The Yakuza

Dan Snow (0:05)

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 attaché. At the center of this delegation was Sakai Eizu, 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.

The two men exchanged stiff smiles, shook hands and posed to 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 had founded a paramilitary organization with the impressive name of the Great Japanese Order of Righteousness. He had built dojos to train his men in beating up union workers. He operated a private aviation unit. He had secured international notoriety by sending mob contacts in to rescue a kidnapped British heiress in Manchuria. 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 organized 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-organized 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. 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.

Andrew, thanks so much for coming to the podcast.

Andrew Rankin (2:36)

It's great to talk to you.

Dan Snow (2:38)

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

Andrew Rankin (2:44)

Well, to be honest, searching for the origin of an organized crime group is 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 standardized 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 early 1600s. 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 ruining. 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 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. I looked into some of these sword testings and they were just basically armed muggings. 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 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 threats from gangs, from intimidation, and it becomes a kind of self-perpetuating business because shopkeepers, 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.