Befitting Bedfellows: Yakuza and the State in Modern Japan

Against a backdrop of labor unrest and the democratization of politics, yakuza (Japanese mafiosi) and the modern Japanese state forged in the late 1910s and 1920s a symbiotic relationship born of shared ideological concerns, financial interests, and a willingness to use violence as a tool for exerting and maintaining power. This article argues that yakuza and the state were able to join forces, as exemplified by the nationalist Dai Nihon Kokusuikai (Greater Japan National Essence Association), in part because they were operating in a world in which the boundaries between the legitimate and the illegitimate were fluid and porous. Struggling to define these boundaries were leftist intellectuals, who in the interwar period took a critical stance against the political violence of groups like the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai and yet were prompted by the murkiness of violent affiliations to reinforce ideas about the legitimacy of state violence. Considered too is the legacy of the yakuza-state relationship in the post-World War II era, when public impatience with political violence shifted discussions about legitimate and illegitimate behavior and affected the visibility of yakuza-state ties, but did not undo them. Taken as a whole, the article seeks to challenge the conventional view of mafias as illegitimate and states as legitimate and poses questions about the extent to which zones of ambiguous legitimacy might have contributed to transformations of Japan's political system.