‘Yakuza’ looks into the Japanese underworld

Even among organized crime groups, which are everywhere a subject of fascination, the yakuza hold a special place in the public imagination. Perhaps it is their reputation for honor, their ornate tattoos, the fact that they operate in such an orderly society, or all of the finger cutting.In Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld, Andrew Rankin, who holds a doctorate in Japanese literature from Cambridge University, tells the story of Japan’s yakuza from the shogunate through the present. This is a fascinating look at yakuza gangs, or “Chivalry Groups,” as they prefer to be known, and the important and distinct role they have played in the development of modern Japan as they went from gambling groups filling in for limited state capacity to the boardrooms of multinational corporations (often there to extort them, of course). In the process, Rankin gives readers a thorough history of Japan itself, referencing many texts and personal accounts described in English for the first time.The first, and most fascinating, thing to know about yakuza — “the Yakuza,” implying a unified society, is an inaccurate Western media invention — is that these organizations have never been illegal. Yakuza groups are listed in the phone book and have headquarters you can walk into, secretaries you can speak to, and decorations on their walls, ranging from calligraphy showing their creed (in one instance, “Solidarity. Silence. Retribution”) to pictures of fallen members or letters from children they have helped following disasters. Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld; By Andrew Rankin; Basic Books; 400 pp.; $32.00. At times, they will even give press conferences or allow themselves to be identified by name in the media as members of their society. In structure, they are not particularly different from charitable fraternal organizations that volunteer to perform state-like functions, such as disaster relief and medical assistance, all over the world. Members and branches pay dues, and this is a large part of their legal income. Incredibly, they may also license the use of their logos as if they were a sports team.Of course, all of this is a cover for massive criminal operations, and, as the author notes, if you look up the legal charges these men are facing, it presents an entirely different picture than what they tell the media. What this means for the book is that, unlike stories of organizations that claim they don’t exist, such as the mafia in America — where it seems much of what is known about them is a fantasy of the FBI, fed by informants saying what they want to hear — quite a lot is known about yakuza that is verifiable from information they have chosen to release over the centuries.Proto-yakuza groups first formed in the early days of the shogunate, when the end of wars in Japan turned samurai into administrators. They were often in need of money, being paid in rice and prohibited from taking part in trade. Consequently, they would look for various semilegal work, such as guarding dice games. Gangs also formed among the lower classes, and they all ultimately converged. Since under the feudal system, each daimyo (the equivalent of a count) was responsible for the security of his fiefdom, paying off sketchy groups to keep order in the underworld was a convenient method of social management. Amusingly, yakuza got many of their most distinct customs from the private fire brigades of the time.Gambling, long illegal but tolerated and popular in Japan, has always been the mainstay yakuza business. In addition to hosting games, yakuza deal in security, loan sharking, and the mediation of all sorts of disputes. They also typically ran the “pleasure districts,” where prostitution was legal and regulated. Later, when prostitution was banned, but all sorts of sex-adjacent activities were still allowed, this too was run by yakuza. We learn the extent to which yakuza did actually observe many laws by being involved in all sorts of business of ill repute while avoiding major crimes such as armed robbery, kidnapping for ransom, and (for a time) the drug trade.It is a common experience when reading a mainstream work of nonfiction to encounter various liberal platitudes that the conservative reader must learn to ignore. To my surprise, this was not the case here — in fact, some conservative views were casually expressed. For example, Japan had a sort of “untouchable” caste called “burakumin” that became eligible for a variety of affirmative action programs in the 1960s, about which Rankin writes: “In Japan at the time there was minimal awareness of the ways that antidiscrimination policies and activism might lead to unintended consequences or become susceptible to criminal exploitation.” While the implication that there is clear awareness of this in the modern West is amusing, Rankin explains the hazards of antidiscrimination programs with remarkable clarity. Yakuza made a real racket out of it, getting activists to claim discrimination and then getting paid off to go away, and exploiting special deals on land and other benefits. As yakuza recruited heavily from these communities, they were able to claim prejudice if their associates were accused of racketeering. Rankin also explains that when Japan liberalized immigration, many foreigners entered on student visas with the intention of committing crimes.AN EXPANSIVE, INFORMATIVE HISTORY OF FISHING IN CALIFORNIA The book drags a bit at times, but in a funny way, this reflects the subject matter. The truth is that yakuza are typically quite orderly and, at times, are little more than security companies that offer various mediation services and run a variety of legal businesses. Throughout the text, there is plenty of exciting material on vice and gang warfare and such, but that is just not all that yakuza do. Particularly in the bubble of the 1980s, much of their income derived from buying and reselling property persistently to increase its value — a profitable grift but not the most interesting one.Currently, yakuza are in deep decline as the government has implemented ever more policies designed to cripple their activities, though the organizations remain legal. They have further suffered from increased public awareness and pressure not to use yakuza services. The government has also taken over some of their business. For example, pachinko — a popular pinball-like, semilegal gambling game — was long one of the main yakuza businesses. Now, instead of permitting the yakuza protection racket, a governmental body staffed by former police officers has control over licensing and goes around making the parlors pay to stay open and providing supplies at inflated prices. By all accounts, they have simply taken over the yakuza racket. As the history of yakuza shows, perhaps the libertarians are right that the state and the mafia aren’t so different.Brad Pearce writes The Wayward Rabbler on Substack and is also a regular contributor to the American Conservative and the Libertarian Institute. He lives in eastern Washington with his wife and two children.