According to a May 25, 2009, report in the Yomiuri shinbun, Japan's Liberal Democratic Party issued a three-volume manual that contained instructions on how to win voters' hearts and minds. Politicians were given hints on how to dress, how to bow, and how to smile; election candidates were urged specifically to practice smiling once a day in front of a mirror. Eiko Maruko Siniawer's book underscores the need for politicians to do more than perfect this daily exercise: “The emergence of a modern Japan did not translate into an era of peaceful and gentlemanly politics; quite the contrary, it spawned a certain political roughness that persisted in various forms” (p. 1). Siniawer's conclusion is that political violence continues to pose a threat to democracy in Japan today.
Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists argues that Japan, like other countries and cultures, has had its share of conflict and corruption since modern times. In examining Japan's “rough political world,” Siniawer highlights the roles of ruffians, yakuza (members of organized crime syndicates), and nationalists, whose activities during the period of Japan's modernization (roughly 1860 to 1960) have been little studied. The details of these “violence specialists” are fascinating. Harder to follow, though, is Siniawer's notion of violent democracy that makes up the book's theoretical framework.
The book begins with an examination of the role played by “patriots and gamblers” at the time of the Meiji Restoration. The activities of a squad of gamblers, the Shūgitai, who fought against the Tokugawa and their supporters, are especially interesting. These and other lowly patriots, whether fighting for or against the new Meiji government, contributed to the “violent birth” of modern Japan. Chapter 2 focuses on new groups of politically engaged young men, or sōshi, who added their muscle power to the Freedom and People's Rights movement. They participated in a series of armed uprisings, including the Chichibu Incident of 1884. Brawls, fistfights, and acts of intimidation became facts of everyday political life. As popular political participation increased, so did opportunities to wield violence as a political tool. After the beginning of parliamentary politics in 1890, sōshi were known more for their violence than for their political agenda. Politicians required their services to get elected. Siniawer's description of the ruffianism that accompanied national elections in the early 1890s illustrates the ways in which the new political system both embraced violence and was nearly destroyed by it.
The third chapter is devoted to the institutionalization of ruffianism in the early twentieth century. Japan's fledgling political parties maintained their own “pressure groups,” or ingaidan, whose existence was necessary to win political battles, both inside and outside the Diet. Physical strength became an important factor for political success. Connections with organized crime were a further plus. The years after World War I and into the 1920s, the so-called period of Taisho democracy, were at the same time a high point in the political influence of these pressure groups. Siniawer gives the example of Ono Bamboku, who joined the Seiyukai ingaidan's youth division in 1913, engaged in heckling and the recreational use of physical force, and eventually won election to the House of Representatives in 1930. Yakuza bosses were also elected to the Diet in the years after the passage of the universal manhood suffrage act in 1925. The biographical sketches of Yoshida Isokichi and Hora Sennosuke, both of whom personified the acceptance of mafia types at the highest level of national politics, add a new dimension to the study of prewar parliamentary politics.
The growing power of the Japanese military in the 1930s helped to solidify a nexus of party politicians, military men, leaders of big business, and yakuza. Siniawer terms this an era of “fascist violence.” The book's fourth chapter focuses on the activities of the Kokusuikai and the Seigidan, two nationwide yakuza organizations that were powerful players in the political and ideological landscape of prewar Japan. Siniawer's comparisons with fascist groups in Italy and Germany are interesting; what she tells us about the sheer scale of the activities of these yakuza groups in domestic and colonial politics is eye-opening. Mainly engaged in strikebreaking and other unsavory attempts to cleanse the country of leftist contamination, these powerful yakuza organizations, alongside other ultranationalist groups such as the Ketsumeidan and the Sakurakai, helped to discredit parliamentary rule. Paradoxically, the influence of the yakuza declined after 1937, as gamblers, ruffians, and yakuza youth were recruited to serve the violent aims of the state overseas.
The final chapter of Siniawer's book examines the resurgence of yakuza in postwar politics. Siniawer reviews the resurrection of conservative politicians in the early years of the Cold War, noting an unholy alliance of political fixers, yakuza, big business, and the United States government, represented by the Central Intelligence Agency. She highlights Kishi Nobusuke's links with the underworld and the role of violence specialists in the explosion of rioting, assassinations, and strikes that shook Japan in 1960. In the years after 1960, violence gradually disappeared from the Japanese political scene, but not the influence of the “violence specialists,” who found the power of money more effective in securing their political goals.
Gamblers, ruffians, thugs, and yakuza have left a major imprint on contemporary Japanese politics and political style, and Siniawer tells their story well. Her argument draws on Daniel Ross's Violent Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), which attempts to explain the seeming contradiction between the use of violence (in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example) and the pursuit of democratic ends. Ross defines democracy as “any political system grounded in the idea that sovereignty lies with the people” (p. 7). He maintains that democracy, born through the seizure of sovereignty, is always violent and that this “originary violence” continues to haunt all that follows.
Siniawer adopts this line of argument to shape her narration of modern Japanese political history. She notes, for example, that Japan's “violent foundational moment was the Freedom and People's Rights Movement and what came out of the 1890s was indeed a democracy” (p. 43). This is a provocative statement that deserves careful analysis, but here Siniawer falls short. Her definition of democracy as “a participatory form of government” (p. 7) is far too simple, and she fails to link her understanding of democracy consistently to the political realities of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan. No one would dispute the general point that violence and democracy are intertwined in Japan's modern history, but a more nuanced treatment of theoretical issues would enhance this compelling account of the underworld in modern Japan.
