The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law, and the State (review)

The English-language literature on Japanese organized crime, the bōryukudan or yakuza, has always lacked a scholarly, book-length analysis of its origins, structures, and relationship with the state. This condition stands in marked contrast to the extensive and detailed scholarly journal articles and book chapters exploring selective aspects of the yakuza or the yakuza as one important aspect of broader social and political dynamics in Japan. In The Japanese Mafia, sociologist Peter B. E. Hill has written an important volume that fills this gap.

The Japanese Mafia is not the first English-language volume on the yakuza. Florence Rome's 1975 book The Tattooed Men offered a glimpse into the rituals and personalities of Japanese organized crime. Researchers long have read David Stark's excellent 1981 doctoral dissertation on the yakuza, with its extensive fieldwork and personal observations of the day-to-day operations of an organized crime group and bemoaned the fact that the work was never revised and published in book form.¹ In 1986, investigative journalists David Kaplan and Alec Dubro overcame an array of publishing obstacles and released a path-breaking book on Japanese organized crime entitled The Yakuza. Rich in detail, often embarrassingly so for many Japanese politicians and law enforcement personnel, by the early 1990s National Police Agency officials often pointed with pride to the sections of the book their interviews helped to influence. The updated and expanded version of The Yakuza, published in 2003 by the University of California Press, retains the earlier volume's strengths in substantive detail. But by its very nature, and in contrast to The Japanese Mafia, the work by Kaplan and Dubro places much less emphasis on theoretically informed scholarship on organized crime and the ramifications of such scholarship for both understanding Japanese society and broader cross-national comparisons of the relationship between organized crime and the state.

Hill's volume systematically explores two explanations common in the English-language literature for what readily appears as a puzzle to anyone during their initial visits to Japan: the highly visible presence of Japanese organized crime groups in a society with an international reputation for relatively low levels of crime. These common explanations are: first, the socially embedded crime control function of the yakuza, and, second, the "quasi-symbiotic" relationship between the yakuza, law, and the state (p.1). Hill argues that a yakuza social control function clearly exists but is not unique to Japan. Drawing on Diego Gambetta's classic work on organized crime, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection, Hill contends that the yakuza, much like organized criminal groups in Sicily, are best understood as "mafias" and share common characteristics in their origins as well as their operations. Hill argues further that while a relationship exists between the yakuza, law, and the state, it has been more "ambiguous and dynamic" than statically symbiotic (p.2). Hill posits that understandable strains in the relationship have increased since the heyday of cooperation during the dislocations of early postwar Japan and that these strains have intensified during the Heisei era. The second half of the volume turns to the impact of government steps against the yakuza under the 1992 Bōryokudan Countermeasures Law (Bōtaihō). Hill argues that the Bōtaihō and subsequent steps against organized crime in combination with Japan's economic downturn have had a "non-trivial effect" in weakening the yakuza, with detrimental as well as beneficial results for Japanese society (p.2).

The book's primary theoretical chapter, chapter one, seeks to make the case that the yakuza can be best understood as a mafia. The chapter offers a brief overview of the long-standing debate in the literature and in law enforcement policy and practice over the definitions and characteristics of organized crime. Drawing heavily on Gambetta, Hill moves from this overview to a narrow focus on those crime groups that are distinguished by the provision of private protection. The author's...