Ruffians Yakuza Nationalists Read online

  All of this scholarship was groundbreaking, but was fairly unconcerned with problematizing the violence of conflict and social movements. Violence was considered significant primarily as evidence of the political consciousness and vigor of the masses, speaking to arguments about popular participation in politics and the grassroots elements of Japanese democracy. There was little treatment of the possible ramifications of political violence. Nor was there much discussion of how popular violence might have connected to other forms of violent politics.17

  Violence, Violence Specialists, and Politics

  This book treats violence itself as a significant historical phenomenon, defining the kind of violence discussed here and throughout as physical coercion of the physical body. It will be noticed that I periodically use “physical force” as a synonym for “violence,” to mean and refer to this specific type of physical force that coerces the body.18 This is not to slight other forms of violence, such as psychological violence, that can have the same coercive power and cause the same mental devastation as physical violence. But there is a qualitative difference when violence is physical, when harm and pain are inflicted on the body as well as on the mind.19 Accordingly, many political theorists treat violence as an act that violates the physical body.20

  A focus on violence specialists in particular highlights the instrumental nature of violence, the ways in which violence was wielded as a political tool. The term “violence specialist” has most often been used by political theorists, such as Charles Tilly, to refer to those who concentrate on the infliction of physical damage, such as soldiers, police, armed guards, thugs, gangs, terrorists, bandits, and paramilitary forces.21 The spirit of this definition has been adopted here as it illustrates how violence is interwoven into the functioning of states and politics. But my focus is on those outside the violent arms of the state and how they can blur conceptions of legitimate and illegitimate violence.22 I thus use “violence specialists” to mean those nonstate actors who made careers out of wielding physical force in the political sphere, or who received compensation for performing acts of political violence.

  Given the messiness of defining both violence and violence specialists, a quick aside on the self-conscious use of language is in order. To the greatest extent possible, when speaking of violence specialists I have usually attempted to choose words that are neutral, that evoke the fewest connotations be they positive or negative. This is particularly true when it comes to the yakuza. I have decided to use this term rather than the English “gangster,” which may evoke romantic images of Prohibition-era bosses for a movie-watching American audience. “Gangster” is also too inclusive, referring to members of any form of organized crime from street gangs to sophisticated syndicates. Where appropriate, the yakuza have been equated specifically to a mafia, a clearly defined subset of organized crime.23 Also, I have avoided the Japanese “kyōkaku” (men of chivalry), a euphemism often employed by the yakuza themselves. This is not to say that the term “yakuza” does not have its own conceptual and linguistic baggage, but the constructed image is less uniform than “kyōkaku,” subject as yakuza are to romanticization and demonization alike. And, at the very least, the Japanese term may have fewer connotations for an American readership than does “gangster.” In generally choosing as neutral a word as possible, I am not suggesting that violence or the violent should not be judged, that there are not important moral meanings and implications to the use of physical force. But violence, in my mind, is so varied in kind and intent that it cannot be uniformly lauded or condemned. Violence used in the context of a grassroots movement for democracy, for example, is not the same as the assassination of an elected political leader or imperialist war. Charged language, then, can not only distort but also does not adequately capture this complexity. At certain points in the book I obviously do offer my own judgments of political action, and here I use terms that indicate my views, choosing “activist” or “protester” over “rioter,” for example. Care has also been taken throughout to explicitly address contemporary constructions of violence and violence specialists.

  An examination of the history of violence specialists in Japan illustrates that violence was not just a form of political expression, it was also a tool—to gain and exert influence, to attempt to control, to amass power, to disorder so as to reorder in one’s vision.24 The antagonistic nature of politics (and, arguably, democratic politics in particular) tends to cultivate the need for such an instrument, and Japan was no different as its politics were rife with contention and confrontation.25 Violence was appealing not just for its utility but also because of a political culture that, within limits, tolerated and sometimes even encouraged the wielding of physical force. Both structural and cultural factors thus made violence a seductive political tool. As such, the use of violence was attractive to activists, protesters, politicians, and statesmen alike. Violence was not just seen in occasional outbursts or political movements, though these contexts are treated here, but was also a part of the routine practice of politics.

  Violence and Democracy

  The book begins by asking what happened to the violence of the late Tokugawa period in the transition from early modern to modern rule, and what implications the violent birth of the Japanese nation-state had for the modern politics that followed. Central here is an examination of how the forerunners of modern violence specialists—shishi (“men of spirit”) and bakuto (gamblers)—navigated the pivotal years from the 1860s through the mid-1880s. Shishi were typically lower-ranking samurai who attempted to topple the early modern regime in the 1860s through a campaign of assassinations that targeted foreigners and allegedly traitorous Japanese officials. Although shishi as a political force did not survive into the Meiji period, they did leave behind a malleable precedent for patriotic and rebellious violence on which their various modern successors could selectively draw to inform and justify their own political violence. Bakuto, gamblers and a kind of yakuza, did not just leave an ideological legacy for the modern period but also became themselves violence specialists in a modern political context. Some bakuto were recruited by domains to fight in the Boshin Civil War of 1868–1869 because they were more battle tested than the samurai who had been languishing in relative inaction for some time. And in the 1880s, they were participants and even leaders in the most violent phase of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, becoming violence specialists conscious of and acting in an unquestionably political realm.

  The Freedom and People’s Rights Movement is also a jumping off point for one of the main concerns of the book: exploration of the interplay between violence and democracy in modern Japanese politics. Compared to the discussion of violence above, democracy is defined rather simply, as a participatory form of government with a representative body and a constitution. This conceptualization is intentionally rudimentary to underscore an approach concerned not with lofty notions about ideal democracies but with democracy as it was actually practiced. Democracy is to be understood as an ongoing experiment, and one that is not necessarily evolutionary; I do not use the word “democratization,” so as to emphasize the point that democracy itself is a process and not a point of arrival. It is fairly easy to argue that violence has no place in a perfect democracy, but such a political system has never existed in reality.26 The more difficult questions are what violence reflected about Japanese democracy and what consequences it had for the country’s political life.

  In speaking of Japanese democracy, I purposely avoid the phrase “Taisho democracy,” a description most often evoked by historians in Japan who have characterized the politics of the Taisho era (1912–1926) by its broadened grassroots political activity and popular embrace of ideas from democracy to nationalism.27 As much as “Taisho democracy” captures the various currents of this time, it is chronologically rigid and narrow, and makes difficult the drawing of connections both backward and forward in time.28 The popular politics of the Meiji period (1868–1912) are sidelined by the focus on th
e Taisho years; indeed, historian Banno Junji has taken to using “Meiji democracy” to counterbalance this tendency.29 The term also slights the links from the nationalism and imperialism of the 1910s and 1920s to the total war and militarism of the early Showa era (1926–1989). By talking of democracy without a chronological qualifier, I hope to underscore important continuities across periods and significant moments of change that did not necessarily fall on era markers.

  The book asks, then, to what extent we can speak of Japan from the 1880s through the early 1960s as, to use Daniel Ross’s term, a “violent democracy.” Ross is primarily concerned with how the violence of democracy’s foundational moment reverberates through what follows. I am interested in this question as well, but focus more on how violence and democracy coexisted in Japan—on how violence could promote democracy but also threaten it, on how democracy could both give birth to violence and contain it, on how a culture of political violence and a democracy could operate at one and the same time.

  Of the 1880s and 1890s, I explore what it meant that violence was present at the very birth of parliamentary and constitutional government in Japan. Prevalent in these decades were sōshi, young activists of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement who, over the course of the 1880s, became more like political ruffians. As politics became more popular and visible, with public meetings and debates and election campaigns, so too did their brand of violence: ruffianism. It became increasingly common for sōshi to storm and disturb political gatherings, physically intimidate political opponents, and protect political allies from the violence of antagonistic sōshi, becoming fixtures in the early decades of Japan’s democracy. The issue is not only why and how sōshi violence became a part of democratic practice, but also why it persisted. Of interest too is whether sōshi should be understood as a product and reflection of the shortcomings of Japanese democracy, and what consequences sōshi violence had for politics in these years.

  Around the turn of the twentieth century, sōshi became even more embedded in politics, institutionalized into the very structure of political parties as violent wings of their ingaidan (pressure groups). In the 1910s and 1920s, ingaidan of the major political parties supported the protection and harassment work of ruffians and also served as organizers and agitators in some of the great political contests of the era. It seems strange that ingaidan sōshi would flourish during a time also known for its vibrant democracy, but perhaps this relationship was not as contradictory as it might initially seem. The larger questions here are whether and how sōshi, and the culture of political violence they helped feed, can be reconciled with our understandings of democracy in these decades.

  Delving into the relationship between violence and democracy also encourages thinking about the violence of fascist movements, and what ramifications violent democracy might have had for the political ascent of the military in the 1930s. In the 1920s and 1930s, violence specialists—namely yakuza—shaped the ideological landscape as active participants in, and leaders of, nationalist organizations such as the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai (Greater Japan National Essence Association) and Dai Nihon Seigidan (Greater Japan Justice Group), squaring off against labor unions, strikers, socialists, and others of a leftist orientation. For a time, the political world was inhabited by both the violence of these nationalist groups and that of ingaidan. Explored are the connections between these two forms of ruffianism and what they meant for contemporary views of political violence, the future of the political parties, and the fate of violent democracy.

  Finally, the theme of democracy’s relationship with violence is revisited for the post–World War II years in which some violence specialists reemerged and others faded from the political scene. Yakuza continued to take a nationalistic and anticommunist stance, but sōshi and violent ingaidan ceased to be a phenomenon, and political fixers who brokered relationships between politicians and violence specialists were forced into the political background. Especially after the early 1960s, even yakuza violence in politics became less visible as money out-paced physical force as the political tool of choice. These transformations raise questions about why Japan’s early postwar democracy allowed for violence specialists in certain forms and roles, and whether it makes sense to speak of Japan in the 1950s as a violent democracy.

  This inquiry into the history of violence specialists is thus intended to serve as a lens through which to examine broad issues about the place and meaning of violence in various forms of politics—from the formation of the Meiji state to Japan’s experiment with democracy and encounter with fascism.

  Approaches to Comparative History

  Violence specialists were interwoven into much of the violent politics in the hundred years after 1860, but the book does not pretend to be a comprehensive history of political violence in Japan. One volume simply could not do justice to the many manifestations of physical force over this century. In addition, the book’s focus on violence should not be taken to mean that violence was the most significant characteristic of Japan’s modern politics.

  I also do not want to suggest that Japan was unique in its political violence or to encourage the reemergence of wartime stereotypes of Japan and “the Japanese” as exceptionally violent. To underscore this point, comparative asides sprinkled throughout the book draw parallels with cases beyond Japan’s borders. In some places, these are intentionally kept to mere mentions to simply illustrate the universality of political violence.

  In other places, the comparative analysis is more sustained, treating not just similarities but also particularities and speaking directly to a central contention of the chapter. A word should be said, then, about the selection of cases. Perhaps the most meaningful comparisons are those between Japan and Italy, for the two countries have faced similar historical challenges and continue to share political characteristics. As political scientist Richard Samuels has commented, both countries have played the game of “catch up” since the 1860s and continue to seek “normality” even as they have become wealthy democracies that enjoy the rule of law and healthy civil societies.30 Even more pertinent to our concerns, Japan and Italy both had encounters with fascism, and have witnessed significant intrusions of mafiosi into their political lives.

  I also discuss political violence in the United States and Great Britain, two countries often held up as model democracies. To demonstrate that they, too, have struggled with violence is to reiterate the point that no democracy has ever been immune from violent politics and that Japan was not singularly or uncommonly violent.

  Taken as a whole, this is a history of political characters who have largely escaped the attention of historians.31 By bringing violence specialists out of the historiographical shadows, the book reveals that violence was systemic and deeply embedded in the practice of politics for much of Japan’s modern history. And we discover a political world that could be both ordered and rough, exciting and frightening, dignified and cruel.

  1

  * * *

  Patriots and Gamblers

  Violence and the Formation of the Meiji State

  Standing before an overflowing crowd on the grounds of a local shrine, Tashiro Eisuke announced himself president and commander of the assembled and christened them the Konmingun (Poor People’s Army).1 This fighting force of farmers and other members of rural society wore headbands, had their sleeves rolled up, and stood ready with bamboo spears, swords, and rifles.2 On this first day of November in 1884, they converged in the Chichibu District of Saitama Prefecture and then launched a rebellion against those they deemed responsible for their poverty and powerlessness: rapacious lenders and the Meiji state. As its members murdered usurers, attacked sites of state authority, and battled government forces in the days that followed, the Konmingun was held together by Tashiro Eisuke and his second in command, Katō Orihei. Tashiro and Katō are especially remarkable because they were bakuto (gamblers)—technically outlaws, and a kind of yakuza. Before the mid-1800s, it would have been almost unheard of for suc
h men to be at the helm of a peasant protest or political rebellion. And yet, in the second decade of the Meiji period, some bakuto assumed roles that thrust them onto the national political stage.

  Tashiro and Katō will be considered here as part of a larger examination of how forerunners of modern violence specialists—shishi (“men of spirit”) as well as bakuto—navigated the tumultuous transition from early modern to modern rule which spanned the 1860s to 1880s. Shishi and bakuto were not remnants of a feudal past that staggered on beyond their time, but were refashioned through the tremendous upheaval of the Tokugawa shogunate’s fall and the turbulent early decades of the Meiji period. The end of samurai rule, the emergence of the nation-state, and the burgeoning of various kinds of democratic politics remade the early modern violence of shishi and bakuto into their modern incarnations. Yet shishi and bakuto negotiated these transformative decades quite differently.

  Shishi were typically lower-ranking samurai, and as warriors of the Tokugawa period they were officially the violent arm of the early modern state. Given the paucity of opportunities for samurai to actually serve as the realm’s defenders, however, they were fighters more in name than in practice. What eventually compelled them to take up arms—against the political order they were supposed to protect—was their profound dissatisfaction with how the shogunate handled the arrival of the West in Japan in the 1850s. Frustration with their status as lower-ranking samurai coupled with ideologies of “direct action” and disdain for the government gave birth to shishi who, in the late 1850s and early 1860s, used violence (mainly in the form of assassination) to try to topple the Tokugawa shogunate. Shishi were not violence specialists in the most technical sense, for they were rebels who used force in an attempt to realize their own political goals and were not acting violently for others. Nor did they survive the Meiji Restoration as a political force. Nonetheless, shishi provided a model of violent rebellion against a seemingly delinquent state that would be adopted in the early Meiji period. And although they were variously constructed as patriotic activists and xenophobic terrorists in their own time, it was their patriotism that was remembered and resurrected by modern violence specialists in the Meiji period and beyond.