s reaction….
A lot of people take this to primarily refer to his mother, but I challenge this line of thought. His mother is someone he is at odds with, but he has never consciously wishes for her deletion. The bullies are the ones Teru wanted deleted before.
They are also what he primarily refers to in his resulting lines of thought.
This accident shakes Mikami’s life to the core. The constant fixtures of bullies and mother that he had before, in bad or in good, are gone at once. What he does in result is try to find meaning in this event. We already know that Mikami believes in a good/evil structure in which good always wins in the end. It’s not new for him to try and figure out the order of the universe on his own.
The effect that is obviously easier to categorize is the death of the bullies and he draws a strong moral from it:
(This is what I meant when I was referring to his earlier wishes for deletion to be ‘not quite death wishes’ – the idea of a specific death wish is just now getting affirmed here based on precedent. Deletion goes from an abstract concept to the concrete idea that people’s death can be positive and wanted.)
Why does he latch onto this moral though?
At this point Mikami is left entirely without guidance. His one and only support system is gone. He has two options to interpret the events:
1.) His mother did not deserve death, hence it is a random coincidence that the bullies died alongside her. Since an innocent person was killed too, the accident cannot have been an act of divine punishment for the bullies – that would imply the force causing the incident is unfair. So if he accepts this version, fate is unfair and deaths do happen at random. Even despite the fact that Mikami has always been ‘righteous’ he is not rewarded and instead abandoned once more. There is no underlying order of justice to the universe. All his actions so far are rendered cosmically pointless with this.
or
2.) His mother might not have been as bad as the bullies, but since she didn’t stand for justice there is some reason for her deletion. The bullies did die as a consequence of their wrong-doings – Teru has been saved from them by divine punishment. Even though his legal guardian is gone, he has the universe’s order on his side because he is righteous and will thus come out on top. His actions are validated and meaningful and he will be rewarded for continuing on the way he believes in.
Accepting 1.) also comes with accepting that his mother was right. If there is no universal order, Teru has no grounds to reject her on. He would have to regret the fact that she died while in a fight with him and have to properly mourn her. He’d be left with nothing but regret and the ideals he believed in shattered at his feet.
Meanwhile 2.) is an option that gives him safety. Worldly reassurance ceases to have a meaning if he knows cosmic order on his side. The feeling of security that he just lost is restored in this fashion.
It’s obvious what he picks.
So he throws his mother’s memory under the bus in order to keep being able to feel validated. She becomes someone he cannot redeem or reflect on because doing so would put a dent in this nice logic he’s cooked up for himself. Mikami decides to not allow himself regrets. To never look back.
There are a couple of things to be said about this further. The first is that there is no mental healthcare he would have access to and that Teru has no other influential figures in his life. He’s a young teen left completely alone with the death of his one and only close person. The fact that his reaction is maladaptive is no surprise – had he received adequate support, maybe he’d have turned out differently. Mikami’s story is one full of unfortunate circumstances.
And lastly, this is probably the moment that finalized the strong distance from other humans that characterizes Mikami’s life from now on. Via mother as well as bystanders, Teru has learned that people’s support is fickle and unreliable. Anyone can turn out to be evil – so getting attached isn’t necessarily worth it. Additionally, with even the possibilities of support gone now, Mikami starts to still his thirst for validation from another source entirely.
As we know, Teru has decided he is ‘objectively’ right – and this idea is only cemented by recent happenings. So the line of thought derived from this is that if he is objectively right other people’s opinions of him don’t matter at all. Whether they think positively or negatively of him has no bearing on the ‘fact’ that he is right. Hence, he doesn’t ‘need’ human contact for positive reinforcement anymore, his idea of divine justice gives him just that.
So now that Ms. Mikami is dead there is the question of where Mikami even lived afterwards – we are never told, but we can assume that whoever it was with had a distanced relationship to Mikami. His further life-story shows no sign that he was significantly influenced by a close relationship past his mother’s death at least.
Mikami graduates high school and enters university with excellent grades. His beliefs grow stronger. Yes, I still said grow.
It would be tempting to say his mindset was finally finished after the accident, but it’s still not true.
The adult Mikami we know who does not think any crime can ever be forgiven is still not quite whom we are dealing with.
Instead we are explicitly told that Mikami reaches out to try and correct people’s behavior. This is also interesting because there has been no mention of reformation since Mikami’s elementary school years. It seems to me that by University time, Mikami is actually making a second attempt at socializing and integrating into same age society even despite what happened and what he decided.
But of course, Mikami is Mikami and he won’t tolerate behavior he perceives as wrong. Judging from the imagery shown, Mikami tried to correct people engaging both in physical abuse and in drug abuse or drug dealing here.
And it’s only here, at this second attempt of reaching out, that Teru decides that reformation might not be possible for older people. The borders of good/bad that had been somewhat open before are finally beginning to close and the mindset of ‘no forgiving’ we know Teru for as an adult shapes.
And he gets affirmation in the shape of accidental deaths.
It’s actually sort of laughable that Mikami passes the deaths of people who live risky lifestyles off as fate. Statistically, it makes sense for people who are involved with crime and drugs to die more often than people not involved with crime and drugs, I am sure.
Interesting is that the 9 people named here seem to not include the bullies. I used to assume the blonde person in the foreground was on of the old bullies, but that is actually not the case.
We see two of the people above as Teru’s university foes.
Meanwhile the four high school bullies’ faces don’t seem to appear. Judging by this, the number 9 refers only to people who died during Mikami’s high school and especially university time.
This would mean the total of people who died as Teru wished for it is actually 13. (I’m not counting his mother for above listed reasons – he does never reflect on her as he does on the bullies so I think that is fair.)
Now, this finally prompts a conscious reflection on the specific nature of this order he relies on. We can tell he believed the deaths to be justified and in accordance with some law of the word before, but at this point we see some real formulated thought put into the idea on a religious level.
First he wonders if it’s him who is causing this. I don’t know a lot about Shinto, but that thought might be in accordance with the Shinto idea of Kami as purifying forces. Pure humans, like Teru obviously considers himself being, could become a vessel to this purifying energy. The idea here would be that Mikami’s righteousness attracts the force in such a way that more cleansing acts occur around him – while other places and people are less righteous and thus do not attract the effects of this purifying Kami. (It’s still sort of fucked up of Teru to consider because it does mean considering whether or not he indirectly caused his own mother’s death.)
It’s important to say here that, even though I use Shinto ideas to explain Mikami’s belief, Mikami is not a follower of Shintoism. There are lots of Shinto ideals he would be opposed to and the many other Kami of this religion obviously are of no importance to it. Mikami uses concepts from Shinto, but his thoughts aren’t Shinto. He only bastardizes the values he was raised among (Kyoto is a very cultural city at that) and turns them into his own invented ideology. It’s not a conscious process, it’s just that the thought patterns come to him easily since he had them accessible via cultural osmosis.
But yes, the idea of him specifically being a catalyst is quickly discarded as irrelevant. Because no matter whether or not Teru is the vessel, what’s actually relevant is that the force itself exists to begin with. That, Teru is now sure of.
It’s been a very slow process of getting to Teru’s belief in his God, but it’s still very noteworthy that Teru comes up with this idea of a purifying divine power before Light even picks up the Death Note. This is something to absolutely keep in mind when it comes to Teru’s later worship of Kira. Teru’s God isn’t Kira, because he predates Kira by a few years.
We now shift to Teru’s aspirations in the professional world. It’s no surprise whatsoever that he wants to work in law enforcement and punish crime. I’m only bringing up this panel because of the obvious visual parallel to this Light panel:
Even though there is little to no parallel in their life stories, Light and Mikami arrive at a similar disdain with the state of humanity. It’s vaguely fascinating how they both have this ‘I am always right’ attitude deeply ingrained into their mindset, because Light arrives there through constant positive reinforcement, while Mikami gets there through a lack of this and the conclusions drawn from that lack. In terms of privilege and upbringing they are very different, but here they parallel each other nicely.
What especially sticks out here is that the Light panel comes from the time he goes out to test the Death Note again and begins some first considerations that go into the direction of his Kira moral. While at this point Light doesn’t actually believe he’s a murderer yet, it’s still from a sequence of events that leads up to him choosing to become Kira – which is parallel set with Mikami choosing to become a prosecutor. (Considering the nature of prosecution in Japan as those who choose who is to be judged, this is oddly fitting.)
So yes, on the topic of prosecution…
We need to take a moment to consider the full implications of this, because it’s incredibly telling in regards to Mikami’s level of intelligence. These implications have already been well-summed up by casuistor in this post, so I am going to take the liberty to just add a quote:
He attends Kyodo University (a reference to Kyoto University – the equivalent of an Ivy League university in Japan) and that he passes the Japanese Bar exam (司法試 験shihō shiken) on his first try. We know this because by the time Kira is first active in November 2003, Mikami is twenty-one, freshly out of college and already a prosecutor.
The Japanese bar, I might add, is notoriously difficult with only a pass rate of 2% prior to 2006. (Source) Mikami was a prosecutor by 2003 so that absurdly low pass rate still applies to him. TL;DR the guy is impressive.
The fact that Teru becomes a prosecutor this early certainly speaks for itself. The average age to become prosecutor in Japan is 28 – Mikami becomes one 7 years earlier than that. This was ‘not hard’ for Teru. Passing the examination is followed by a 2 year training period though, so Teru is ‘only’ a full-fledged prosecutor at age 23.
At this point I want to put a small intermission to briefly talk about prosecution in Japan further. It’s not strictly necessary for understanding Mikami’s character, but as his job is a defining part of him I think there is a lot of value in somewhat knowing how it works. (My primary source is this paper from the United Nations Asia and Far East Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders.)
Japanese prosecutors have way more authority than prosecutors in Western countries – they have authority over police investigations and even to investigate without the police. They are the only ones who can request the detention of suspects – this is called ‘monopolization of prosecution’. Further, public prosecutors in Japan are under no obligation to bring cases to court – even if there is sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. Basically, prosecution has the ultimate power over which criminals are going to face punishment at all. Technically this is meant to secure that only those guilty are charged and innocent people are saved from false accusation. However, Japan’s conviction rate is 99% and this is not at all because Japan is so good about punishing all their crimes – it’s because prosecutors choose to only bring those cases to court that they are guaranteed to win. This quite often means that only cases in which the suspect confessed are prosecuted. (If you ever wondered how the murderer of Misa’s parents, with Misa as an eye witness, could still go free – here’s your reason!)
In turn, this system means that Mikami could not possibly have gotten by with acting as he did in childhood and prosecute every single crime. Having a conviction rate this high establishes a status quo – any prosecutor who takes more risks and winds up losing cases as a result is bound to lose their job sooner rather than later. Thus, Mikami (while I don’t doubt he is more prone to taking risks than others) also has to have let crimes go in his career.
Kira will actually be a reassuring presence here. While Mikami would not take his work any less seriously for it, there is still a distinct chance that the criminals he had to let go will be punished by Kira instead and that doubtlessly takes a weight off his shoulders.
But in the mundane world, the prosecution has the ultimate power over the treatment and conviction of criminals. This is Mikami’s dream job for very obvious reasons. And just as he gets it, Kira appears.
This eradicates all of Teru’s small doubt in the underlying justice of the universe once and for all. He sees it as confirmed that there were no coincidences in the deaths around him – the purifying, punishing God exists and was at work there.
For Teru ‘Validate Me’ Mikami this is obviously the strongest kind of validation. Even before God appeared to the public in the form of Kira, people died around him – so that must mean he, Teru, is special after all. The first workings of God had been in his surroundings. God is watching.
This far, Teru has made up his positive reinforcement. ‘I am right because it’s cosmically true’ has been his logic all along but there was nothing to prove this with – he only had his own faith to hold himself up by. Now, this changes. With Kira’s appearance there is empirical evidence of this phenomenon that Teru calls his God. All these years where nobody was on Teru’s sides have suddenly been confirmed as meaningful, because something much stronger than humanity was on Teru’s side all along.
It’s funny because this is just coincidence again. That Kira appears in Teru’s lifespan and matches Teru’s image of God exactly has nothing to do with Teru being good – there is no causal relation between Teru’s life and Light finding the note. Mikami’s whole life consists of reading meaning into randomness.
Time to emphasize again that the God Teru believes in is not ‘Kira’ as in ‘Light Yagami’. This would require Mikami to have been convinced into his belief by Light’s actions specifically. Instead, his belief preexisted and Kira only took up a preformed spot in it. Mikami does not realize it, but he’s latching onto Kira and using him to confirm a set of ideals he made up himself.
Now that Mikami believes he has found the embodiment of the concept he lives for, he tries everything in his might to be able to reach out to Kira and fulfill his purpose more directly.
He starts a series of media appearances.
On first glance, this panel might seem contradictory. Mikami just stated that he believes God has seen him, so why does he need to get God’s attention now?
This is where we need to remember that Teru’s conception of ‘God’ is more shaped by Shintoism than it is by the Western idea of a God. Primarily, his God is a purifying force rather than an entity specifically. In Kira it has found an earthly vessel – the vessel of this force does not necessarily share the force’s knowledge, it has just been chosen to fulfill the force’s ideal.
This is also why Teru doesn’t really bat an eyelash that presumably none of the people he saw die so far died of heart attacks, even if that is Kira’s established MO. They were simply effects of the Kami before it took a concrete more earth-bound shape.
Back to his media appearances: we’re not really shown a lot of them in the early days, but we do know that Mikami does not only appear in the background crowd like on the above shot from Sakura TV. Generally, he doesn’t only appear on Sakura TV either but also on very respected channels such as NHN, which Takada works for.
There is only one of these instances we are shown further and to get there we are making a pretty big time skip in Mikami’s life. We just left the guy at 21, a freshly made lawyer, and jump right up to him being 26. The only thing we know about the time in between this is that he moved at age 23 (since Gevanni says he’s been living in the same apartment for 4 years) – this collides time-wise with the end of his training period. It makes sense that he would get himself a new apartment to reside in permanently with taking up his real job.
So, now we’re past this – one year before Mikami’s official canon appearance. He’s 26, an established prosecutor and taking part in a debate program on NHN called ’21st Century Discussion: the Rebuilding of Japan’ in which working people in their 20s participate.
The extract we are shown from his talk here is the only bit of Kira non-related speech we ever see Mikami give, so it’s pretty interesting on a theoretical level. Analyzing Mikami separately from his X-Kira plot is kind of hard after all since most of his scenes are related to it. On a practical level, what Mikami says here is very very general and not really enlightening though.
As we can see, he’s pretty open about his dark past at least on a superficial level. To witness something is not the same as to experience it – the tale becomes impersonal put this way. (However, I do not know which terms are used in the Japanese so this nuance might be a translation coincidence.)
Moral-wise what he’s saying is just an opinion we see him repeat implicitly in his orders as X-Kira later: everyone should use their full abilities to contribute to a functional society. Mikami dislikes crime most of all, but aimlessness comes in second – considering his history with bystanders I would not be surprised if it seemed as a precursor to crime to him.
In this particular talk, the debate also comes to Kira as Mikami reminisces, but we don’t know what is being said. The only thing revealed to us is that this is when Takada first sticks out to him since he picks up on her eyes changing as the topic is addressed.
Despite the fact that he noticed this, he shows no personal incentive to talk to her. He’s sensitized for other people who care about Kira, but reaching out to people on a personal level seems to be something he has given up on. (Gevanni does not note any social activity during the time span he observes Mikami, so saying that the man doesn’t really have friends seems appropriate.)
Because of this, I can never stop appreciating how Takada succeeds in dragging Mikami out of his shell. She’s an assertive person and the one seeking exchange with Mikami.
I really like the visuals we are given for their first conversation during the show. Mikami is seated and hunched over – his position is focused on the drink (Water? Coffee?) in his hand – he doesn’t seem like he was expecting to be approached. She’s standing, thus visually towering over him and engaging him in conversation – confronting him with her opinions.
They don’t immediately go into a friendship but as coincidence (hah) has it, they meet again and again over news coverage on cases he’s been involved with. That’s what it takes to convince them to meet privately as well (looks like they went out for fancy dinners) – which might well establish Takada as Mikami’s only non-work related acquaintance. We’re not really given reason to believe they were overtly close as people, but being friends at all is pretty astounding with Mikami.
Interestingly enough, he still does not value her ideals as being totally correct. A ‘more or less’ is all he gives her. Mikami is incredibly arrogant when it comes to this – the conviction that it’s only his own ideals that are 100% correct and 100% in accordance with Kira is strong in him. He hasn’t opened up to let someone stand at equal height with him.
Back to Mikami’s media presence and fast-forward another year, we get to the point where he is unknowingly spotted by Kira. The panels this is shown in are Mikami’s first appearances in canon and thus serve as the first impression a reader would have of him. A very apt first impression.
There is only one word really coming to my mind with this amount of line-face: stoic. Mikami sticks out like a sore thumb in a rally of Sakura TV Kira supporters, who are all enthusiastic and loud. Contrary to everyone else, Mikami is dressed formally (fun fact: aside from his gym appearance, we only ever see him with button down shirts) and his expression remains as a constant scowl all the way through. The most overt enthusiasm he displays is subdued clapping.
We’ve spoken a lot about Mikami’s internal feelings so far, from now on it’s time to take a closer look at his outward behavior. Even though we know Mikami feels deep passion for Kira, he doesn’t let it show in the way he carries himself. Mikami is a controlled person with minimal expressiveness.
At least his questionnaire is a little bit more expressive. In it’s own way….
Mikami is obviously a person who believes in saying only what is necessary. Superfluous chatter is not his style, especially not to the likes of Sakura TV. The only people worth being spoken about are Kira and…. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. I have never seen anybody but Mikami use his full name, so this tells you something about what kind of perfectionist he is.
There is an excursion about Churchill and why Mikami likes him that should be done here, but I am not yet qualified to make it, so we’ll skip over it for now.
What’s interesting aside from minimalism and Churchill is how incredibly open Mikami is about his devotion to Kira as ‘God’ specifically. In that time, Kira worship has become more and more common and that’s fascinating because it has given Mikami a platform to voice beliefs he has, at core, held since long before Kira’s appearance. The same thoughts that would have seemed delusional back then are now something he can voice openly without even putting his career in danger. Kira has given reality to ideas that should have remained unprovable forever.
And… this is it. We’ve made it through all of Mikami’s life up to his actual official canon introduction to the plot. Only took like 6.000 words or something.
Mikami is an unbelievably entitled person. God has come down to earth and rather than being particularly humble about, Mikami feels that he is deserving of a spot at God’s side. To him, that’s obvious. In a sea of unrighteous, he is the only one who understands true morals. Mikami literally is incapable of acknowledging anybody but himself as being in the right at this point – so obviously he has to be the most special and deserving person on earth, isn’t that so?
But even though this panel states that ‘He too had become a god’, his further treatment of Light in canon makes very clear that Mikami does not view himself as being on equal footing with him. He may have also become a vessel to the force, a person able to pass judgement, but he never comes to view himself as the primary instance of it. The sharing of the power is all that is referenced here, it’s not a statement on hierarchy.
This is something deeply ingrained in how his mind works. The validation has to come from the outside. Mikami always needs something external (even if he has to make it up) that justifies him. He takes pleasure in being right but the condition for being right is that ‘objective right and wrong’ exist – Mikami is obsessed with the idea that the universe is structured this way, that it’s natural, that there is an irrefutable moral guideline that cannot be challenged.
Recognizing himself as the highest moral instance would simultaneously mean acknowledging that there is no inherent given order. This would make all of Mikami’s self collapse onto itself. The very core he has build himself around would disappear.
No matter how self-righteous he becomes, no matter how many others he rejects because they don’t fit his moral…. Mikami will never be able to realize that he’s the one making the rules in his head.
I always emphasize how much Mikami is using Kira in this regard. He latches onto this idea of God because it’s the only way Mikami can keep going, keep making on rules while passing off the responsibility for these rules to someone or something else.
There is something sad about this level of self-delusion.
Phew, that was a lot of introspection again. We’re zooming back out to the surface again because the next thing we’re shown are shots of Mikami’s living situation.
Here’s his apartment complex in Sakyo-ku, Kyoto. Noteworthy about this address is that the Sakyo-ku district is the same that Kyoto University is located in. Assuming Teru originally had an apartment close to the campus as to not have to commute far, he stayed in the area even after finishing his education. (Although the manga names the prosecutor’s office he works in as ‘West’ the only prosecution I could find in real world Kyoto is quite close to the University campus as well though, so if this applies to the manga too, then it makes twice as much sense.)
The building he lives in seems rather exclusive and doubtlessly his apartment is expensive – as a prosecutor he makes good money and is able to afford things for the first time in his life.
Looking at his bookshelves, we can see he goes wild with it.
I’ll count the transitions in the glass panels that protect his bookshelves as dividers between bookshelf segments for an easy attempt to count his books. There are at least 4 of these segments on each side that we can see (so 8 total), each housing at least 5 shelves of books. One shelf-segment alone houses at least 12 books – we can’t see any of the segments fully but from counting on with rough distances, there should be around 20 books in each shelf segment.
With 5×8 rows of 20 books each that brings us to around …. 800 books in this panel alone. We don’t know how much further his bookshelves extend or what the rest of his apartment looks like.
Someone has a collector’s problem. I guess this pins us on Mikami’s first free time interest: he’s an avid reader.
Judging from the one close-up of his books we get, most of them are about law – which is not surprising. There is also one about Post-WWII history though, which also marks the timing of Japan’s major constitution change, but I also take this to mean he is overall interested in politics and political history. After all, society progressing is close to his heart.
This (as well as the previously shown panel of him holding the note up in worship) also introduces us to another nice habit Mikami has: his dramatic worship antics.
For all his face lacks expression in daily life, he is actually pretty pronounced when it comes to how he expresses his dedication in private. There will be a few more instances like this. Whether it’s dramatic kneeling or softly stroking the notebook, Mikami likes to express his enthusiasm for serving God physically. Since these acts of reverence take place when nobody can see him, they are obviously private representations for himself. Usually stoic, Mikami takes joy in expressing his privilege of being chosen in any way he can. He’s savoring it.
So… Mikami has the note, he’s X-Kira now. Time to look at how he deals with this. Or deals with Demegawa, really, who at that point has started a donation drive to build Kira a palace.
Mikami is not amused by this kind of sensationalism. He immediately goes to reflect on Kira’s stance on this – Demegawa is, up until now, Kira’s assigned spokesperson after all. Pretty quickly Mikami figures that him having received the note must mean Kira is unable to act himself, especially in light of the fact that there haven’t been judgments in a while.
Having figured this, Mikami draws his conclusions. He decides that his job has to be to think for Kira and act in ways that would benefit Kira. There is an incredible degree of confidence at display here – Mikami is sure that he will be able to judge accurately what Kira wants and needs. These is no doubt in his head that his ideas align with Kira. He’s righteous after all, right?
(The circularity is always astounding. He’s right because he’s righteous and he’s righteous because he’s right.)
Teru immediately makes the eye trade and kills Demegawa. It’s amazing how this is a choice he makes on the fly, rather than at least considering it for an hour or two. After all whom he is killing is someone who has been proven to be appointed by God himself.This is another noteworthy something about Mikami – he is a quick decision maker when it comes to judgments, both on an action and an emotional level. Like it only took him a few moments to reject his mother, it only takes him very little thought to decide over people’s life and death now.
The idea that he’s making a mistake and Kira doesn’t want Demegawa dead doesn’t even cross his mind. In a sense, Mikami is similar to Light in thinking that he cannot fail.
The act of killing on live television is also a clear demonstration of Kira’s power and a corrective measure to make the public see that Demegawa’s motivations, despite him being the acting Kira spokesperson, do not align with Kira’s views here.
Otherwise, I don’t think I have to greatly discuss how far Mikami’s dedication goes that he would throw away half of his life for the eyes without hesitation. One way or another, Light would have expected him to make the trade but Mikami does not act like someone who is reluctant. Rather, he thanks Ryuk for this eye ability. He is glad to have gotten it. Half of his life is nothing in turn for being able to help his God – Mikami’s great willingness for self-sacrifice for a cause he agrees with shows again.
His own well-being on a physical level always comes in second to his morals.
(On a short note about the eyes: as per Death Note rules, having the eyes grants a person perfect eyesight – Mikami does not actually need glasses past this point, but has to wear them anyway to keep up his act of normalcy. Poor guy.)
We’re now also introduced to one of Mikami’s most notorious habits – the repetition of the term ‘delete’ as he writes names into the Death Note. This is an interesting contrast of Mikami’s character – on the one hand he is a character who lacks expression and tends to keep everything inside, not even allowing his face to change according to situations. In the other hand he is someone who thrives on externalization. The few times we see him feel joy are most often paired with conscious movements and expressions meant to act out these emotions.
Externalization is a topic I’ll also come back to when it comes to how Mikami’s neat freak nature reflects on how he wants to see the world (duh). In this case, what’s externalized is just the reality of his capability to deliver punishment.
Another aspect of Mikami’s that shows in this habit is his love of repetition. We haven’t covered it yet, but the man is absolutely obsessed with repeating the same schedule over and over again. Repition means order and order is what matters most to Mikami, as we already established in abundance.
As for word choice… It’s not just the English that has the term be the same as the computer key. The Japanese word ‘Sakujo’ is likewise used for the delete on a keyboard:
削除 sakujo noun, suru verb, no adjective
1. elimination; cancellation; deletion; erasure; DEL (key)
I’m not sure if it’s just me but ‘deleting’ seems to carry a certain implication of ‘removing something without a trace left behind’ – which is pretty close to what Mikami would like to ultimately achieve with the crime of the world.
The term seems to have come to represent the fulfillment of everything he has wished for since he was a child. As such, it holds a rather amazing power. It allows him to get lost in the world of dream fulfillment that is writing names / killing people to him.
Very lost. Do you ever get so absorbed in murdering that you forget the monstrous looking god of death in your room entirely? Hopefully not. Mikami just loves ‘passing judgement’ a whole lot.
Even though he and Ryuk spend a bit of time together, canon hardly elaborates on it. This is sad, but there is still a lot about Teru’s view on the divine to be extrapolated from their few interactions.
While Mikami takes care to ask this question at least twice (which is exceptional in itself for someone like him who tends to stick to his choices and views once they are formed), there is a clear divide shown between how he perceives Kira in contrast to literal Kami/Shinigami.
What this shows is that for Mikami, Godhood is not defined by supernatural ability primarily. He will not believe in a God because they are out of this world, he will believe in a God because he perceives them to be righteous. Since he knows Ryuk isn’t Kira, he can disregard him as easily as we are shown – shinigami as creatures are of no relevance to Mikami. As long as they don’t meddle with human affairs in significant ways, they are unimportant. The knowledge of their existence doesn’t seem to change anything for Mikami in the slightest. His beliefs about universal structure go unharmed even by confrontation with the supernatural.
Since Japan is not defined by monotheistic religion, it obviously doesn’t come as any kind of surprise for Mikami that there is more than one type of Kami. His treatment of Gods is just interesting in the sense that he acknowledges the existence of more than one element that qualifies as Kami one way or another, but chooses to worship only one. Kami can exist without being his Kami and this is no issue to Mikami at all.
What Mikami acknowledges as God is entirely based on the actions this God takes. If Light had the same power, but didn’t use it to change the world this way, he would not be Mikami’s God. It’s simple as that.
What makes Kira God is the coincidence that both will and means to act in Mikami’s favor collide in him. The knowledge that God’s embodiment is human in nature doesn’t matter to this either.
Mikami is delighted to serve him either way. Kira is the one thing that can bring a smile on his lips. His eyes that are usually drawn without any light in them are positively shining as he can act out this purpose. If it weren’t mass-murder, he’d be downright adorable here.
Moving along in the plot, Mikami is pretty strongly proving prevalent fanon about him wrong. Popular opinion has it that he only acts on orders and is incapable of doing much else, but it really couldn’t be further from the truth.
Mikami does not shy down from independently assessing Kira’s situation and very clearly forming his own opinions on how the building of the new world is to proceed. ‘I can’t let the Kira movement stop. Now is the time to change the world….’ – these are not the words of someone who is only subserviently waiting for someone else to do the thinking for him. Mikami may view himself as a devout follower first and foremost, but his own initiative is strong in all of his actions. Kira is more of a subconscious figurehead leader as Mikami pushes his own agenda forward.
Still, he does have awareness that to much independent action might be overstepping his boundaries…. So he makes a choice to ask for permission.
As we can see here, even in interaction with Kira himself, Mikami is quite proactive. Going back on TV to contact Kira is a very risky and bold move. (It is amusing that Light watches this and still fully believes Mikami will not act independently later on – even something like killing Takada out of his own volition finds perfect precedent here.)
This speech is less someone passively waiting for orders because he can’t move without them and sounds much more like ‘I command you to command me’, to me personally.
On the amusing side, Mikami’s contempt for Sakura TV shows beautifully here. Even though he is on TV on the cover of advertising for them, he ignores their instructions and helpless comments absolutely. He’s just using them and even covering up for himself can’t quite bring him to lower himself to a position where he would let words of promotion for their program leave his lips.
The Mikami way of life: spoken out loud on television. I’m just repeating this here, because I can’t underline enough how much this holds true not only for this specific situation but for his overall way of acting. Although his specific reason here is to reach out to Light, he still presents this as a maxim to go by for the whole viewership. It’s one he certainly lives by, personally.
Here’s another panel of Mikami considering Kira’s new spokesperson that I am mainly adding in because of the nice simultaneous occurrence of implicitly praising Takada (for having these qualities) and shit-talking Sakura TV (for not having these qualities at all).
The most excited Sakura TV audience member. The reasons he even still uses the program are that Kira has previously chosen it for official announcements and the fact that it’s fairly easy to get a speaking part, since their show relies heavily on audience statements as it seems.
Now with Takada chosen as a suitable spokesperson, Mikami!Kira wastes no time in establishing the position Kira is to have within the new world. There is a distinct air of ‘world domination’ to this statement – Kira is the law worldwide, the ultimate government. Teru, who otherwise is a very law-abiding person, also recognizes flaws of current legal situations and places Kira above them ‘officially’. Kira is the one way to circumvent the law in a positive way, to Mikami anyway.
And the extremist positions Mikami takes continue promptly. Even though, as we know, Mikami thinks he and Kira cannot possibly disagree on anything (which is also why he can so boldly have Takada make these announcements), his position actually is different from Light’s.
Contrary to Light, Mikami is more impatient and quicker to implement new changes already. While Kira so far stood for a crime-less world, Teru immediately raises the goal up to ‘efficient society’ – which significantly widens the scope of possible Kira victims. Lazy people had nothing to fear before because they were not directly hurting others.
This also shows how dangerousgiving Mikami validation is – because it extremizes his thoughts with rapid speed. Underlying thoughts such as this fluidly turn into open threats.
But at least Light still generally agrees with Mikami’s measures here, just not with the timing. Mikami is not yet off about being on one wavelength with his God. But of course, it doesn’t take long.
There we go. The contrast to Mikami’s childhood beliefs is incredible here. Remember how he used to believe in redemption? Now he doesn’t even think people who have already sat out their jail time are deserving of being integrated into society anymore. His consistent disappointment with people has brought him to a belief that anybody who has once crossed the line to crime is irredeemable. He will not trust in anybody anymore – there are no second chances.
Light, being a slightly more sensible person, disagrees with this attitude. I think this is also a Mikami fact that is seldomly acknowledged: he is more extreme than the original Kira.
Even though he is a follower character, his moral deviates from Light’s and surpasses his in cruelty.
Noteworthy is also that these two statements are made within the first 3 days of Takada being spokesperson – Mikami is wasting no time whatsoever.
So then, Light instructs Takada to voice her opinion to Kira and Mikami, being a smart cookie, begins to understand immediately.
On an interior-design side-note, look at the amazing TV he has in his wall, despite the fact that he usually watches TV on his computer instead. He clearly does not lack money now.
Also note how he considers it ‘like Takada’ at baseline to voice her opinion even when confronted with Kira – her assertive nature is something he is well aware of.
Even so, her sudden lacking neutrality is a character break that makes him feel that something is off. On pages where his reasoning is set parallel to Near mulling over the same issue, Mikami figures that the only person who could instruct her to do something like this is Kira.
Even though the end result of this line of thought is completely correct, he actually makes rather amusingly many assumptions here. In reality, he underestimates who all could be influencing Takada. After all, Light hasn’t actually revealed himself to her, so any influence he has on her is as charming young Mr. Yagami instead of as the god of the new world.
Mikami is very much judging her by his own standards – the idea that she just has regular people who are close to her and influence her doesn’t even cross his mind.
Either way, he decides to contact her about it. To prove he’s Kira, Sakura TV comes in handy once more…. As Kira Mikami keeps his phrases harsh and brief, but he still cannot insist throwing in a short insult about the current Kira’s Kingdom host.
…. and yes, I am done talking about how much he hates Sakura TV now.
So then, Mikami goes on to ask Takada about her current surroundings and company. He is told she’s with a friend.
The idea that she just has a secret boyfriend, again, just doesn’t cross his mind at all. Even though there would be something quite realistic about this consideration. Sometimes it’s hard to think outside your own scope of mind, huh Mikami?
Well, this can only mean one thing, Mikami thinks …..
Mikami is very lucky that Takada’s secret boyfriend is coincidentally also God.
At this revelation, Mikami’s attitude does a 180 degree turn.
He’s stuttering (I went and checked the Japanese to make sure because I was so amazed).
No trace of his curt Kira persona is left anymore, his speech immediately changes to polite and formal. His eyes are shown as lively again.
Shooting up from his chair here is one of the most impulsive and non-filtered actions we ever see Mikami take – a testament to his joy. I don’t really need to stress that this seems like the fulfillment of everything he has worked for in the past years to him, an incredibly emotional event.
Regardless of it, he snaps back into rational quick-thinking mode very fast and even the manic grin leaves his face after only a second. Even at the height of emotion self-control is key.
After he and Light settle the details, Mikami gets back to representative physical expression again. He has a strong preference for ritualized, formal displays of worship for Kira – even when Kira cannot actually see them. In a way, even these shows of reverence are something Mikami does for himself to cherish the moment. The hand-on-heart gesture is meant to show subservience, but here it is mainly just for Mikami’s private enjoyment of the formalities.
Now we’re breezing past a few Mikami-unrelated plot-developments until we make a brief stop at the point where Mikami is informed that he is to send Death Note paper to Takada.
After all I have pointed out that Mikami does more independent thought and decision making than he does blindly follow Light over the course of canon, we finally reach a counter-example where Mikami, now directly under Light’s orders, swallows his doubt in favor of faith.
He does see himself as a servant and as long as he can be entirely certain of Kira’s orders, Mikami is not likely to break with them. The issue is that as soon as he cannot check back with Light anymore, Mikami starts thinking and acting on his own.
It’s important to keep these two patterns in mind when thinking about Mikami – neither considering him someone who can’t move without order nor considering him disobedient do his character justice.
As side-notes: Mikami seems visibly displeased that the privilege of passing judgement / writing in the note may be taken from him. It’s actually sad how much the man enjoys killing.
Also I like how he just keeps on writing even when he’s not looking at his paper and otherwise pretty distracted.
Now we’re skipping ahead through a few other Mikami-less chapters until the point where Near has discovered Mikami as X-Kira and sends Gevanni to observe him. For analysis purposes, this observation period is worth gold. We do not usually see Mikami go about his daily life much, so having another character tail him and reveal his behavior to us is very useful.
Instead of covering the bits of information as they appear throughout the chapters, I’ve decided to pile up all relevant statements Gevanni makes about Mikami’s habits and cover them all at once.
So. Schedules.
I was debating heavily about whether or not to do this analysis in chronological order and one of the downsides was that I would have to mention this keypoint of his character so terribly, terribly late.
Mikami’s life is extremely reliant on schedules and repeating the same patterns over and over and over. His gym habits illustrate this nicely, because we can clearly see that he doesn’t intend to budge from his schedules even on holidays. He isn’t just someone who likes to plan ahead a little, he is someone who wants to have every day of the next year structured in advance and so on.
We’re given very specific times for his workouts (if he works out until 10:30 and leaves the gym at 11 overall then we can deduce the man takes 30 minutes to shower and change / get ready – ah, beautiful trivia) and as you can see, it takes Mikami an hour to get home from the gym.
He spends roughly two hours in public transport for the way there and back, twice a week, just so he can make sure that even things like New Years won’t get in the way of his training regimen. That’s some… uh, dedication to regularity.
What Teru does is turn his values outside. On a meta level he desires nothing more than structure and cleanliness – a world with binary good / evil opposition and a lack of the evil side. It’s this desire for order (and consequently control, an environment without randomness and accidents) that carries over into his daily life in the form of schedules. He may not be able to put the whole world back in order at once, but he has full control over his own schedule and it’s easy to compensate there.
The fact that he’s somewhat of a clean freak obviously ties into this complex as well. Especially considering the fact that he’s been quite literally tossed in the dirt over and over as a child, it’s logical that Mikami yearns for a dirt-free environment. He might well be metaphorically washing off the negative influence of others, the marks that have been left on him.
Looking at his apartment, both these aspects are reflected very well in the orderly, minimalistic and sterile-looking living space.
The only thing that takes priority enough to break through Mikami’s obsession with keeping a consistent schedule is statedly work – Gevanni specifically points out that Mikami adjusts his hours to his workload. Order does not take compulsive priority over everything, it’s just that Mikami does not have other things he would consider worthy of being prioritized.
And for a final comment on the gym, specifically:
I find it noteworthy that the only thing we see Mikami doing is muscle training specifically. As he is somebody who was physically abused quite regularly, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume he wants to shape-up on top of just staying healthy specifically to avoid a repeat of such a situation and be strong enough to hold his ground in situations where he hypothetically has to defend somebody again. I doubt Mikami actually expects getting into brawls or anything though, so this appears more as an underlying motivation in my thoughts.
In the actual plot, Mikami now has to stage fake executions to convince Gevanni he is the acting X-Kira. There is nothing particularly interesting about that scheme in itself, but his choice of victim deserves a few words.
It’s this guy. His crime is the attempt to lift this girl’s skirt, but mostly he is only verbally harassing her. The blush-lines also seem to indicate him as a drunk. On the scale of criminals he is more than just small-fry. Mikami’s opinion?
Teru ‘Zero Tolerance For Sex Offenders’ Mikami. I’m not really pointing this out to pass value judgement on this murder, so much as saying it’s interesting to contrast this with Light’s second kill. Takuo Shibuimaru was in a similar situation of offense (he had not lifted any skirts though, but cornered a girl with his motorcycle gang – less criminal by legal standards but more intimidating overall) when Light kills him and Light’s initial thought is that he wasn’t so bad that he necessarily had to die. Quite the difference. (To be fair, Light is not even Kira yet at this point while Mikami has built Kira mentality over years and has been murdering for a while here already – they are nowhere in similar frame of mind regarding the issue and a direct comparison of these scenes doesn’t truly reflect on their character differences.)
Additionally, it was not necessary for him to add his ‘delete’ out loud here – Gevanni has never seem him kill in private and can’t know that this is a usual habit. The fact that he killed someone would be clear enough for anybody who has knowledge of the Death Note, too.
This is really just for Mikami’s personal sense of accomplishment – even though he is just pretending to do the deed, his routine of execution is still highly important to him.
This scene also subtly demonstrates well how Mikami’s focus has shifted away from support for victims towards punishment for culprits. As a child, Mikami used to care for the well-being of those he saves most of all. Now he leaves this girl to deal with the fact that a man just died in front of her eyes without sparing a thought for it or a glance for her at all.
After this train mayhem, the next step in Light’s plan is to have Mikami assure the people investigating him that there is no shinigami around him. Mikami does this via talking to himself at break. The only thing that really helps us even a little with Mikami characterization here is how he spends his break in itself:
Alone on a bench in the same slightly hunched position we have seen before when either his mom confronts him or Takada comes to speak to him unexpectedly. Since Mikami is so completely adherent to routine, we can safely assume this is how he always spends his break at work.
On the roof, staring into nothingness on his own. The loner life is real.
Next thing that happens is Near examining Mikami’s Death Note. There isn’t really much that could be said about his other than that it reinforces the things that have been shown about Mikami previously in the manga.
Routine is once again the dominating factor.
Somewhere past this point, Teru recognizes that Gevanni has exchanged his faked notebook for a replica. Since Gevanni is supposedly quite amazing at forging, this goes to show how perceptive and thorough Mikami himself can be.
So now it happens that Mello decides he’s been out of the plot for a little too long and opts to go kidnap Takada, which is an incident covered on TV which is on in Teru’s office. Takada is able to kill Mello, calls Teru and asks him to schedule the next days’ judgments together.
And as we know, this is where shit goes down. Mikami now does not have any direct means of contacting Light and consulting with him. He also works under the assumption that Light is being watched and cannot make any moves. Light’s watch note scrap is unknown to him.
So now, being someone who thinks along, he considers Takada’s situation.
She cannot make moves or get free on her own and she has killed her kidnapper. Which means that if she gets found, she gets found with the body of someone who died by heart attack. Someone whom Kira could quite likely not know about since no face or any hint of identity were shown on the media. Were this to be found, the SPK could easily jump to the conclusion that Takada is acting as Kira at this moment and killed her kidnapper herself – even if she destroys the paper, this still suddenly would become a possibility worthy of being investigated. And this, in turn, endangers the entire plan that relies on people thinking Mikami is the one doing the killing.
Light realizes this trouble. Mikami realizes this trouble. They know this evidence needs to go.
It’s very ironic how they reach the exact same conclusion on how to go about this. Both decide that setting the truck on fire will obscure any identities and causes of death and thus give them the time to go through with the plan until the end. They even set the almost same time, only apart by a minute. The brain-twinning is impressive, looked at without context.
The issue with Mikami’s little idea is that he doesn’t actually have any access to the Death Note right now and that is where the entire trouble starts. To access the note he needs to go to the bank.
Which is a very suspicious move for someone who does not tend to act irregularly. It is especially suspicious if your name is Teru Mikami and you have astoundingly little pokerface for somebody who pulls a scowl sameface 24/7.
This was definitely dumb of him to do, but in his defense we need to emphasize that he thought this was the only chance. In his mind it’s either this risk or the entire plan failing. The idea that Light can do something doesn’t occur to him, because that’s not something that has been mentioned to him.
So he goes to the bank and kills Takada as well as arranges the killings for the next two days.
Better to do it himself than leave Takada alive and a risk for longer. Though this also means he has written all these names in while standing front of the bank deposit, which is a pretty impressive case of speed-writing.
It’s really too bad that these two don’t communicate too well. Despite having precedent of Teru not waiting for orders and instead going proactive, Light kind of assumed the guy would get entirely complacent once they had direct contact but sadly Teru does not actually take instructions as literally as Light would have wanted.
As Near says, basically. Easy for him to appreciate, since things went his way.
The details of fuck-up aside, there is some irony in this incident when you consider the details of Mikami’s belief. Takada is a person who did nothing to fall unrighteous – the circumstances that lead to her death were not her fault, she personally did not deserve to die. It was unfortunate coincidence. It’s funny that Teru, who so deeply believes you fall irredeemable once you commit a crime, immediately fucks up the moment he attempts to kill somebody who did not deserve to die on their own merit.
This isn’t to say Mikami seems like he had great regrets about Takada’s death – it was a necessary evil, a small sacrifice for the perceived greater good. In a way, I don’t think Teru considers it someone’s right to value their life higher than Kira’s success.
Takada and him might have gotten along, but there are bigger things to focus on now and so on.
Going back a tiny bit, I’d like to point out that this is the only mundane interaction we actually hear Teru have. Every other bit of talk we can ‘overhear’ is deeply related to being X-Kira and can’t quite count as mundane. As such, interpreting Mikami in a daily context is largely a matter of inferences from his thought structure and other conversations – it’s not something that can be done with the strictest accuracy because we lack the sample size.
So this is where the finale in the warehouse should be described. It won’t be. That is because I have already written a very very extensive post on the subject that I can just conveniently link here.
I need to say upfront first that I agree with Matsuda’s theory on Mikami’s death.
I absolutely agree that it is most logical for Near to have written Mikami into the notebook and I take it a step further and say that a lot of how Mikami acts has been controlled via Near’s Death Note entry as well. If you want to read up on the how and why of this theory, here is casuistor’s post explaining the general outline as well as my addendum discussing Mikami’s warehouse behavior specifically.
I don’t think viewing it this way is the only possible option. This is a Schrödinger’s Cat case and Ohba himself has said that there is no right answer and it’s been left open for individual fan interpretation. In this sense, I absolutely don’t fault people for not buying into the theory, it’s just the one way of reading that makes sense to me. The above posts are thus what would complete this analysis of my view on Mikami.
That said, I do think that the 50/50ness of this state makes it awkward to just dismiss Mikami’s whole breakdown as irrelevant to his character. To just completely disregard a chunk of canon for a character who already gets very little canon characterization is irksome to me.
While I do not believe Mikami’s breakdown in the finale is natural, I do believe Mikami capable of unwinding in similar fashion. I do certainly believe that he could and would reject and insult Light violently if he felt that Kira does not match the picture he made of his God after all.
Mikami’s loyalty is not to Kira but to the God in his mind – it is certainly not loyalty to Light Yagami as a person. He doesn’t even know Light. They spoke once prior to warehouse, there is no time for Mikami to develop a specific loyalty to Light as an individual.
Their names reflect this nicely. Light is read as, well, ‘light ‘– which shows how he is perceived, especially by Teru. The radiant savior. Light’s name is written as ‘moon’ however. As we know, the moon cannot shine on its own but rather reflects other sources of light. Fittingly, the name Teru is spelled with the kanji for ‘illumination’. This sums them up. Mikami sees his own beliefs reflected in Light, but is tricked to believe they originate from Light instead.
I would like to wrap up this analysis with a brief consideration of the time prior to Mikami’s death.
We are told that Near destroys the notes immediately at the warehouse – this means Mikami loses his memory of having been Kira and anything else relates to the Death Notes then and there.
And the fascinating thing is that this means Mikami remembers a completely normal life. Since he’s been pretending to go about his daily life all this time, you can actually cut out his memory of being Kira without it resulting in any recollection of odd behavior. As far as Mikami now can recall, he’s been living completely as usual until January 26th when he somehow went to the bank twice.
And now it’s January 28th and he’s in a warehouse and has no memory of how he entered it. The whole conversations having taken place prior were note-related and thus would be wiped from his memory. Mikami basically wakes up from a daze with a bloody corpse in front of him. Like Misa remembers her love for Light, he likely remembers his feelings for the man as well – prior worship and immense disappointment (that, if Near did write it in, is fake but not recognized as fake by Mikami himself).
Likely enough, Mikami would overhear further conversation between SPK and task force about Light being Kira so it’s probably not particularly hard for a man of his intelligence to accurately reconstruct all the things he cannot remember including his attempt to kill Takada (although he would not remember not succeeding, so it’d remain questionable to him).
In prison, Mikami is thus left with the bare-bones intellectual knowledge of what he did while being completely deprived of any reasoning he actually had for what happened. He knows his wildest dream came true, but he cannot remember it. He knows it fell apart but he cannot specifically remember how either – not how it’s his fault and not how exactly he feels and especially thinks about the dead man he can deduce was Kira.
It’s a strange state between knowing and not knowing that he is left to reflect in for 10 days. And if Near manipulated his reaction to Light, there are things about it that he will never be able to make sense to himself because they don’t actually originate from his own mindset.
We don’t know how he dies – ‘goes crazy and dies’ is a very vague description that seems to implicate suicide and yet does not spell it out. This ambiguity is interesting, because Mikami committing suicide as a convicted felon would not be surprising at all – yet we are left in the dark, other options remaining open.
Imagining Mikami’s last days in prison is a sad thought, because Mikami is someone who relies so much on certainty and is left spending the rest of his life in a total absence of it.
This concludes my updated thoughts on this rigid man. If you want to talk to me about any aspect of this essay, please feel welcome to!
pseudomiracle 