The honorable gangster is a powerful fiction—and a useful alibi. Reviewing Andrew Rankin’s Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld, Ian Buruma follows the gap between Japan’s romantic outlaw mythology and organized crime’s service to politicians, business interests, and the far right.
- Art helped manufacture tradition. Chinese bandit tales and Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s nineteenth-century prints supplied heroic imagery and elaborate tattoos; later, gangster films shaped criminals’ own performances of honor.
- Modernization expanded the business. After the Meiji Restoration, gangs moved into labor supply, docks, corporate extortion, voter intimidation, and trafficking—not resistance to capitalism, but participation in it.
- The supposed defenders of ordinary people broke their struggles. Gangsters helped suppress the 1918 rice riots, industrial strikes, and union organizing. Some bosses formed ultranationalist organizations; one cultivated ties to Mussolini.
- Postwar cinema recast domination as heroism. Films turned ethnic conflict into tales of patriotic Japanese outlaws confronting foreign enemies, obscuring both colonial labor coercion and the gangs’ recruitment of marginalized people.
- Even antiwar students loved the fantasy. Takakura Ken’s solitary, sword-wielding heroes appealed to protesters who despised corrupt business and U.S. domination—despite the genre’s reactionary politics.
Buruma’s strongest thread is the feedback loop between entertainment and power: criminals borrow their legitimacy from stories, while stories conceal whom their violence actually serves. The sharper question isn’t whether an outlaw looks honorable, but whether his supposed rebellion protects workers or protects the people exploiting them.
The essay also resists a tidy ending. Tougher laws constrained the established syndicates, but predatory markets persisted, and anxiety about foreign competitors furnished another excuse for nationalist nostalgia.