The Yakuza

They projected themselves as fearless protectors bound by a code of chivalry, yet in their wake they left trails of bloody street duels and ritualised finger-chopping. From 17th-century dispossessed samurai turned street muggers, to powerful paramilitary bosses infiltrating national politics, the yakuza's evolution is a masterclass in criminal survival and reinvention. Andrew Rankin, author of 'Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld', joins us to uncover the dramatic rise and transformation of Japan's organised crime syndicates. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Tim Arstall. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Dan Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  An icy wind swept through Berlin on the 19th of January, 1938, framing a truly surreal ideological spectacle. A delegation of Japanese dignitaries stood in formation, flanked by an Imperial naval attache. At the centre of this delegation was Sakai Ezu, a man who, in his mind at least, carried the weight of the Japanese empire on his shoulders. Facing him was Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi SS. Himmler raised his arm in a rigid Hitler salute. Sakai countered with his own carefully devised gesture of solidarity. A bent elbow, forearms swept horizontally across his chest.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  The two men exchanged stiff smiles, shook hands and posed for the cameras. To the casual onlooker, it looked like a meeting of fascist diplomats between Axis allies. In reality, Sakai was no diplomat. He was an oyabun, a ruthless Yakuza crime boss from the rough streets of Osaka. About 15 years previously, he'd founded a paramilitary organisation with the impressive name of the Great Japanese Order of Righteousness. He'd built dojos to train his men in beating up union workers. He operated a private aviation unit. He'd secured international notoriety by sending mob contacts in to rescue a kidnapped British heiress in Manchuria.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Far from an imperial envoy, Sakai's grand European tour, which took him from Mussolini's palace to the courtyards of the Third Reich, was a brilliant PR stunt by an underworld boss trying to dodge an imperial crackdown on organised crime back home. The bizarre meeting in the tumultuous 1930s is just one wild chapter in a much larger story. In this episode, we're going to trace the incredible history of the Yakuza, Japanese organised crime families across centuries of transformation, from disgraced feudal outlaws to ultra nationalist enforcers and syndicated crime groups in the 20th century. Joining us is Andrew Rankin. He's a scholar of Japanese history and literature, author of Yakuza: A 400 Year History of the Japanese Underworld.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  He explains how the bosses of the centuries old gambling syndicates ended up shaking hands with the architects of the Third Reich. Let's get into it.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  Andrew, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  It's great to talk to you.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Take me back to that tumultuous period in the early 17th century in Japan and explain the emergence of the Yakuza.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Well, to be honest, searching for the origin of an organised crime group is, it's a little bit like chasing the end of a rainbow, because no matter how far back you go, there's always a little bit further you can go. But what we can say is that many of the aspects of Yakuza culture and the practices that have become characteristic of them, they do seem to have become standardised, starting from the early 1600s, which was, of course, when Japan had come to the end of a very long period of civil war and strife and had finally become united under the Tokugawa family. And the Tokugawa regime ruled Japan for 260 years from the, from the early 1600s.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  And the policies of the first Tokugawa shoguns were a policy of retribution against these warrior households who had opposed them previously. And that resulted in the confiscation of lands, dispossession of property and money. And the result of that was that tens of thousands of samurai, former warriors, entered the job market. They became unemployed. They became rawning. And it's simply a fact of criminal history generally, that when you have a very large number of military men, grizzled soldiers who have known almost nothing but war, and they enter the job market, well, inevitably what follows from that is an outburst of criminality.

• 6:04Speaker 04

  And not just criminality, but a certain type of criminality, an aggressive kind of gangsterism. Some of the warriors will fall on hard times and simply turn to crime. And that's what a lot of these samurai did, at least for the first sort of 50 or 60 years of the Tokugawa regime. So they engaged in, at the time, they were called sword testings. People said that the samurai were bored and they were roaming the streets of the city and just testing their swords on pedestrians. But I looked into some of these sword testings and they were, they were just basically armed muggings, right? They were, they were stabbing people and stealing their money. So gangs of samurai were doing that. They were engaging in the kinds of crime that we would call, today we would call

• 6:47Speaker 04

  strong arm robbery, I suppose, where they would force businesses to give them goods without having to pay, or they'd run up huge bills in restaurants and bars and brothels and then refuse to pay. But aside from the samurai who went into the, literally went into the criminal underworld, even the ones who found jobs in the legitimate parts of the economy, they took with them a kind of aggressive military attitude. Even legitimate businesses, of course, can be subject to, to threats from gangs, from intimidation, and it becomes a kind of self perpetuating business because shopkeepers,

• 7:28Speaker 04

  for instance, have to pay gangsters to protect them from other gangsters. And that's what seems to have happened in the early years of Tokugawa. Large numbers of samurai ended their military careers and they took their skills into the underworld.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  And you mentioned that's when you see these distinctive features that have endured. What are those features? What makes Yakuza different from other organised criminal gangs elsewhere in the world? What are those sort of defining features that you think, that you can identify really taking shape at this period?

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Well, the military men took with them the military style discipline. So the underworld became organised in a way that we don't see in many other countries, certainly not in, in Western countries. So you're talking about very large gangs with a kind of military style hierarchy. The senior men treating the younger men like, you know, a senior officer would, would treat a private, say, a very strict chain of command. The basic rule that, which still applies to Yakuza families today, that everybody must obey, every member must obey his immediate superior, even if he knows that the superior is wrong or making a mistake.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  In other words, you must follow orders at all times. And then a very strict regime of punishments, very severe discipline for men who disobeyed orders or misbehaved. In addition to that, at the beginning of the Tokugawa era, the samurai who entered the criminal underworld, they also took with them a kind of ideology. Maybe it's going too far to call it an ideology, but at least one of their buzzwords was ninkyo, which even at the time was a rather archaic word. It's usually translated into English as chivalry. Honour could be another translation. If we use the word chivalry, it's, it doesn't have anything to do with being nice to ladies.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  It's chivalry in the sense of being a protector to one's community, taking care of the people at the bottom end of society, and also a sort of samurai style attitude towards danger. The man of ninkyo is a protector. He's also a fearless man, has no fear of death. He obeys orders at all times. He's loyal to his comrades, loyal right up until death. And the, the early samurai gang bosses that we know of, and there isn't, to be honest, there isn't that much reliable information about them, but these were the, the samurai who rose to the top of the underworld in the early years of the 1600s.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  They did seem to have been, in addition to the, the sort of extortion rackets and gambling and protection rackets, they also, some of them seemed to have been quite eloquent speakers and they were essentially giving lectures to the young generation of warriors who had come of age after the formation of the Tokugawa regime.

• 10:30Speaker 04

  And that meant that these young warriors had come of age at a time when there were no more wars, no more wars to fight. All of the many generations of warriors before them had had plenty of opportunity to prove themselves on the battlefield. But a young warrior, wannabe warrior of, say, the 1620s, 1630s, he had been born too late for any of that. The best he could hope for was to find some kind of lowly job in the Tokugawa administration. It might be a security guard, but that would just mean standing around all day. The chances that he would ever fight in battle had had started to become non-existent.

• 11:11Speaker 04

  And that seems to have created, at least for a while, a kind of angst among, particularly among younger samurai. And the manifestation of that was because they couldn't actually fight in battle, they turned to talking about how tough they were, and therefore that led to the boon of this concept of ninkyo. They would extol the qualities of, that they thought would be becoming of a heroic warrior, even though they themselves had no chance to do this. So that gave the the kind of samurai gang culture that flourished at the time something more than just, it wasn't just pure criminality, although they were definitely engaging in crimes, including serious crimes.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  I mean, they they seemed to have been fairly murderous, they were committing large numbers of murder. But at the same time, they strutted around, they wrote slogans on their swords, slogans about chivalry. A popular slogan was, "I have lived too long", which gives a suggestion of the kind of mentality at the time. They were born in the wrong era. As I said, the senior bosses were were men who were, they were essentially criminals because they were supervising organized criminal activity. But at the same time, they were projecting themselves as men of honor, men of chivalry, men who were providing some kind of legitimate protection service to the people who paid them.

• 12:37Speaker 04

  And that has become a characteristic that has never changed since then, even recently. We still hear the word chivalry, it it sounds ridiculous these days, but we still hear that word being used by yakuza bosses today as they try to present themselves as something more than just a common criminal. I say it sounds strange, but there are, of course, parallels in other cultures. A Westerner is likely to think of, say, the Sicilian corsa nostra has this idea of the man of honor. The Russian mafia has the dvorie, the thief with a code of honor, supposedly. And in China, there are basically underworld groups who call themselves brothers, and they supposedly follow a code of righteousness.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  At least that's what they tell themselves. So it's not just a form, it's not just a form of propaganda to to try to conceal the activities of the gang. But all of the talk about chivalry and honor, it's also a kind of self persuasion. The the member of the yakuza gang, the samurai gang, although he's committing petty crimes, although he's he's basically a member of a thuggish organization, he can tell himself that he's more than just a common criminal. He's honorable, he's loyal, he's fearless. Something of the warrior spirit still lingers in him, even though he's living in a time where there are no more wars to fight.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  We talk about families and and these traditions.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Are they literally families? Are these 400-year dynasties that these gangs have managed to operate? Or are these subsequent, are these just people in every generation who are latching on to these ideals and this heritage, this culture, and declaring that setting themselves up as yakuza?

• 14:19Speaker 04

  Hmm. There are two names that the yakuza have chosen for their groups. One is the one you mentioned, ikka, that's families. It tends to be the gamblers who choose that name. And the other is kumi, which means something like a unit or a crew. So they don't call themselves gangs. The families, no, they're not, they're not literal families, but they're also, it's also not just a word because many of the men who joined a bit later in the, from later in the 1600s, these were men who were often on the run from the law enforcement authorities in their own towns. They'd fled their own province. They had criminal records, they had no families of their own.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  And they would swear a bond of loyalty to the boss of the yakuza group. His his title would be oyobun, which means father. And his men, once they'd sworn loyalty to him, would become his kobun, his children. And they would often, this is another feature of the yakuza, they would often live together in the same house. So the father, the oyobun, would, he would have the main residence, and a number of his men would live with him, either in the same house or in a compound, which is something, again, the yakuza have been doing ever since. A very large yakuza compound can have 100 men living in it. It's like a military barracks.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  So in that sense, they developed very strong, family-like ties. The father, the oyobun, was expected to take very good care of his men and return. They rewarded him with lifelong loyalty. If anything happened to them, if they ended up in prison, then the boss would provide money for their families. And if they were killed in action, so to speak, usually the yakuza family would have a communal grave. This is a common thing in Japan. Instead of individual graves, people, members of a family are buried in a family grave. And the yakuza family started to do that. You you can see some of those tombstones today. It'll say, you know, the tomb of the Tanaka family.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  But the family involved is, it's not an actual family of fathers and sons and brothers and sisters. It's a yakuza family where the men have sworn to be the children of the father for their lives. And when they died, they're all cremated, and then the the remains are in the same tomb, which is something that still goes on today.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  And you you mentioned gambling earlier. It seems like lots of these organized crime syndicates around the world throughout history have all had quite a kind of central, whether it's prostitution, whether it's drugs and alcohol in the 20th century. You know, is gambling essential to the kind of rise of the yakuza in the 7th century?

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Not automatically. I mean, obviously, anybody can sit down and play a card game. Anybody can throw some dice on the street and and start gambling. But an ongoing gambling business is going to require some fairly, you know, rigorous organization. If the gambling is illegal, as it always has been in Japan, then any kind of illegal gambling game is vulnerable to robbery by other gangs. If if they steal the money from the gambling table, the gamblers can't report it to police. So very tough security is needed. That's going to need multiple men to do that. Informants will often be needed to maybe keep the police away.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  Lookouts usually posted around the the gambling den. In Tokugawa, Japan, people often traveled long distances to go to gambling events. And inevitably, bandits and robbers would stalk the streets, the the roads leading to the gambling event. So again, someone had to provide security sufficient enough to scare away bandits. It takes quite a tough gang to do that. And then the men who had won money at the gambling table, they had to get home safely with their money. So again, someone had to provide bodyguards to escort them home. Then there's a problem of collecting gambling debts. A man runs up debts at the gambling table, someone has to go around and remind him that it's time to pay.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  Men borrow money to gamble, and therefore money lending comes into it. So you put those all together, and you need a well-organized gang to provide all of those services on a reliable basis. So gambling inevitably leads to, you know, gangsters taking control, and it becomes an organized criminal business.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  From one thing you mentioned earlier on as well, it made me think, is there a little hint of the Robin Hood here as well? There's a talk of chivalry, community, looking after those. Yes, they're looking after those that can pay, but is there a sense in which they are standing up to authority on behalf of the community more generally?

• 19:08Speaker 04

  Well, the honest answer would be that it it varies. I mean, some of the yakuza gangs did did rise to the level of community protectors, and the types of crimes that they were committing were limited to running gambling dens, which is not a serious antisocial crime. On the other hand, there were also much more aggressive yakuza gangs who, you know, did commit robberies. They were essentially bandits, lived in the mountains. And they they did not cooperate with law enforcement in any way. It would be difficult to portray them as, you know, chivalrous or honorable. Of course, there's a certain amount of, yes, the the Robin Hood, the Robin Hood aspect to it, but

• 19:53Speaker 04

  that was generally created by Japan's culture industry. Some of the yakuza bosses, they engaged in direct conflict against the shogunal police forces. The Tokugawa regime eventually set up a special samurai detective unit that was charged with patrolling the area of the the Kanto plains, this is the areas around Tokyo, where there was a lot of gang activity going on. And some of the gangs cooperated with the the samurai detectives?

• 20:24Speaker 04

  And some of them fought against them. So it'd be difficult to generalize. But there were certainly stories about Yakuza bosses doing things like during a famine, the boss would show up in the village and hand out money to the villagers in order to help them buy rice. That sounds like a Robin Hood folk tale. And I looked into it. And I've actually found a journal by one of the governors, the samurai provincial governor. And he said in his journal, I visited this village and the people came out and told me that there's a some kind of, some kind of robber living on the mountains. And he had come down into the town and handed out money to the villagers to help them buy rice.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  The fact that a common criminal had fulfilled this role, which ought to be my role as the governor, made me feel very bad, right? He'd made this entry in his journal. So there does seem to be some truth in that. And Yakuza bosses have often copied that. They do things like on the emperor's birthday, the Yakuza boss will go to the impoverished part of town, the slum area, and hand out envelopes with money in it. The Yakuza have also done things like help out with relief efforts after natural disasters, tsunamis, earthquakes, terrible fires. So it's not a complete myth that the Yakuza have done this.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  On the other hand, of course, there are pragmatic reasons why gangsters would try to try to do this, right? They want to win the support of the local community as much as they can. Anything that makes them look legitimate is good for them. I suppose you could say it's a result of the fact that unlike mafias in other countries, the Yakuza have never been secret societies. Usually mafiosi deny that their organization exists, right? Cosa nostra? What cosa? I don't know what you're talking about. The Yakuza have never been secret organizations. That doesn't mean that they're not duplicitous. They are camouflaging their activities, but they're doing it in a different way.

• 22:26Speaker 04

  Instead of denying that they exist, they say, yes, we exist, but we are honorable organizations. Look at what we did here. We helped the local people after the tsunami. And look at the way that we help with the fire brigades. We are doing, we're doing a good work. And people come to us with their problems. They want our protection. And our protection business is not any kind of racket. It's not extortion. We are genuinely providing protection to our customers. So the Yakuza certainly have an incentive to make themselves look chivalrous and honorable. The question is, how believable is it?

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• 25:54Speaker 00

  Talk to us about some of the individuals that you've you've come across that you can actually reach back and and actually kind of construct a fuller picture around.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Individual Yakuza bosses. Well, one of them that stands out is a man called Kotetsu. At least that's the name he uses, not his real name. Kotetsu is actually the maker of the sword that he used. And his career follows, follows the basic trajectory of most Yakuza bosses during the final few decades of the Tokugawa era. And then he was also very successful for another 15 years of after the fall of the Tokugawa regime. So he started out basically as a teenage thug. He murdered somebody in his native city of Osaka and had to flee. He ended up in Kyoto. This would be sometime in the early 1850s,

• 26:46Speaker 04

  which of course was just at the time when Japan was coming under pressure from foreign nations to open its ports to trade. And radicals were starting to plot against the Tokugawa regime in the hope of overthrowing the Tokugawa family and creating a nation state with the emperor as the supreme political leader in Japan. So for the last sort of 20 years of the Tokugawa regime, there was all kinds of you know, aggressive militant activism going on against the Tokugawa. And Kotetsu came into play because once he arrived in Kyoto, he got himself a job as a, I guess you would say, a Yakuza soldier for one of the Yakuza bosses there.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  And by the time he was in his early 30s, he'd become by far the most famous swordsman in Western Japan. It was typical for rival gangs to solve their differences, not just gangs, but men who are arguing with each other, to solve their differences with an arranged duel. One advantage of doing it that way was that the authorities would usually take a lenient attitude to men who had agreed to fight in advance. If they'd agreed to fight each other, then nobody would be arrested. A duel did not always continue until somebody was killed. From what I can tell, often the duel ended when one of them was wounded and not able to continue.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  And Kotetsu seems to have won a very long string of victories and made a name for himself, although people who met him did say that his forearms and shins were covered in scars. He'd also lost one of his fingers as well. But by the time he was in his 30s, he was, he was running a Yakuza group, basically a gambling group and a labor supply group. But by that time, the Tokugawa police authorities were desperately trying to hunt down the radicals who were plotting against Tokugawa. And to do that, they had no scruples at all about relying on the resources of the underworld. And so they asked Kotetsu to help them. The radicals were using false names, moving around Kyoto.

• 28:56Speaker 04

  I should say, the reason that the radicals congregated in Kyoto was because, of course, that's where the emperor and his court were located. The Tokugawa police squads, they found it easiest to arrest radicals when they were in the brothels, because they were not, not on guard, or when they're in the drinking dives. So they used the resources of Kotetsu's gang to track them down, identify them. And in some operations, he seems to have been personally involved. He lost three more fingers. He lost three more fingers when he was in a tea house, talking to one of the Tokugawa intelligence officers, when suddenly two radicals with swords drawn rushed in and assassinated the intelligence officer.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  Kotetsu got caught up in it and lost three more fingers off his hands. So he's down to six fingers. I'm not sure whether you could say that that's the reason, but in his later life, Kotetsu was one of the Yakuza bosses who standardized the punishment system of cutting off fingers for people who had wronged him, for his junior men who had disobeyed his orders or lost money in some way. He would order them to cut off one of their own fingers and then present it to him, usually wrapped in a silk handkerchief. And that finger chopping practice, again, has has since become fairly standard among the Yakuza community.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Really? So that still happens today?

• 30:21Speaker 04

  Well, yes, I mean, it still happens today. Today it's a bit less voluntary. There was a case just a couple of years ago where four senior members of a group in Tokyo used a hammer and chisel to chop off the finger of one of their subordinates who had clearly angered them in some way. And when they were arrested, they said, well, look, this, these are the rules of our organization. But until the end of the 20th century, it was not unusual for a Yakuza boss to keep a small collection of bottles, each one containing a severed finger of one of his men pickled in formaldehyde or alcohol.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  How do these families change, adapt to the challenges of the centuries that follow?

• 31:02Speaker 04

  By the end of the Tokugawa era, Japan embarked on a very rapid phase of industrialization. Huge numbers, hundreds of thousands of people migrated from the countryside, from the farming land, to the cities, or rather to towns which then became cities. Many of the big cities of Japan today, until the second half of the 19th century, they were fairly small towns. Yokohama was a fairly modest sort of port town. Kobe was just a small harbor town. Until by the 1890s Kawasaki and Mitsubishi built their shipyards in Kobe, transforming it into an enormous industrial hub. The same thing happened to several other major cities.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  And so that was somewhat overwhelming for the Yakuza gamblers who'd been running fairly small-scale rackets in Kobe, for instance. And what happened was much larger gangs started to sprout from the industrial bases. Because some of the Yakuza bosses, in addition to gambling, they had also infiltrated the labor supply business. So Yakuza bosses were controlling the supply of labor to, say, the docklands, cargo handlers, to the shipyards, to the steel mills and so on. And they basically took the tactics and the cultural practices that they had used within

• 32:28Speaker 04

  the gambling world into the industrial basis. So the gamblers, for instance, had spent a lot of time performing rituals of brotherhood and swearing oaths of loyalty to each other. And the labor bosses, the Yakuza who went into the labor business, they did the same thing. The two labor bosses would sit down together, they would say, this is my territory. Well, I will control the workers in this part of the harbor. You'll control the workers in the other part of the harbor. I won't encroach on your territory. You won't encroach on mine. And if we're threatened by some external threat, we'll pool our resources and fight them off. So these kinds of alliances that we see in the criminal underworld were simply transferred

• 33:13Speaker 04

  into the more legitimate, but still violent and aggressive part of the labor industry. And because the Yakuza bosses in places like Kobe and the docklands, they had huge numbers of men at their disposal. Thousands and thousands of workers were loyal to the boss. So some of the fights between them resembled kind of mini battles with, you know, huge mobs of men bashing each other with crowbars and so on. But the docklands business in Kobe and the steel business in some of the kushu cities became fundamental parts of Yakuza income.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  And it enabled the Yakuza to fleece the workers from every single direction. The Yakuza boss would take a chunk of the workers' wages, often as much as 20%. The workers would live in a dormitory that was run by the Yakuza family, and they would extract more money from them in various ways from that, for their bedding and so on. Then, when the workers got their wages, the first thing they did was head off to the bars, the brothels, the restaurants. And guess who they were run by? Of course, they were all run by the Yakuza. So the Yakuza were basically extracting money from the workers in an extremely exploitative way.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  And many of those Yakuza bosses became very wealthy, much more wealthy than the Yakuza bosses of Tokugawa. So that would be the first main difference.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  And you've mentioned the sex trade there. Presumably, these new, big, humming industrial cities had, you know, what we know, what are called red light areas or whatever. This would be an important part of the business model.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  Yes. Well, Japan's sex industry was a bit unusual because the Tokugawa regime had taken the decision to, instead of having brothels sort of scattered around the towns, they thought it would be better to move them all to designated areas. These licensed brothel districts were created. And they were, they were kind of self-policing, self-policing areas. There would be a security wall around them. The women and the girls, many teenage girls were there, working in the brothel towns, were not usually permitted to leave.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  And the policing of the brothel towns was often left to Yakuza-type gangs who specialized in the sex trade. Initially, the Yakuza worked as recruiters for the city brothels. It was a very unpleasant business. The recruiters would head out to the most impoverished farming areas and then try to coax the girls, trick them. Some of the girls probably went, you know, knowing what they were getting themselves in for. But the recruiters would lie to them and say, you can get a job as a maid. All you have to do is come with me to Kobe, I'll get you a job. And those girls were tricked into working in the brothels. But often, parents, particularly the sort of impoverished farming families, by the

• 36:18Speaker 04

  time of the industrialization period, the farmers were so impoverished that it was really, it was really difficult for them not to agree to sell one of their daughters to a city brothel. The standard contract was six years, and the parents had to agree not to complain if the brothel owner beat their daughter. And they also had to promise in writing not to sue the brothel if the girl died while working in the brothel. So pretty grim, pretty grim situation. And the new factor after the fall of Tokugawa and the beginning of the Meiji era was that

• 36:59Speaker 04

  because Japan's ports had opened, not only were foreigners now arriving in Japan, but Japanese people could now travel overseas. And one of the main exports of Japan to other countries from about 1870 until, I guess, the outbreak of the First World War, one of the main Japanese exports was prostitutes. Japanese women were highly prized around Asia, partly because of their, you know, their exotic makeup, their kimono's, but also for a practical reason, which was that the Meiji government had instigated a system of regular health checks and STD checks for the girls working in the brothels.

• 37:41Speaker 04

  So Japanese women had a reputation for good hygiene. They were very popular around Asia. And the sex trade worked in a similar way to the one that I've just described. Recruiters would, you know, trick the girls, or sometimes just kidnap the girls, bundle them onto a ship and take them to... Singapore was one of the main destinations, but Japanese women ended up in all around Asia, northeastern China. And they would be sold at flesh trade markets there to brothel keepers, often Japanese men who owned brothels in other parts of Asia. There was one girl, she was 15. She was abducted from a street in Kobe by some Yakuza gang.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  They bundled her onto a ship and sent her to Singapore. From Singapore, she was sold to a Japanese brothel owner in Malaysia. And when she arrived in Malaysia, the first thing that the Japanese brothel owner said to her was, "You owe me 600 yen." Because they, one of the ways that they kept the girls under control was to trick the girls into thinking that they'd somehow incurred a debt, which they had to pay off. So she would have to keep working in his brothel until she paid off the debt. And of course, the brothel keeper would come up with all kinds of excuses to explain to her why she still hadn't paid it off. So that was the grisly set of circumstances that prevailed for about 50 years.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Yakuza, more coming up.

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• 40:40Speaker 00

  By the late 19th century, it sounds to me like the Japanese government trying to get a grip on this situation. Tell me about the Great Cull.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  This was the movement that was ostensibly presented as a crackdown on criminality and particularly on the Yakuza. But that was really a subterfuge. The fact is that, starting in the 70s, 1870s, there was a growing movement towards freedom and people's rights in Japan. It was based on the democratic movements in Europe and the United States. People wanted, they didn't want to be ruled by these samurai oligarchs anymore. They wanted a parliament, they wanted a constitution, and they wanted electoral voting. The oligarchs pushed back and tried to shut down the events, the rallies held by the Popular Rights Movement. Police would try to break them up.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  So the Popular Rights activists turned to the Yakuza families for support. Not all of the Yakuza were willing to get involved, but the ones who did, they lent their men as security guards at the Popular Rights rallies, pretending to be security guards. But the real job of the Yakuza was to prevent the police from shutting down the rally, which they seemed to have been successful at doing. Some of the Yakuza families even held training camps, where they taught the activists how to thwart police tactics. And that went on for a while until the major government had had enough. And in 1882, they started a massive crackdown on the Yakuza families, but not Yakuza families across the countries,

• 42:17Speaker 04

  but the ones who were specifically involved in this kind of involvement with the Popular Rights Movement. And one of their first victims was Kotetsu. He had built himself a really nice compound on the east side of Kyoto, near the Silver Pavilion. He had about 70 men living with him in a kind of barracks. He had a nice house for himself. The compound also included a yakitori stall, a cake shop, a bar, that goes without saying. And on a night in February 1882, a large cohort of police officers armed with Western-style sabers climbed up the walls of the compound in the middle of the night, overpowered the sentries, and arrested everybody inside.

• 43:02Speaker 04

  The only thing they were able to charge Kotetsu with was running an illegal gambling ring, which didn't carry a very strong punishment. One year in prison. So he was sentenced to one year in prison. But it seems that while in prison, the authorities were determined to kill him. So they appeared to have been poisoning him with arsenic. By the time he was released from prison, he was too sick and eventually died. He was the first victim. But the Great Cull that you're mentioning was the Yakuza name, the name that the Yakuza gave to this massive police operation, where within the space of about 18 months, police arrested some 30,000 Yakuza gang members.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  So it's the biggest police operation in Yakuza history. And many of those men unfortunately met the same fate as Kotetsu. They were sentenced, they were not young men, they were in their 50s and 60s. They were sentenced to years in prison with hard labor, which they did not survive. There was one Yakuza boss though who made a name for himself by his appearance in court. He was rounded up in the Great Cull. And the judge asked him to identify his territory. And this was an elderly boss, he'd be in his, I guess, 70s. The judge asked him, "Where is your territory?" He looked at the judge and said, "Go to the top of Mount Fuji and look around. That's my territory."

• 44:30Speaker 04

  For that impudence in court, the judge sentenced him to, I think, 13 years in prison, simply for a gambling offense, which he did not survive.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Golly, great a legend though. Tell me, I'm so interested in your book about the Yakuza being brought into the political sphere after the First World, before the Second World War and the buildup and the spasms that ripped through Imperial Japan in that period, the changes of policy direction. What role did the Yakuza play in this vital period?

• 44:58Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, violence had become endemic in Japanese politics, regardless of the Yakuza. By the 1920s, assassinations of prime ministers had become almost routine in Japan. Violence in the parliament itself had started to break out. Politicians and their supporters were brawling with each other. The violence attended almost every type of election, even local council elections would, mobs of thugs would surround the homes of the candidates and so on. So certainly by 1930, the people of Japan had become accustomed to violence in politics.

• 45:43Speaker 04

  That being the case, it wasn't really surprising that politicians should call on violence specialists to help them out. Enter the Yakuza. The Yakuza started to provide bodyguards for Japanese politicians, including high-ranking politicians, cabinet ministers. They signed deals with politicians. The Home Ministry, for instance, called upon Yakuza bosses in Osaka and Tokyo to help them crack down on left-wing activism. Workers who tried to unionize would find themselves under attack from armies of thugs organized by the Yakuza families. And one or two Yakuza bosses actually managed to get themselves elected to the parliament with predictable results.

• 46:28Speaker 04

  There were stabbings and pretty serious violence breaking out in the halls of the Japanese parliament building.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  It sounds like the Yakuza are doing some of the, well, performing some of the roles that the black shirts are playing in Europe, Mussolini and Hitler's sort of street fighters are doing in Europe at the same time.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  Yes, that's absolutely right. One of the biggest mistakes that Japan made in the first half of the 20th century was they were taking their lead from the West and they fatally chose to take their lead from Italy and Germany. But there was a Japanese equivalent to the Squadristi, the black shirts of Mussolini, and it was led by a Yakuza boss. His name was Sakai Eizou. He was originally a gambler and a labor boss from Osaka. But by the 1920s, he'd set up this enormous organization, at least 100,000 members. And he didn't use the word fascism, but it was clearly modeled on the black shirts of Mussolini.

• 47:30Speaker 04

  Sakai's men wore black uniforms. It was a paramilitary group, although they didn't carry weapons. And it had a fantastic name, which I'll say in Japanese. It was called the Dai Nippon Seigidan, which means "The Great Japanese Order of Righteousness." The righteousness in question was crushing unions, crushing socialists and left-wing activists. Anybody who tried to obstruct the industrial output of Imperial Japan, the Order of Righteousness would move in and basically clobber the strikers,

• 48:12Speaker 04

  drag them from their homes, take them to work, beat them with hosing, that kind of activity. So not murderous, but militant thuggery, all at the behest of politicians and police who tended to collude with Sakai's movement and allow his men to get away with it.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  And he visits Europe?

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Yes, he had a chance to meet his hero, Mussolini. He met him once in 1925, but then he paid a visit to Italy again in 1938. By that time, of course, there was a lot of talk in the West about Japan was now at war with China and Japan's image was crashing. So Sakai thought that he should go to Europe and explain in person to Mussolini and also to Hitler that Japan's intentions were righteous. So he sailed in autumn of 1938 to Europe. He went to Italy first and met Mussolini. He gave Mussolini a gift. It was an antique samurai armor kit.

• 49:17Speaker 04

  Then he headed to Berlin. In Berlin, it didn't go quite so well for him. The Germans were a bit suspicious of the Asian black shirts. So Hitler unfortunately refused to meet Sakai. He had to settle with a meeting, settle for a meeting with Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS. And the photo is in my book of Himmler and Sakai beaming as they shake hands with each other in Berlin.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  The aftermath of Second World War, so Japan is in ruins, literally and metaphorically. And so presumably that's kind of fertile fertile ground for the Yakuza to move fast and rebuild networks.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  Yes, well, it's a, again, it's a repetition of, you could say it's a repetition of the situation at the beginning of the Tokugawa period, right? War comes to an end. Millions of Japanese servicemen return back to Japan after having known nothing but brutality of war for years. And they find themselves no money, no job. People were not nice to them. All they know is violence. And as in early Tokugawa, what we see is a massive outburst of gangsterism. There was also the fact that Japan's economy was wrecked. The black markets flourished after the, after the end of the war. So it was only natural that gangster types should move in to take control of it.

• 50:45Speaker 04

  But even then, the gang bosses who were successful, they tended to portray themselves as fulfilling a legitimate role, feeding the people. They set up large markets where most of the goods being sold in the markets were either stolen or ridiculously overpriced. And the bosses shook down the, the street stalls for protection money and so on. And that, that situation continued for about 10 to 15 years after the end of the Second World War, until Japan's economy started to take off.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  We now think of Japan as, in some, in some ways, one of the most advanced countries in the world. So it's strange that there's still this seam of sophisticated, organized crime families that can exist, even despite all the modern developments that we might associate with fighting crime. Is this something now that movies like to exaggerate their impact, their existence in modern Japan? Or is this still a feature of Japanese life?

• 51:45Speaker 04

  As of today, the Yakuza importance in Japan, the amount of trouble they cause is, is quite small. And their, yeah, their social relevance is, is at a low today. For that reason, people are now talking about, you know, this is the end of the Yakuza. The Yakuza are dying out. But having studied 400 years of Yakuza history, I can see that there have been many periods like this. It's, it's all ups and downs. The Yakuza are not operating independently in a vacuum. They're responding to the social and economic circumstances around them. One thing that maybe has been lost forever is the connection of the Yakuza to, to the lower working classes, right? They, they used to be, as I said, labor, labor bosses.

• 52:30Speaker 04

  They were a close connection to the people at the bottom end of the social hierarchy. Day laborers, street stall vendors, construction workers, transportation workers. Those are the, the key people that the Yakuza wielded control over. And that's why the Yakuza were often useful to the authorities. But what's happened in the last, I guess, three decades is the Yakuza have, have lost their, their foundation in the, the working classes. Now, most of the men who joined the Yakuza families, they're not really connected to the, to the laboring classes. They're, they're basically just dropouts from mainstream society. For that reason, the Yakuza unfortunately have, have lost a lot of the, they've lost

• 53:15Speaker 04

  a lot of the sort of cultural cachet. They're, they're not cool anymore, at least not, not at the moment. And many of them have degenerated into nothing more than criminal gangs. They sell drugs, mostly crystal meth. They do commit armed robberies now and fraud schemes, kind of online fraud schemes. So you could say that the Japanese organized crime situation has started to become rather less Japanese than it used to be, and it's starting to resemble organized crime in other countries.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. Another unexpected facet of globalization there, sort of remarkable. Andrew Rankin, thank you so much for taking me through that remarkable history. Tell everyone what your book is called.

• 54:00Speaker 04

  Thank you, thank you for having me. The full title is Yakuza: A 400 Year History of the Japanese Underworld.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Must have been a fascinating book to research.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Well, I won't talk about that.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  We don't want to get you in trouble. But thank you very much indeed for coming on.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  Okay, thank you for having me.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2% daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

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