Book Info: The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law, and the State By Peter B. E. Hill Oxford University Press Oxford, 2003, pp. 323.
	Bad boys, Bad boys... Peter Hill Yakuza Japanese Cops

The idea that crime is representative of moral failing is a potent one in our modern culture. Take for example, that execrable Fox TV show, Cops. One of the early “reality” television shows, the unblinking eye of the camera follows police as they chase the criminal and the hapless, grab drunks and addicts, and break up domestic “incidents.” Each clip follows with a cop musing thoughtfully that it was a tough job, but ever so rewarding to do right. To wit, the theme song proclaims “Bad boys, bad boys, what’ya gonna do, what'ya gonna do when they come for you.” Even the most logical of criminals, (e.g. the fictional Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lechter) is dismissed as ultimately pathological.

The Yakuza, the very real Japanese mafia, occupy a place that is somewhere between fact and fiction. They are bigger than life, with tattoos, elaborate rituals, and their own special language. Fingers are chopped off and bodies are elaborately tattooed. They are romanticized as gamblers and rogues who protect the townspeople against the authorities.

One of the most persistent perceptions of the Yakuza is that they are unique, when compared to Russian, Chinese or Italian mafias, in their relationship with the state. Indeed, in one of “the industrialized world’s most crime free societies,” the Japanese mafia appears to have open, almost cozy ties with police: in the past, some police used to have tea in headquarters to catch up on news.

Yakuza gangs used to openly display their gang affiliations outside their offices without fear of reprisal, have organization guides, and send formal notices through the post on who’s in and who’s out in a given gang. Indeed as Peter Hill, the author of The Japanese Mafia, discovered in the course of his field work, interviewees on both sides of the law asserted that “the yakuza were fundamentally different from the (Sicilian) mafia.”

Or are they? Are the Yakuza unique in their allegedly close relationship with the state? Do they exist with the tacit approval of the state? Peter Hill’s elegant study of the Japanese Yakuza is stripped of anecdotes (though given the opportunity, one gets the feeling that he probably has some stories to tell) and uses a variety of sources to try to “makes sense of the yakuza.” He argues that the Japanese Mafia, in as much as any organized crime gang can be seen as a monolithic group, are not fundamentally different from their peers.

He dissects the nature of the Japanese Yakuza by asking difficult questions. What is organized crime? How is it defined? Why does it exist? As he points out, a bank heist requires much organization, but is not organized crime per se. It is not enough to point to the pathological nature of crime—clearly there is a market for the services that mafias provide. Borrowing heavily from F. Varese work on the Russian mafia and D. Gambetta on the Italian mafia, he develops a framework that organized how crime groups sell and seek to monopolize the supply of protection. And as he points out, police are competitors in this market.

By building a conceptual framework around a market of supply and demand of protection, he provides a structure to what seems like random acts of gang activity. Indeed it is need as the scope of Hill’s study is wide. He attempts to quantify mafia business, describe sources of income, sketch the various laws, and the complex relationship between the state and mafia. He describes the legal niceties and limitations of the Boryokudan Taisaku Ho (Botaiho), Japan’s answer to RICO. In the course of his research, he spoke a wide range of sources from interviews with police, lawyers and gang members in a variety of locales. He refers to a wide range of sources on international mafia, and police documents and white papers.

However, unlike his peers, he uses shukanshi, “the down market weekly and monthly magazines” as a source. Certain magazines such as Jitsuwa Jidai and Jitsuwa Dokyumento “are avidly read by both gang members and police alike as a way of keeping up to date with underworld affairs.” Hill makes skillful use of these sources: while they are colorful, are not always verifiable. However, while the police white papers have more respectability, they are equally problematic, albeit in a different way: for example, yakuza income statistics appear to be underreported by a wide margin.

Hill’s forte is describing the complexities of the relationship between the mafia and the state. For example, Hill’s description of the Sagawa Kyubin scandal connects the dots. In this scandal it was found a listed company and “the two most powerful and well-funded politicians in Japan at the end of the 1980s were making direct use of the yakuza.” However, Hill fully explores the many varied reasons why major players such as Noboru Takeshita created certain alliances with Kominto, an obscure right wing party with ties to the Yakuza.

In another case, he highlights frictions between the state and the mafia by describing a lawsuit in which local residents in Shizuoka prefecture sued the Yamaguchi-gumi (gang) in an effort to oust them from their local headquarters building. In this case, the land was legally owned by the gang officer and no criminal activity had been obviously committed: the gang argued that they were a “chivalrous group” and the residents’ group was infringing on their constitutional rights to freedom of association, property rights and equality before the law. Nevertheless, the gang lost the case.

The work is not without flaws. Hill takes on the onerous task of trying to quantify the Yakuza business. As he himself concedes of the numbers, “many of them look suspiciously like as they have been calculated on the back of a cigarette packet. The truth is that nobody knows the true figures of, for example, total yakuza income.” He also makes a minor error: he notes that the maximum interest that money lenders can charge under the Investment law is 40.004%. However, as of June 2000, the maximum interest rate had been lowered to 29.2% under a revision of the Capital Subscription Law.

But none the less, Hill’s work is valuable addition: by exploring Japan’s criminal underbelly, he offers insights into both the mafia and the state. In the end, both exists in conjunction with the other.

[Hill] dissects the nature of the Japanese Yakuza by asking difficult questions. What is organized crime? How is it defined? Why does it exist?