Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists

The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960

Eiko Maruko Siniawer

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780801454363
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Violence and democracy may seem fundamentally incompatible, but the two have often been intimately and inextricably linked. In Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, Eiko Maruko Siniawer argues that violence has been embedded in the practice of modern Japanese politics from the very inception of the country's experiment with democracy.

As soon as the parliament opened its doors in 1890, brawls, fistfights, vandalism, threats, and intimidation quickly became a fixture in Japanese politics, from campaigns and elections to legislative debates. Most of this physical force was wielded by what Siniawer calls "violence specialists": ruffians and yakuza. Their systemic and enduring political violence-in the streets, in the halls of parliament, during popular protests, and amid labor strife-ultimately compromised party politics in Japan and contributed to the rise of militarism in the 1930s.

For the post-World War II years, Siniawer illustrates how the Japanese developed a preference for money over violence as a political tool of choice. This change in tactics signaled a political shift, but not necessarily an evolution, as corruption and bribery were in some ways more insidious, exclusionary, and undemocratic than violence. Siniawer demonstrates that the practice of politics in Japan has been dangerous, chaotic, and far more violent than previously thought. Additionally, crime has been more political.

Throughout the book, Siniawer makes clear that certain yakuza groups were ideological in nature, contrary to the common understanding of organized crime as nonideological. Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists is essential reading for anyone wanting to comprehend the role of violence in the formation of modern nation-states and its place in both democratic and fascist movements.

1

---

Patriots and Gamblers

Violence and the Formation of the Meiji State

Standing before an overflowing crowd on the grounds of a local shrine, Tashiro Eisuke announced himself president and commander of the assembled and christened them the Konmingun (Poor People’s Army).1 This fighting force of farmers and other members of rural society wore headbands, had their sleeves rolled up, and stood ready with bamboo spears, swords, and rifles.2 On this first day of November in 1884, they converged in the Chichibu District of Saitama Prefecture and then launched a rebellion against those they deemed responsible for their poverty and powerlessness: rapacious lenders and the Meiji state. As its members murdered usurers, attacked sites of state authority, and battled government forces in the days that followed, the Konmingun was held together by Tashiro Eisuke and his second in command, Katō Orihei. Tashiro and Katō are especially remarkable because they were bakuto (gamblers)—technically outlaws, and a kind of yakuza. Before the mid-1800s, it would have been almost unheard of for such men to be at the helm of a peasant protest or political rebellion. And yet, in the second decade of the Meiji period, some bakuto assumed roles that thrust them onto the national political stage.

Tashiro and Katō will be considered here as part of a larger examination of how forerunners of modern violence specialists—shishi (“men of spirit”) as well as bakuto—navigated the tumultuous transition from early modern to modern rule which spanned the 1860s to 1880s. Shishi and bakuto were not remnants of a feudal past that staggered on beyond their time, but were refashioned through the tremendous upheaval of the Tokugawa shogunate’s fall and the turbulent early decades of the Meiji period. The end of samurai rule, the emergence of the nation-state, and the burgeoning of various kinds of democratic politics remade the early modern violence of shishi and bakuto into their modern incarnations. Yet shishi and bakuto negotiated these transformative decades quite differently.

Shishi were typically lower-ranking samurai, and as warriors of the Tokugawa period they were officially the violent arm of the early modern state. Given the paucity of opportunities for samurai to actually serve as the realm’s defenders, however, they were fighters more in name than in practice. What eventually compelled them to take up arms—against the political order they were supposed to protect—was their profound dissatisfaction with how the shogunate handled the arrival of the West in Japan in the 1850s. Frustration with their status as lower-ranking samurai coupled with ideologies of “direct action” and disdain for the government gave birth to shishi who, in the late 1850s and early 1860s, used violence (mainly in the form of assassination) to try to topple the Tokugawa shogunate. Shishi were not violence specialists in the most technical sense, for they were rebels who used force in an attempt to realize their own political goals and were not acting violently for others. Nor did they survive the Meiji Restoration as a political force. Nonetheless, shishi provided a model of violent rebellion against a seemingly delinquent state that would be adopted in the early Meiji period. And although they were variously constructed as patriotic activists and xenophobic terrorists in their own time, it was their patriotism that was remembered and resurrected by modern violence specialists in the Meiji period and beyond.

Bakuto of the Tokugawa period were gamblers who had honed their physical skills to protect their enterprises and territories. Precisely because of the violence of the bakuto, the Tokugawa shogunate made the somewhat ironic move of asking them to help police the realm, and certain domains recruited them to fight in the civil war of the Meiji Restoration. In the context of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement of the 1880s, the ability to wield violence helped propel some bakuto, like Tashiro Eisuke and Katō Orihei, into prominent leadership roles. Bakuto did not just leave an ideological legacy, as shishi did, but also became themselves violence specialists in a modern political context.

Both shishi and bakuto speak to questions about what happened to the violence of the Tokugawa period in the process of nation-state formation, about how and why violence persisted in certain forms, about how violence was remade to become distinctly modern. The violence of the Tokugawa to Meiji transition did not disappear with the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state but endured, however transformed, to have implications for political life and practice for decades to come.

Shishi: Assassins, Rebels, Patriots

The arrival of American gunboats off the coast of the capital in 1853 sparked a contentious and divisive debate about foreign policy in a country that had been secluded from official contact with much of the West for some two centuries. While opinions ranged from appeasement to expulsion, key government officials decided they had no choice but to cooperate with the militarily superior Americans. The perceived impotence of the Tokugawa shogunate in the face of the West crystallized concerns about its ability to protect and defend the country and encouraged in some a turn toward violent reform. Particularly offensive to those who saw Japan prostrating itself before the outside world were the signing in 1858 of the so-called “unequal treaties” that established diplomatic and trade relations with a handful of Western countries, and the subsequent two-year purge of opponents by the chief shogunate official, Great Elder (tairō) Ii Naosuke. Fanned by the country’s forced opening by the West, an incipient form of patriotism encouraged the use of violence to express deep dissatisfaction with the early modern state. What resulted was one of the few acts of violent samurai rebellion in over 200 years.

This anti-Tokugawa group has variously been called loyalist or shishi, a term that had connotations of self-sacrifice for realm or country. Confucius had defined a shishi as one who denied his body for the sake of virtue and benevolence; in the context of late Tokugawa Japan, shishi leader Yoshida Shōin characterized his kin as exercising their will for the country (kokka) in times of battle.3 In these years, the slogan that encapsulated their ideological stand was “revere the emperor, expel the barbarian” (sonnō jōi). The intellectual pedigree of these ideas was long and complex, but they were honed in the early 1800s by scholars from Mito Domain and then taken up by key shishi figures in the 1850s and early 1860s.4

Prominent among them was Yoshida Shōin from the domain of Chōshū, who especially after 1858 was vociferous in his entreaties for shishi as “humble heroes” to act—the Tokugawa regime was to be challenged by those outside it, and foreigners were to be attacked to force the shogunate into action against the “barbarians.” Yoshida also called for a restoration of the emperor led by self-sacrificing and loyal “unattached patriots” (sōmō no shishi). He was not just a man of words. In 1858, he was arrested for planning the assassination of Ii Naosuke’s emissary to Kyoto and was executed the following year. His teachings lived on in his pupils, at least 15 of whom would become shishi who engaged in violent action and a handful of whom—like Itō Hirobumi and Yamagata Aritomo—would play important roles in the Meiji Restoration and the politics that followed. Like Yoshida, fencing teacher Takechi Zuizan of Tosa Domain had a core following of shishi students, including notables Sakamoto Ryōma and Nakaoka Shintarō, and advocated the use of force to undermine the authority of the Tokugawa shogunate and to restore power to the imperial court.5

Assassination was a common violent tactic of the shishi, wielded against foreigners and those fellow countrymen viewed as kowtowing to the demands and presence of Westerners on Japanese soil. Historians have often described these assassinations as acts of terrorism. Indeed, they were symbolic acts intended to elicit fear—calculated to punish allegedly traitorous Japanese, bring about the expulsion of foreigners, and endanger the objectionable treaty settlement.6

A number of assassinations were carried out in the capital of Edo, a central site of official relations between the shogunate and foreign diplomats. Here, shishi were recognizable by their long hair, unshaven faces and unwashed bodies, light and casual clothing, and bare feet in wooden clogs. The opening shot that ushered in several years of shishi violence sounded outside an Edo castle gate, where Ii Naosuke was assassinated in March 1860. Eighteen shishi, one from Satsuma Domain and the rest from Mito, punished Ii with death for concluding the “unequal treaties.”7 Also on the list of shishi victims was Kobayashi Denkichi, a translator in the employ of the British legation. He was known to frequent establishments that catered to the amorous needs of foreign residents and served as a guide for members of the legation, but what allegedly caught the attention of his attackers was the disrespect that he and some of his British coworkers showed to the headstones of the famed 47 loyal rōnin (masterless samurai). Whether this was the true motivation for the assassination is unclear, as it sounds more like myth than reality, but Kobayashi was killed by angered shishi in early 1860.8 Also in Edo, a small group of shishi from Satsuma targeted Dutchman Henry Heusken, secretary and interpreter for the American legation who had used his linguistic skills in negotiations of the “unequal treaties.” On the evening of January 15, 1861, the masked shishi, dressed in black, ambushed Heusken and his retinue at a checkpoint and managed to inflict fatal sword wounds. The assassins were later found to be part of a shishi group known as Kobi no Kai (Association of the Tiger’s Tail) that was organized by Kiyokawa Hachirō, who ran a school where one could study Chinese classics, practice swordsmanship, and discuss politics. The Kobi no Kai consisted only of Kiyokawa’s most trusted associates who embraced the “revere the emperor, expel the barbarian” ideology.9 A number of months later, in July 1861, shishi attacked the British legation at Tōzenji. Fourteen or 15 shishi managed to breach the supposedly well-guarded defensive perimeter and stormed the compound, which resulted in the death or injury of several dozen people.10 During these years, other shishi attacks were aimed at a Russian naval officer, a Dutch merchant captain, and a Chinese in French employ.11

Although shishi considered their assassinations heroic, many foreigners naturally did not agree. Illustrating the idea that violence can be understood differently depending on where one stands, foreigners viewed shishi violence as terrorism and a reaffirmation of Japanese incivility. The first British minister to Japan, Consul General Rutherford Alcock, did acknowledge the determination and self-devotion of shishi when discussing the assassination of Ii Naosuke.12 On the whole, however, Alcock was understandably critical of the threat of violence that he felt so keenly. In a protest against the poor treatment of foreigners that he submitted to the Japanese government (presumably the shogunate) on August 9, 1859, Alcock explained to the host country the perils of everyday life in Edo:

No officer of the Missions of either country, Great Britain or the United States, can walk out of their official residence without risk of rudeness, offense, and latterly—more especially latterly—violence of the most wanton and determined character. Stones are thrown, blows are struck, swords are drawn on gentlemen passing along the great thoroughfares inoffensively and peaceably, offering neither offense nor provocation to any one.13

Alcock spoke almost two years later, just before the attack at Tōzenji, of how the constant danger was so “intolerable” that it made those around him “grow hardened and indifferent.”14 In his mind, the assassinations spoke to Japanese and Oriental treachery, cruelty, and vindictiveness. They also revealed the flaws of the shogunate for not controlling such unruly behavior, especially in the capital; this kind of “mob violence,” as he often called it, was reminiscent of bygone feudal Europe, and in the Europe of the present day, claimed Alcock, the equivalent of shishi violence would not be permitted by the government.15 Violent attacks on foreigners thus confirmed for the British minister his conceptions of the inability of Japanese people and politics to measure up to European civility, rationality, and advancement.

Shishi assassinations peaked in the early 1860s, with 70 carried out in a two-year period starting in mid-1862.16 Among them was the May 1862 attack on Tosa Domain’s chief minister. Orchestrated by Takechi Zuizan, the assassination was considered retribution for domain reform proposals viewed as pro-shogunate.17 Then, in September, British merchant Charles Richardson and three of his companions were attacked by shishi from Satsuma in what became known as the Namamugi Incident. A member of the British consular service, Ernest Satow, commented on the resultant panic: “This [the assassination] had a most powerful effect on the minds of Europeans, who came to look on every two-sworded man as a probable assassin, and if they met one in the street thanked God as soon as they had passed him and found themselves in safety.”18 British subjects wer...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Patriots and Gamblers
• 2 Violent Democracy
• 3 Institutionalized Ruffianism and a Culture of Political Violence
• 4 Fascist Violence
• 5 Democracy Reconstructed
• Afterword
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography