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Befitting Bedfellows: Yakuza and the State in Modern Japan

2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jsh/shr120

1527-1897

Eiko Maruko Siniawer,

Crime Patterns and Interventions

On a fall afternoon in 1919, several dozen yakuza bosses—heads of Japanese mafia groups—climbed into cars at a Tokyo hotel. The caravan of smartly dressed men then proceeded to the Home Ministry for an appointment with top ministry officials, including the home minister himself. This meeting between Home Minister Tokonami Takejirō and Kansai-area bosses eventually led to the founding of an influential nationalist group of the interwar era: the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai (Greater Japan National Essence Association). What made this event notable was not just the seemingly remarkable cooperation between yakuza and a minister of state, but its coverage in the media as relatively unremarkable. Newspapers listed the names of all the participating yakuza bosses, and the tone of the published articles was utterly mundane and matter-of-fact.1 This collaborative moment in October 1919 was but part of a larger story about the close relationship between yakuza and the state—the Home Ministry and to a lesser extent the military and the police. In the late 1910s and 1920s, they came together for various, interconnected reasons having to do with ideological kinship, financial interest, and a shared attitude toward the use of violence. In the shadow of the Russian Revolution, both yakuza and the state were deeply concerned about the upsurge in leftist activism and labor union strikes that were perceived as unpatriotic threats to societal stability. The state had much to gain from uninterrupted, capitalist production and yakuza were more than happy to accept the payment of company management willing and able to hire them as strikebreakers. Yakuza and the state also came together out of a mutual characteristic: the purposeful use of violence as a means to exert and maintain power. It may come as no surprise that the mafia and the state operated through the use of physical force and viewed violence as a significant, instrumental tool, with violence being defined here as physical coercion of the physical body. More surprising may be that both, including the state, were implicated in what might be called criminal violence—violence that was illegal, as defined by the laws promulgated by the state itself, and used for illicit ends.2 For all of these reasons, the yakuza and the state became bedfellows in a world where the legitimacy of their violence was ambiguous.