The Yakuza and the Way of the Would-Be Warrior

The dream of the traditionalist outlaw fighting for justice is much older than the movies. As Andrew Rankin observes in his gripping new book, “Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld” (Basic), “Japanese gangsters have spent the past few centuries fashioning an image based on warrior culture, while pretending to uphold a code of chivalry and honor.”

Rankin traces the myth all the way back to around 100 B.C.E., when Sima Qian, the first great Chinese historian, wrote about highway robbers who did “their utmost to honor any agreement they have made, all without the slightest concern for their own safety.” Even more influential in shaping the Japanese-mobster style was “Water Margin,” a fourteenth-century Chinese novel about twelfth-century bandit heroes who robbed the rich and protected the common people against venal and oppressive officials.

Rankin’s study of the Japanese underworld really begins in the early seventeenth century. The Tokugawa shogunate had brought a period of civil wars to an end, and during the long, uninterrupted peace under its iron rule there were fewer opportunities for men who had been trained to fight. Many samurai became bureaucrats. Only criminals still made a living from violence. Déclassé warriors, sometimes joined by street toughs from other walks of life, gave themselves the airs of swashbuckling samurai. It was then that, in Rankin’s words, “some elements of Japan’s popular culture began to look for models of heroism, loyalty, and self-sacrifice in outlaws or people living on the edge of the criminal world.” Gamblers, robbers, and firefighters provided the glamour of derring-do in a pacified and increasingly mercantile society.

Much of what later became known as Bushido, the way of the warrior, was also developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most famous Bushido text, “Hagakure” (“The Book of the Samurai”), written in the early eighteenth century by a samurai turned clerk, prescribed ideals of honorable warrior conduct in minute detail. But this was really a form of dandyism, of theatre—a bit like jousting in Europe during the late Middle Ages, when combat between knights had become a performance of chivalry.

Although Japanese versions of the classic Chinese outlaw tales had circulated since the eighteenth century, the images that proved most influential appeared in the early nineteenth, when artists such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi made prints depicting these Robin Hood figures with intricate full-body tattoos. The prints helped set off a tattoo craze, and the style they popularized became closely associated with Japan’s criminal underworld. Some gangsters still wear elaborate designs all over their bodies, and the association with the yakuza remains strong enough that most public baths, swimming pools, and saunas in Japan shun tattooed customers. (That can create complications when Japan hosts international sporting events and tattooed athletes and fans arrive from abroad.)

As Japan entered a period of political upheaval in the mid-nineteenth century, criminal gangs became useful in a new way. In 1854, the U.S. fleet, under Commodore Matthew Perry, had forced the Japanese to open their ports to foreign ships, exposing Japan’s vulnerability. The panicked Japanese élites divided broadly into three camps: those who would appease the foreigners and submit to the unequal treaties; those who would fight the barbarians to the death; and those who would keep the foreigners at bay while modernizing the nation to resist further encroachments. The shogunate’s government chose appeasement. Radicals, outraged at its concessions, wanted to fight and topple the shogunate in favor of imperial rule. Reformers played for time. It was then that the Tokugawa rulers asked criminal gangs to fight the radicals on their behalf.

The alliance was an early instance of a pattern that would recur any time Japan entered a period of political or economic turbulence. Whenever the power of the state is weakened, Rankin writes, political leaders invite the yakuza bosses “to emerge from the underworld and cooperate openly with agents of the state to control unruly or subversive elements.” Relations between criminals and the authorities would become especially cozy; nostalgic references to a lost past would provide a false sense of continuity.

That history of coöperation has helped give Japanese crime its distinctive form. Petty street crime has long been quite rare, in part because criminal enterprise tends to be highly organized. As was often said of New York neighborhoods with a strong Mafia presence, tightly run hierarchical mobs like to control the streets, and have little use for violent freelancers. In Japan, this has meant not only a great deal of collusion between yakuza gangs and law enforcement but also considerable overlap between crime and politics—especially, though not exclusively, right-wing politics. None of this is unique to Japan, but it is particularly conspicuous there.

In the nineteen-seventies, I interviewed a yakuza boss, a courteous man who handed me his card, with the name of his gang embossed in gold. A rather flashy calligraphic rendering of the Chinese character for “sincerity” hung on the wall of his establishment. Green tea was served by gang members shuffling around in slippers. I noticed another guest sipping his tea. He didn’t say much, but nodded politely when the boss held forth to me about chivalry, loyalty, and ancient warrior codes. The quiet man was later introduced to me as the local police chief.

The scene was a modern echo of the old accommodation between gangsters and the state. But the criminal auxiliaries enlisted by the Tokugawa rulers were fighting for a lost cause. The shogunate fell in the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The emperor was installed in Tokyo as the absolute ruler (on paper, at least), and Japan modernized at breakneck speed. The old caste system that privileged the samurai was abolished. Japanese élites dressed in European fashions and adopted Western manners: ballroom dancing, meat eating, attending classical-music concerts, and so on. Big business and industry thrived. Rapid change and Western influence gave the yakuza all the more reason, as Rankin observes, to “cultivate a nostalgic image of themselves as upholders of old feudal ways.”

But the modernizing economy also provided organized crime with new opportunities. No longer confined to gambling dens and brothel districts, yakuza muscled their way into other businesses, some legal, some not. Among the new rackets were providing cheap workers to new industries, ruling the docks of large port cities, extorting money from trading companies, and working for political parties to intimidate rival voters. By the eighteen-nineties, crime had taken on an international dimension as Japan expanded its empire overseas and yakuza trafficked young Japanese women to brothel owners in China and Southeast Asia.

To burnish the public image and the self-image of men engaged in such sordid enterprises, all kinds of pseudo-traditional rituals and ceremonies were revived or invented. Lapses in yakuza discipline were atoned for by offering the offended party one of the offender’s fingers, wrapped in silk cloth. The funerals of yakuza bosses were highly formal affairs, often attended by politicians and business leaders. In a way, the ruthless modernity of criminal enterprise demanded a new veneer of invented tradition. This is why many classic yakuza movies are set in the late nineteenth century, when the contrast between bad guys in business suits and good guys in kimonos offered rich dramatic possibilities.

Yakuza gangs also burnished their reputation by helping ordinary citizens with problems that the authorities couldn’t or didn’t wish to handle. Local disputes were adjudicated. Loans were offered when banks refused. Businesses were protected against rival criminal predators. When democratic activists demanded greater civil rights in the late nineteenth century, some yakuza came out to guard their rallies.

“Call it a midlife crisis, but I’ve decided not to swim upstream and die.”

Cartoon by Rose Anne Prevec

But protection and help from gangsters usually have a steep price. And the idea that yakuza were on the side of the common man was rarely anything more than a pretense. They were of far greater help to powerful political and business interests. Like criminal organizations everywhere, yakuza tend to be conservative. When citizens rioted in 1918 because the prices of essential commodities such as rice had spiralled out of control, gangsters were hired to crack down on the protesters. They were also recruited to put down industrial strikes and to lean on union organizers.

The reactionary spirit of mobsters was particularly useful to the authorities when left-wing politics gained steam in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Yakuza organized ultra-nationalist outfits like the National Essence Society, which aimed to crush such noxious foreign influences as Marxism. A number of yakuza bosses even entered parliament. One of them got his start with money borrowed from his sister’s brothel. Another, Koizumi Matajiro, who sported a red-dragon tattoo on his back, had made his name as a tough guy in the dock yards of a naval base. (His grandson Koizumi Junichiro was Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006.)

In the nineteen-thirties—a decade of political assassinations, failed military coups, brutal invasions of China, and a hard-right reaction against the relative liberalism of the nineteen-twenties—the yakuza embraced the Zeitgeist with gusto. Political extremism and organized crime became increasingly entangled. Rankin singles out the remarkable career of Sakai Eizo, a racketeer who founded the Great Japanese Order of Righteousness. Sakai hired out his men to break strikes with violence, which was par for the course in his line of business. Less usual was his infatuation with Mussolini’s Blackshirts, whose uniform he adapted for his own gang. Between the wars, Sakai travelled to Rome multiple times to meet his hero. Rankin writes that he presented Il Duce with a suit of samurai armor, pledging an “eternal spiritual partnership” with the Italian Fascists. In Berlin, surrounded by grinning Storm Troopers, he briefly met Heinrich Himmler.

The Second World War was not a fruitful time for the yakuza. Brothels were closed, and few people had enough money to gamble. The economy was now under military control. Some gangs went out of business, and several mob bosses lost their fortunes. Rankin points to a character named Chubby Shino, whose “henchmen learned of his impoverishment only when they attended his funeral, and the discovery was said to have caused them much embarrassment and shame.”

Rankin has less to say about the shadowy criminal entrepreneurs who flourished in occupied China and Japanese-ruled Manchuria. Their rackets—plunder, opium trafficking, and much else—were often run not by members of established yakuza gangs but by fixers and political operators who exploited their connections with the Imperial Japanese Army. But Rankin does mention a thuggish figure named Kodama Yoshio, who worked for Japanese spy agencies in China while trading in narcotics and smuggled goods. After the war, Kodama was detained by the American occupation authorities as a suspected Class A war criminal, though he was released without trial. He later used his wartime connections to serve as a broker between yakuza gangs and right-wing politicians, while also serving as a C.I.A. asset. (A bribery scandal in the nineteen-seventies involving Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei and the Lockheed Corporation brought his colorful career to an end.)

Kodama was closely associated with an equally shady character named Sasakawa Ryoichi, who also made a great deal of money in occupied China and operated in the same postwar twilight world of officialdom, right-wing agitation, and organized crime. Sasakawa, like Sakai, was a great admirer of Mussolini, and formed the extreme right-wing Patriotic People’s Party. He, too, was imprisoned as a suspected Class A war criminal, and he liked to boast that he was “the world’s richest fascist.” After his release, he added to his fortune by turning motorboat racing into a betting enterprise. Sasakawa didn’t pretend to be a modern-day samurai. Instead, he promoted himself as a philanthropist, donating money to all kinds of causes, some of them worthy, in the hope of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize eluded him, but there is a bust of Sasakawa at the World Health Organization, in Geneva.

The decades after Japan’s defeat were a golden age for the yakuza. Cities almost entirely destroyed by American bombs had to be rebuilt. Black markets catered to the needs of a desperate population, charging extortionate prices. Guns looted from Japanese and U.S. military supplies were plentiful. Women, poor and often single because so many men had died in the war, turned to prostitution in large numbers; some, known as panpan girls, catered to American G.I.s, while others served local men. There was a lucrative trade in hiropon, a brand of methamphetamine. And many battle-hardened, unemployed veterans meant that there were fresh recruits for the yakuza gangs.

The late nineteen-forties provided another favorite setting for classic yakuza films. The mythical image of the chivalrous mobster offered a way to ease the humiliating memory of losing the war and carried a nationalist charge, exploited in movies set amid black markets, rapacious Americans, and panpan girls. In the previous decades, Japan had brought in many Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese laborers, often under duress, to work in factories and mines, usually in atrocious conditions. Many went home when the war was over, but many did not. They formed criminal gangs that fought Japanese mobsters for control of the bomb-cratered streets. In the exaggerated version of history promoted by yakuza movies of the nineteen-sixties, Korean and Taiwanese gangsters enjoyed the protection of the American occupation government. Onscreen, this ethnic conflict allowed Ken-san and other kimonoed gangsters to be presented as pure, sincere, patriotic heroes fighting for traditional Japanese values against savage aliens as well as local, gun-toting yakuza. The politics of these entertainments reflected those of the right-wing, crime-riddled organizations of prewar and wartime Japan—highly chauvinistic, hierarchical, and hostile to Western-style modernity.

In real life, the yakuza gangs were not always so xenophobic. Most crime syndicates were more welcoming to Korean recruits, for example, than mainstream corporations were. Members of the traditional outcast community, the Burakumin, who engaged in trades that Buddhists consider polluted, such as animal slaughter, were also heavily represented in yakuza gangs—so much so that political organizations standing up for outcast rights were often mobbed up. (Dominating the meat business was a highly lucrative enterprise, though that wasn’t an aspect of yakuza life that the movies showed.) At the same time, politicians and business leaders still employed yakuza for various tasks in mid-century Japan. When plans were made for a visit to Japan by President Eisenhower in 1960—it was eventually called off—there weren’t enough policemen to guard his route into Tokyo, so the yakuza were mobilized to help.

Despite the reactionary politics of the yakuza films, not to mention of the syndicates themselves, Ken-san was very popular among left-wing student protesters in the late nineteen-sixties. What could the antiwar students possibly have had in common with an anachronistic yakuza hero? Well, like the alienated yakuza loner, they hated the corrupt politicians and shady businessmen driving the economic boom. Above all, the protesters resented U.S. domination of postwar Japanese politics and culture, especially during the Vietnam War. The fact that they themselves benefitted from Japan’s booming economy and were deeply influenced by American culture only sharpened their resentments. The idea of crashing into the modern office of a capitalist gang with nothing but a samurai sword and a sense of moral righteousness had a certain romantic appeal.

In some instances, student radicalism spilled over into yakuza activities. I once met a man who had been a protest leader at the University of Tokyo in the sixties and was now working for the yakuza by digging up dirt on corporations, which his bosses used to blackmail them. He claimed that he and the yakuza were on the same side. A more public version of this racket was played out at shareholder meetings. Racketeers blackmailed companies and executives, threatened to disrupt shareholder meetings, or intimidated other shareholders to keep quiet. These extortionists, called sōkaiya, were frequently connected to extreme right-wing groups whose younger members would speed around town in trucks festooned with rising-sun flags and military regalia, blaring wartime marches through powerful loudspeakers.

After the nineteen-sixties, though, the image of Japanese gangsters began to change. Men of honor, with full-body tattoos and missing fingers, exchanging sake cups in elaborate brotherhood rituals, were becoming a bit passé, even as a fantasy. Yakuza movies kept pace. A new type of gangster picture emerged in the nineteen-seventies, edgy and hardboiled, with such titles as “Battles Without Honor and Humanity” (1973) and “Graveyard of Honor” (1975). Postwar Hiroshima was a popular setting for these movie gangsters, who fought dirty, had no use for the old ceremonies, and wore flashy suits and aviator shades. Hiroshima was, in fact, especially notorious for its criminal gangs, probably because its near-total destruction had disrupted civilian life with particular severity.

This new type of yakuza movie often featured over-the-top violence, but its depiction of the criminal underworld was more realistic than that of the classic movies I watched in the all-night cinemas. The moral distinctions among mainstream business, the yakuza gangs, and the police were often blurry. This cynical, even nihilistic attitude reflected changes in real life.

But the older image of the yakuza as protectors of the community did not disappear altogether. When Kobe, home of the Yamaguchi-gumi, was devastated by an earthquake in 1995, yakuza provided food and supplies from the parking lot of their headquarters. Beginning in 1991, however, tougher laws severely restricted the gangs’ activities and their dealings with legitimate businesses.

Rankin plausibly argues that these laws, together with the gradual exclusion of the yakuza from their old domains in entertainment, finance, and the property business, changed the nature of crime in Japan. The yakuza syndicates had a choice: they could either “cease engaging in predatory crimes targeting civilians” or “become fully criminal clandestine groups like mafias and wage war against the authorities.” “Most gangs,” he adds, “prudently took the first option.”

Of course, crime didn’t just disappear. There is still an underground economy in drugs (especially methamphetamine) and gun smuggling, and the yakuza retain a strong interest in the sex trade. But Japanese gangs now face new competition. In recent decades, Japan has become a more cosmopolitan country, with a growing immigrant population and, inevitably, some imported crime. In Tokyo and Osaka, there are Chinese gangsters, Brazilian robbers, and even a gang of thieves from Serbia and Montenegro called the Pink Panthers. As Rankin puts it, crime in Japan is “being invigorated by cultural diversity.” The newcomers have stirred up some of the same fears and prejudices that fuelled movies set in the aftermath of the Second World War. Panic about predatory outsiders is, of course, grist for the mill of right-wing populists, including the very conservative current Prime Minister, Takaichi Sanae.

No wonder, then, that members of some old syndicates now seek credit for barring such foreigners from their ranks, as though the yakuza were still defenders of a noble Japanese tradition. But Rankin mentions a Japanese mobster who was asked what the arrival of overseas competitors meant for the ancient codes of yakuza chivalry. “Rules aren’t worth shit nowadays,” he replied. “Mafias from other countries are moving into Japan. If we stick with tradition, they’ll take over all of our business.” Ken-san, my old hero, must be rolling in his grave. ♦