Japanese Schoolgirl Gangs and Kamikaze Bikers: How an Assassin’s Sword Kicked off a Criminal CountercultureDraft Episode for Dec 13, 2022
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October 12th, 1960. Politicians and around 2,500 spectators are gathered for a televised debate at the Hibiya Public Hall in downtown Tokyo. Inajira Asanuma, leader of Japan's Socialist Party, a towering man, iconic, never to be seen without his thick-rimmed specs and scratchy moustache, is the main draw.

Asanuma is a behemoth in post-war Japan, a place battered and bruised and confused about its identity, traditions and place in the world.

But he's a polarizing figure too. The previous year, he visited Chairman Mao in China to declare the United States a common enemy. Throughout 1960, Asanuma's party has been instrumental in huge anti-Washington protests, during which demonstrators storm Tokyo's National Diet Building, Japan's parliament, and one woman is killed. The fallout of that deadly episode has toppled the right-wing government of Nobusuke Kishi.

a right-wing suspected war criminal who's enjoyed the backing of the CIA and the support of Yakuza organized crime groups. At a debate in Hibiya, Asanuma is set to stress how his socialists will support free and fair elections rather than communist revolution. At around 3 p.m., Asanuma advances to the podium and begins his speech, but right-wing activists drown it out with heckles and jeers.

Five minutes later, the crowd settles down and Asanuma's ready to begin. But as he does, a slight 17-year-old named Otoya Yamaguchi, dressed in his school uniform, storms the stage and charges Asanuma. He's wielding his father's short-bladed Yoroi Doshi sword, the kind feudal samurai once used to pierce their enemy's armor. Asanuma's suit is no match, and he reels in agony as Yamaguchi plunges the blade into his side.

Guards grab Yamaguchi, an ultra-nationalist radical who dreams of returning Japan to its pre-war society. But he wriggles free and he stabs Asanuma again, felling the giant leader, who folds and collapses onto the floor, bleeding out in minutes, long before anybody can get him to hospital. Yamaguchi then attempts to turn the blade on himself, but he's wrestled to the ground, pinned and hauled off to prison. Cameras capture the entire thing.

Fascist thugs have committed a vile horror, announces Soviet news agency TASS, while China calls Yamaguchi a, quote, hired gangster. 20,000 Japanese flood the streets of Tokyo that very night to mourn the death of their socialist hero. Leaders from across the political spectrum will speak out in praise of Asanuma, but Japan's socialist party is rudderless and it will be smoked at coming elections.

Just three weeks later, while awaiting trial, Yamaguchi mixes toothpaste and water and scrawls a message on his prison cell wall. Seven lives for my country, it reads. Ten thousand years for his imperial majesty, the emperor. Then he tears his bedsheets into strips, knots them into rope, and he hangs himself from a light fixture on the ceiling. The protests, assassination and suicide rocked Japan, and they split its political factions even further.

A US deal around which the protests were started to leave military bases on Japanese soil will be signed. But that leaves Tokyo in a state of flux, caught between a traditionalist past and the breakneck lurch of Western capital. Amid the chaos, the Yakuza thrive, empowering and piggybacking on the kinds of nationalist leaders Asanuma had sought to vanquish at the polls.

By the mid-1960s, their numbers swelled to an all-time high, 200,000 gangsters countrywide.

But Asanuma's televised slaughter and the political and mafia power it grabs and invites will spark incredible countercultures, anti-Yakuza and feminist movements that will manifest in gangs and gaggles of street thugs of both genders whose lurid exploits inspire world fashion and some of the world's most recognisable movie characters.

Among them are washed up kamikaze pilots and a self-appointed so-called girl boss they call Keiko the Razor. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Music

Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast that's single-handedly battling stereotypes about Japanese schoolgirls, or at least doing its bit to change the SEO. My name's Sean Williams, I'm a journalist in London, I'm joined by Danny Gold, who is a journalist in New York City. I'm just about over my World Cup heartbreak, although I'm definitely doing better off than the 21-year-olds who smashed up the pub I watched it in.

That's about as British as it gets. And we've got something else as rare as an England World Cup win, and that is a Danny Gold correction. So take it away. Well, I mean, I don't know if it's like that rare, but I feel obligated to come out and say that I fucked up last episode. I said, I think we talked about Pistol Pete, right? And Sex, Money, Murder. And I mentioned that he had a podcast called

that, which is something I should have looked into more because, you know, he was locked up and in isolation for a long time. And I thought things had loosened. Uh, and Pistopita is like a pretty popular nickname, but it turns out, um, and also the podcast is about like interviewing guys from prison or in prison or about like, you know, drug gang stuff. It's actually a different dude, uh, who has that podcast, you know, it was called like King of Rikers or something like that, which should have tipped me off. But, uh, yeah, I got that really wrong. So, uh,

Pistol Pete from the episode does not have a podcast. Of all the things to get wrong, I mean, assuming that a middle-aged man has got a podcast is not the worst call that you could ever make. I think a middle-aged man doing life in prison. But, you know, I just thought maybe it was like one of those arts programs or something that people do. But yeah, so Mia Culpa on that one.

All right. Cool. Yeah, this one is a little bit different. Anyway, I hope you guys like it. Bunch of random, like different things thrown in, but it's all super interesting. I kind of like got onto it when we did the first Japanese one. I mean, it feels like forever ago. I think it's one of our first shows. I think back in 2020, around the fall then, like we kicked this thing off and I did a two-parter on the history of the Yakuza, how they came out of the feudal period, got wildly rich in Imperial Japan, and

And then they used the US's Cold War anti-communism to get even richer after the war, only to see it all crumble down and end up scrubbing actual shit off the decks of the Diamond Princess. Remember that cruise ship moored up in Yokohama because of COVID? You know, that was the time when we were all getting hammered on Zoom quiz nights and wondering when we'd ever live normally again. I'm not sure we ever did, really. And I have a friend of the pod, Jake Adelstein, who's the author of The Incredible Tokyo Vice.

about his time on the crime beat in Japan's capital. It's still available online for a couple of quick guys. Patreon.com forward slash The Underworld Podcast. Do it. Yeah, that's where we put up all the bonus episodes and everything else that you can get for a very cheap price. Patreon.com slash The Underworld Podcast. Also, the Tokyo Vice show is pretty awesome. Like I was a big fan. I think HBO Max, right? It was really good, really well done.

Oh, cool, man. I've still not seen it. But, you know, anyway, this is two years later. We're obviously millionaires now. Jake's show is huge. And the Yakuza stock is worth a bit less than a Bored Ape. According to Japan's National Police Agency, membership of organized crime groups there dropped by almost 10% in 2021, down to just 24,100, which is way, way down from that 60s peak of 200 grand last year.

One of Tokyo's biggest families, the Anagasaki Kai, God, sorry, announced it was disbanding only last month, which is good news, I think. I don't know. Kind of a real bummer for them, though. I mean, how does that how does that disbanding process work? It would kind of be a fascinating thing, I think, to follow for a documentary filmmaker or journalist just to kind of really spend time with these guys that are now disbanding.

Although I guess they were more business oriented as opposed to a lot of organized crime groups. But it's, yeah, I don't know. It kind of reminds me of, you know, FARC disbanding in Colombia. And you've got all these Colombian guerrillas in the jungle that are coming in from the cold. Yeah, I think that's probably a little bit more intense than what's going on here. But I imagine there might be some breakaway groups or something along those lines. Yeah, gotta be. I think you might be using pod time to pitch editors there. That would be a pretty good film.

Yeah, $3 a word, I'll fucking pitch. Anyway, moving on. But Japanese crime, right? It's not just about Yakuza and their own deep set rules and tats and all that kind of stuff. I mean, in fact, there are a bunch of really interesting and crazy gangs that grew up in the subculture of the 1960s and beyond. And the televised killing of Inajiro Asanuma that we just went through, that was the catalyst for a ton of it.

And you might think you've never seen these gangs before, but you almost certainly have. So take, for example, Tarantino's 2003 movie Kill Bill Volume 1. You know that Japanese schoolgirl character, the kind, kind of Harajuku girl assassin with a razor ball and chain, played by Chiaki Kuriyama, who was also in Battle Royale? Well, actually, she's an example of somebody called a Sukaban. And I'm sorry, Japanese speakers, as always, we're going to butcher and kill your language in this episode.

And that word comes from suke or girl and ban, which is a short form of the word banjo or gang boss. So sukeban aren't just skirts and scowls, but they definitely are that too. They're proper gangs, like fully fledged paid up gangsters.

So side story here, this is from a couple of years ago when I worked at Vice News and it was just starting off, right? Yeah.

Probably the most popular video we did there, or at least like top three, despite it not being that much of a crazy news story or super interesting. No disrespect to my guys, Andrew Glazer and Simon Ostrovsky.

Was about the Japanese schoolgirls. The walking dates industry thing. Their kind of hustle there. That's not prostitution. But sort of in the gray area there. Because so many pervs are probably YouTubing or Googling Japanese schoolgirls for sale. Or Japanese schoolgirls. And I just checked.

And it has 14 million views on YouTube. 14 million! So my doc on the Rohingya, which is probably the best thing I've done, exposes human trafficking networks in Thailand, unearthed insane UN fuckery. I think that has like 225,000. And what I'm saying in a long-winded way is that we need to be sure to put the phrase Japanese schoolgirls in the title for this episode just to get that massive purr bounce. The Venn diagram of people who

listen to our show watch vice and type that into google i'm not gonna say what that looks like but i don't know man yeah it's it's a it's a it's a circle it's basically a circle yeah um yeah i mean you know you got 225 000 views on that fuck i mean half the stuff i write for magazines who reads magazines anymore can you even get a copy of outside magazine you were saying the other day

Nah. All right. Keep it going. All right. Anyway, yeah, journalism's doing well. Despite... Anyway, going back to that time in Japan, despite Japan's loss and occupation by the Americans right after the war...

For many years, its society remains one of rigid roles and strictures, and there's little room for women's movements like there were in other Western nations. In fact, women didn't even get the vote in Japan until 1947, and that was only after a US-backed constitutional overhaul, which caused plenty of issues amongst the country's old male-dominated politics. Yes, a lot has changed since then, obviously.

In fact, this 1947 constitution in Japan is in most ways more progressive than America's very own. But while we're here, quiz question. Which nation was the first to allow women to vote universally? Yes, New Zealand in 1893. So congrats, Kiwis. You did something interesting. I'm going to...

And that were my future compatriots. Anyway, after this point, women begin getting jobs in industry and other sectors in Japan. And that challenges the status quo. And the first march towards the Sukaband gangs actually comes out of organized crime itself. Sex work, to be precise. So we're not going to venture away from the prostitution.

And there's some half a million Japanese women working in the trade during the 1950s, when the Americans are in control and the islands are building themselves back from this wholesale destruction. Almost all sex workers then ply their trade out of government-sanctioned red light districts, meaning it's actually legal at this point.

And that also means that Japan's political elites and Yakuza gangsters have free range on their earnings. Now, in Tokyo, you can still see that world in the district of Kabuchiko. Kabukicho. Christ, man, I'm going to struggle with this one. The corner of Shinjuku that is like crammed with smoky bars, hostess places, brothels. I went out there once and it was amazing. Some stories for another day. Definitely. Yeah.

You know, we actually, we have time if you want to get into your stories from there. I mean, all I'm going to say is that that guy, that guy and his wife's proposal were really, it was really kind. And maybe I should have just stopped smoking menthol cigarettes and took him up on it. But anyway, so because these high profile red light districts are run by the mob,

at the behest of local politicians or vice versa hand in glove kind of thing you get this feminist movement that actually bucks the trend of women in other nations at the time by calling for this system of sex work to be made illegal so they're making around three times the cash of other traditionally female jobs at the time like receptionist or factory workers and

And they don't want these men in suits taking a massive cut. You know, that's really interesting because you kind of see that sometimes in black markets, right? Like how much more profitable was alcohol when there was a black market there? But also a big thing right now, the LA Times just had a huge article on it. This is the beginning of September about how the weed industry right now in Cali is just so much more violent and dangerous and messed up since it got legalized.

And we had a listener along, like maybe a year ago who was going to take me into it. I think he was in Northern California, but he dropped off the face of the earth. I'm actually kind of worried about him, but he was saying how, how violent and how dangerous it's gotten because org, a lot of organized crime groups have moved in because like,

I don't remember the specifics, but I assume it's because the money is semi-legal. They're operating in a gray area. And the feds have kind of backed off of Cali because they're like, okay, it's legal in the state. You guys want to deal with it, deal with it. But these kind of smaller police forces in these rural areas or Northern California, valley areas, whatever it is, they don't really have the manpower to

to get out there and do something about these, you know, really, a lot of them international organized crime groups that are moving in and making a ton of money. And of course, they're employing a lot of undocumented workers and they abuse them and all that sort of stuff. And then also, there's all sorts of stick-up crews out in, especially around the Oakland area because a lot of the business is done in cash because of all the banking regulations. So,

So a lot of these guys, I mean, he was telling me a lot of them are like, no, make weed illegal again because it's the only thing that's going to regulate this business. I mean, there's got to be hopefully another answer. Maybe federal legal will change things. Yeah, it's kind of wild to think about. Yeah, I saw some documentary a while back about people taking cash over state lines and they're like driving around in station wagons like some kind of National Lampoon Mad Max crossover with like shotguns hanging out the windows with piles of cash in the back.

It's pretty nuts. Yeah, they get arrested, some of them, in states where weed isn't legal. And they can face serious time, seriously. Jesus Christ. I mean, I'm actually going to sort of look into that thing next week in Nepal because I'm going out to look at the weed industry and whether, I don't know, like whether with the legalization in Europe and the US, these Nepalese historic kind of growers in the south near India are branching out into more exotic and kind of,

Yeah.

Men stay on top, not least the Yakuza, which are just getting more powerful in Japan by the minute. In 1958, Tokyo cops estimate there are 80,000 Yakuza across Japan. Within five years, that more than doubles, with the biggest Yakuza outfit, which is the Yamaguchi Gumi, no relation to our assassin at the top of the show, cementing its place as the nation's number one. When

Women can't join the Yakuza, of course, and they've leaned nationalist and right wing to say the very least since their foundation. And since we're here, let's kind of catch you up on that quickly. The name Yakuza actually comes from the combination hand of eight, nine and three. You could get in this Baccarat style card game called Hanafuda, which was a favorite of the 18th century Bakuto, who were kind of an untouchable thing.

gambler cast in feudal japan yakuza also transliterates as good for nothing but they're not really down and outs right according to yakuza themselves they come out of early vigilante groups called machi yako which are kind of battling neighborhood watch types who defend villages from ronin or samurai fighters who've lost their masters and fancy and easy pillage so i'm getting all your favorite japanese terms right out the way at the top of the show

Anyway, fast forward to the 20th century and Yakuza are more structured, divided out into families and assimilated into several ultra-nationalist groups which are gaining prominence in expansive Imperial Japan. Yakuza, under the leadership of this guy who is a fascism fanboy called Yoshio Kodama, they smuggle and gun run when Japan occupies Chinese Manchuria from 1931, which is one of the events that actually led to the Second World War.

Kadama himself becomes one of Asia's richest people, stealing from the benighted Chinese. We went into him a bunch in the first couple of shows about the Yakuza, but here's a bit from David Kaplan's 2003 book, Yakuza, Japan's Criminal Underworld. Quote,

Kodama operated as a sort of imperial Japanese version of Catch-22's Milo Minderbender, buying tungsten here, guns there, reselling them and peddling vast stores of radium, cobalt, nickel and copper. He obtained the materials in China and Manchuria, forcing the Chinese at gunpoint to sell at pitifully low prices. It was an incredibly lucrative effort, one that might easily be termed looting.

And then, at the end of the war, of course, America drops the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrenders to occupation by the US. Kodama winds up in prison, but he's released in 1948 as part of an attempt to cull the spread of communism in Asia by propping up right-wingers and fascists. That's not obviously confined to Japan.

The CIA even pays him to beat up leftists, which is one of his favourite hobbies, but not as much as getting paid. And he runs contraband and drugs, not least meth peddled by the Axis powers during the war, to explode the power of the Yakuza for decades to come.

So, these guys, these gangsters, they're hardly summer of love wild child hippies, and to Japan's embittered youth, particularly its women, Yakuza and Japan's right-wing politicians are just two sides of the same coin. Men in power, in suits, and against change. Women begin forming small gangs and patrolling the streets of major Japanese cities for the second half of the 1950s. Wait, are they like greasers? Like what kind of are...

you know, like savage nomad style biker gangs? Or are they more kind of just in it for the look? Yeah, there is this element of that. And we're going to get to that with another group of guys further down the show. There's a lot of imports from the US counterculture at the time. Greece is a good like touch point, actually. But these women, they kind of take it in their own direction, right? They run small time scams. They do gambling, theft and other street crimes. But that is about to change. And in pretty spectacular style.

Now we're back at 1960, where we began this show. Public anger in Japan grows over the proposed United States-Japan Security Treaty. This is the measure I mentioned at the top of the show, which, if passed in a Diet, Japan's parliament, will allow Washington to keep military bases on Japanese soil.

Locals simply know it as, quote, AMPO, which is a portmanteau of security treaty in Japanese. And you can see why it's controversial. Not only has America dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, but it's occupied and dictated to Tokyo since, which is a national embarrassment that unites leftists and nationalists alike.

In May 1960, Japanese leader Nobusuke Kishi, who we mentioned earlier, he's the head of the Conservative Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP. He tries to push this bill through the diet to coincide with a state visit from US President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

further stoking claims of authoritarianism among fellow lawmakers and protests which are gathering by this time in Tokyo. I just want to stop you right there and let our listeners know that the politics stuff, it's going to end soon and then Sean's going to start talking about

schoolgirls who hide razors in their skirts and cut people's faces and all sorts of fun stuff like that. So just bear with him for a little more background. Yeah, it's just another hour of this to go. So Kishi, this right-wing politician, he's not a wallflower. He's accused of war crimes himself during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. It's kind of like denazification in Germany. And he's also pals with Kadama, our Yakuza friend, and he's about to call in a favor.

On June 10th that year, Eisenhower's press secretary James Haggerty arrives at Tokyo's Haneda Airport, only to have his car attacked by protesters and he has to be airlifted to safety alongside US Ambassador Douglas MacArthur by a Marines helicopter. Now this is massively humiliating for the LDP and Kishi turns to his Yakuza buddy Kodama and asks him to provide some muscle as the now dubbed Ampo protests threaten to turn ugly in Tokyo.

Five days later, they do.

On June 15, 1960, hundreds of thousands of people, most of them students, crowd the diet. I guess, insert joke about teenagers eating disorders here, is that bad form? I don't know. It's a bad joke and bad form. So basically, you know, two for two, par for the course for you. Wicked. Yeah, got it. Anyway, a small group of hard leftists, they break into the building itself and fight with baton wielding cops. And amid the violence, a female student named Michiko Kamba is killed.

Outside the Diet, Kishi's called in Yakuza Honcho Kadama and his nationalist thugs who ran protesters with trucks and beat them with spike planks, hospitalising dozens but amazingly leaving no one dead.

In the aftermath, politicians and newspapers denounce violence, quote, on both sides. Is there any for this reminiscent America? I don't know. Kishi, though, he's for the block. Media blame the chaos on him and Kodama, and on June 16, he commits political harry-carry, steps down as Eisenhower cancels his trip too. On June 18, the last day before this Ampo Treaty can be ratified, an even bigger, this time peaceful crowd thongs the Diet.

No dice. It passes. For millions of Japanese, not least the young women, the Ampo protests and the conspiracy of politics and organized crime that helped push through the treaty are the spark that lights a touch paper of counterculture social revolution. And then on October 12th, that very same year, Otoya Yamaguchi plunges his sword into Asanuma's belly on live TV.

And overnight, Japan just doesn't have a disaffected youth anymore. It's got a full-blown culture war. To be fair, I mean, this culture war sounds much more interesting than the current American culture war about, you know, arguing over ethnicities of elves and mermaids and things like that. Although plenty of young men who study the sword, so at least there's something in common there. That's true. There is like a unifying factor in that. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyone, the front lines of this culture war are the Sukaban. These girl bosses prowl Tokyo and other major cities, and they quickly become notorious. Writes Annie Wang at Caliber magazine, quote, brandishing katanas and tucking razor blades under their skirts. So there you go, Danny, you got it.

Sukaban followed a strict hierarchy and moral code. With their outrageous fashion choices and criminal behavior, Sukaban directly challenged the notion of the ideal Japanese woman, proving that Japanese women are indeed more than just objects to be exploited by the Japanese government and podcasters in 2022. Sukaban participated in petty crimes like shoplifting, while also dabbling in more serious crime like break-ins and public conflicts.

What are public conflicts? I think just a punch-up, basically. The Suka band, though, they stick to a rigid code of conduct, just like their male counterparts in the Yakuza, and they're also strictly hierarchical. If a girl is disloyal, does drugs, or gets off with the wrong guy, they're, quote, lynched, which is a term that's very distinct from its US connotation, as it basically means getting a beat down, anything from cigarette burns to a razor slashing.

And these gangs, they have amazing names. There's the Tokyo Shoplifters Group, which has just 80 members. And it goes all the way up to something called the Kanto Women's Delinquent Alliance. Now, among all the Sukabang gangs, the Kanto Women's Delinquent Alliance, they stand above them all. And I'm sure you'd agree it storms in top spot in our underworld gangs names charts.

These guys pop up in the mid-60s. They peak in the 1970s with an estimated 20,000 members, which is huge. These shoplifting gangs are like the female version of the lowlifes from Brooklyn, which, you know, I don't know if you know about that. I don't know about those guys. Yeah, I mean, they were actually pretty hard, but they were famous for racking, just like going to stores and just taking everything, like stealing everything. I think it was the 80s is really when they popped up.

But they had a special interest in Ralph Lauren clothing, and they all wore Ralph Lauren. I mean, maybe we'll do a story on it one day, but they're a pretty fascinating group.

Like legendary New York City street gang. I feel like the Decepticons as well, the gang that Shine was in back in the day in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I think they were known for ripping off big stores, right? The Duck Down guys were involved in that. But yeah, I mean, they were hard as hell. They weren't just like shoplifters who stole stuff. But that was a big part of it, which is racking, taking everything they could and then selling it and getting money from it.

Yeah, shine this. Love it on this show. Here is something about the Canto Women Delinquent Alliance, though, which is an altogether different kind of gang that I found in an academic paper. And honestly, there is not a lot about these guys. I even contacted a local museum galleries. I'm trying to get some information about it that I can put in a bonus as well. But here's the academic paper. Quote, their antics range from petty crime like shoplifting to full-on brawls with other gangs. I guess that's the...

the public conflicts that we mentioned before. The women always carried chains and single blade razors as their weapons of choice. One famous Sukaban was Keiko the Razor. Keiko's nickname came from her tendency to quickly pull the razor she kept between her breasts out and slash an enemy's face in one swift motion. I mean, Keiko the Razor, pulling a blade out from between her boobs, stealing shit and smashing people's faces in. I mean, come on, man, this stuff is mad.

Keiko herself, she comes from the Tokyo suburb of Saitama, and she's said to have commanded a private army of some 50 Sukaban. I mean, Sheryl Sandberg, eat your heart out. And because this is Japan, right, these girlbosses, of course, they've got a style all of their own. Here's a quote from the website Groovy History, because the history of assassinations and gangs is nothing if it ain't groovy. Quote,

They did not embrace the leather biker look of the Hells Angels and other American gangs, but rather turned their restrictive schoolgirls uniforms into a symbol of their rebellion. They wore a long pleated skirt in defiance of the miniskirt which had risen in popularity in the 60s during the sexual revolution. The skirt was topped by a sailor blouse and an untied necktie under the collar,

If we could just put images on this podcast episode, it would easily be our biggest episode ever. How do we do this? There must be a way. We've got to get the iTunes. I'm sure there is.

I'm not going to do any effort. Anyway, some folks call this the quote Ivy look. Ivy League preppiness and all that kind of stuff because these outfits have been worn by these rebel girl gangs. Uniforms weirdly become one of post-war Japan's ultimate expressions of counterculture. Freejump.

Freedom? Freedom. Writes Perspect magazine, quote, Nothing says thorny rose like a schoolgirl who's going to punch your face in, or at least act like she will. It's a pretty good quote. Anyway, University of Missouri professor Laura Miller was living in Osaka, which is Japan's third biggest city, right during the heyday of the Sukabang. She recently told Vice that, quote, I admired them for rebelling against mainstream gender and femininity norms. Why?

Walking around different districts, it soon became clear that they were all from working class neighborhoods. It seemed that their rebellion was linked to the fact they knew they would never become princess office ladies and adorable marriage fodder for white collar salary men. So this all might make the Suka band sound more like the kind of feminist movement sweeping the world in the swinging 60s. And to some extent, yeah, they kind of are.

But those Ivy outfits, the sailor and school uniforms, well, they serve a second purpose. And that is concealing a bunch of deadly weapons. There's the chains, the razor blades, and there's bamboo swords. That's kind of awesome. Like, I mean, I'm not, you know, I've never been someone who was super into like anime or what is it called? Like a weeb, like into Japanese culture. But obviously, you know, there's a huge cultural impact and signifier of those uniforms, right? And it's pretty cool to just learn now that.

that it got that way from like these badass teenage girls trying to conceal like blades and fucking weapons yeah i mean even if you got a passing interest in movies that reference anime and manga and stuff like you're going to come across this archetype right i mean these these guys though back then i mean they really do mean business and

And there's a bunch of obscure references online to them being terrors on the streets. Again, like it's really hard to find good Japanese stuff, hard to find translated stuff from there. And I'm really trying to dig into it a bunch more because I want to do some more on this kind of stuff further down the line.

Maybe some less stuff on second wave feminist movements in Japan, but I don't know. Send us emails. Let us know what you think. Anyway, it's hard to underestimate how chaotic 1960s Japan actually is, right? As mentioned before, the country's struggling deeply with its traditions and identity in the wake of its defeat in the Second World War. And industry is coating its cities in smog and filth.

Writes Robert Whiting in the Japan Times, quote, Tokyoites dwelled under a constant cloud of noise, dust and pollution as the city struggled to rebuild itself from the wreckage of the American B-29 Superfortress bombings.

I mean, to be fair, that sounds like a lot of Europe at the time, you know, just trying to rebuild from various countries' bombings with industry and all sorts of chaos and organized crime and militant groups having shootouts in the streets and bank robberies and all that.

Yeah, yeah, we've got loads of pleated schoolgirl gangs slashing people around the faces with razors from their bra. But no, no, we don't. We're nowhere near as cool. Anyway, there's a seminal NHK documentary called Tokyo from this time. As the Japanese capital is gearing up to host the 1964 Olympic Games, it focuses on a young woman whose father was killed in the Allied firebombings, quote,

Tokyo, unplanned and full of construction sites, is no place for a human being to live. Only a robot with no sense could live in this rough, coarse, harsh and dusty city that doesn't have any blue skies.

I mean, they must have done something right eventually, right? The last 50 years, because it seems like the most, I don't know, convenient, well-run city in the world by now, no? I mean, it was when I was there a yonks ago, but yeah, I don't remember it even being polluted. I don't know. It's like the biggest city in the world by a mile though, right? Tokyo, I think it's like 35 million or something. It's pretty unbelievable.

Anyway, drug addiction soars in this broken down environment, especially among young men, playing right into the hands, of course, of Kodama and his Yakuza, which becomes its own kind of cult in the country. Tattoos, fingers cut off for misdemeanors, and a hierarchy that comes straight out of feudal and fascist ideology.

The Suka band, though, they go the other way. You want to be a Suka band? Welcome right in. You want to leave anytime? Go for it. There's no lifetime membership for the Suka band, meaning that by the end of the 1970s, their founders have all got older, they're settling down, and they get out of the razor blade, boobie, slashing game. Even the uniforms go out of fashion, as Japan's women's movements focus elsewhere, and Japan's by now booming economic miracle,

A sailor outfit isn't subversive anymore, just looks a bit trad and boring. Instead, the Sukaban archetype becomes a belle of the era's low-rent movie makers with titles like 1970s delinquent girl boss blossoming night dreams. Ha ha!

Or the following year's even better titled Delinquent Girl Boss Ballad of Yokohama Hoods. And these movies often take on a similar tone to American blaxploitation movies of the same era, falling on pretty hackneyed and problematic stereotypes.

And later on, these movies actually take on a more pornographic twist. There's Girl Boss Gorilla, Escape from Reform School, and the noir sex thriller Zero Woman Red Handcuffs. Right, Dazed? Settle down. Settle down, Sean. Well, it's the listeners I'm worried about.

Right, today's Claire Marie Healy, quote, Sukaban subculture was a pop cultural time bomb, representing something so utterly new in Japanese society, the stylistic signatures of the group were too much for image makers to resist. In the 70s, Japan struggled to keep up with American cultural imports, and even major film studios found that only erotic productions would be able to keep them afloat.

So the Sukkaban, the girl bosses, they wind down throughout the 1980s and

And they just become these kind of pornographic tropes just, by the way, as the Yakuza is branching into major international drugs and arms trading, even getting itself onto the boards of Japan's biggest corporations. They're golden geckos and skinny tires. And they're doing this crazy thing called Sokoya, where gangsters threaten to embarrass companies at their AGM.

I went into this a bit with the old Yakuza show, but it's pretty crazy and really emblematic of how deeply ingrained Yakuza clans are in regular society in Japan in the 1980s. In one episode, mobsters throw a bottle of whiskey at a company leader. I mean, these guys are almost untouchable at this point. But as the Suka band themselves are just

disappearing into little more than pornography, manga and other anime tropes, another kind of Japanese gangster is on the rise. And these guys are no yakuza either. Just like the Tsukuban, they come out of the imperial strictures of wartime Japan, but they're not women trapped within a sexist society, they are kamikaze pilots.

Yes, kamikaze. The men indoctrinated into the holiness of the Imperial Japanese Empire, then dispatched into the, quote, special attack unit of the Air Force to fly suicidal missions against Allied naval fleets. This, by the way, is your periodic reminder to watch 1970 movie Tora Tora Tora, one of the best war films, well, one of the best movies ever. Watch it, burn your copy of Pearl Harbor, watch it again, just watch it. Anyway...

Not all kamikaze pilots are killed in battle, of course, but they're still schooled in this death cult and they struggle to adapt to life in battered, mundane post-war Japanese life. So they turn to US culture. And the idea of a fully Japanese motorcycle club begins to take shape is where you're going to get your greasers. You might know these guys from the 1988 movie Akira still holds up.

up absolute banger near the beginning of the movie a motorcycle gang flies through the streets of tokyo with engines revving taillights leaving streets of color in their wake i've seen none of these movies oh man really wow i you i reckon i mean you would love akira is an absolute classic have you i mean you've watched all like kurosawa stuff in the 1960s and all those sorts of things i mean not really ah maybe we should stick those up on the reading list yeah

He's great. I'm a Philistine, man. Is it a cartoon or is it like a normal movie? It's a cartoon, yeah. Although just calling it a cartoon, I feel like we're going to get angry emails. But, you know, it's all interaction with the fans. I'm learning. It's all good. Anyway. Now I am introducing to you the Bozozuku.

writes Heisunobaiti, quote, So,

These are fanatics, right? They're desperate for a thrill, and they're pumped up on US biker culture and movies like Rebel with a Cause, which was massive in Japan apparently. A lot of these guys are also handy mechanics, having worked on kamikaze planes and other war material. So, modding up a little Honda is child's play. By the early 1980s, membership of Bozuzuku Gang swells to its greatest number, which is around 42,000.

And the gangs, they just favour run-of-the-mill 250 to 400cc bikes, but they pimp them up with stuff like modded exhausts, oversized fairing and these massive comical sissy bars. Flashy paint jobs and decals often depict the rising sun. These also, of course, coming out of ultra-nationalist military battalions. Who doesn't in lovely Japan? And like the Tsukuban, these guys have an iconic outfit, which is the tokofuku. Translation, special attack clothing.

These are jumpsuits inspired by munitions labourers and kamikaze pilots, and they're embroidered with gang slogans and imperial flags, plus kamikaze headbands with stuff like, police be damned, or bring it on written on them. I feel like some very safer work translation was stuck on that.

Anyway, they also get into rockabilly fashion, and 80s bozozuku gangsters often have huge pompadour haircuts and leather jackets to go with the rest of their stuff. It's pretty cool looking, to be honest. In these times, the bozozuku are mostly known for just causing havoc, racing, fighting other gangs, and carrying out petty crime. Do they actually, I mean, do they do real shit, though? Like, are they...

Yeah, that comes later on. I'm going to get to that a bit further down. I mean, they do like get into pretty violent attacks on rival gangs, like a bit of a warrior style thing. And they do cause a lot of havoc, closing down roads and fighting with the police. But they do like get into pretty violent attacks on rival gangs.

Yeah, I mean, they're a strictly men's club, right? So, unfortunately, there are no bamboo swords and no booby-delivered razor attacks, which obviously is sad. Here's a pretty cool extract from the book Kamikaze Biker by Ikuya Sato. Quote,

A Bozo drive-through one night consists of several sessions of high-risk racers broken by intermissions. The length of each session varies from one to two hours. According to one Bozo interviewee in the book, quote, so many cars, so many people, my heart sounds like ban-ban being docky-docky, like being stricken with polio. What the fuck? I cannot say it in words. No shit. I just cry, yo!

I hope that was as easy to hear as it was to read out loud. And I was being pretty phonetic there. Anyway, yeah, there's a subculture of this subculture itself called the Yankee, which is not necessarily to do with America either, which I'll get into in a short bonus for the Patreons this week if you're interested. But the Bozazuku and their antisocial tomfoolery, they don't exist alone for long.

Being handy with their fists and with a bike, they become this kind of lower-rung introductory level for the Yakuza themselves, beating up people and ferrying drugs, similar to how bikies are used by cartels in North America, Australia and New Zealand. This only accelerates in the 1990s, as Japan goes through a period of economic downturn, I think they call it the Lost Decade. Millions lose their jobs, young working-class people fall into the hands of organised criminals.

Add to that a lack of disposable income for the bozos to mod up their bikes, and the movement kind of dies a little, gets eaten up by far more powerful forces. In 2004, the government also leads a crackdown on biker-led crime, giving cops the ability to arrest suspected members on the spot, and it decimates their numbers. These days, bozos number just 5,000 across Japan, and by the way, bozo's nothing to do with bozos as we know it.

You can still hear the random biker revving through the city or across the countryside at night, but that's about it. Every once in a while, some group will try their luck creating a bigger disturbance, but these instances are few and far between, and they're usually swiftly handled by now far more powerful police presence. I've been trying to think of like a Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift joke for something like 10 minutes and I have nothing so far. But it's, I mean, like how many Fast and Furious movies are there now? Like,

I mean, that's not even a joke. I think nine or ten, but that's one of the best ones. That's a great movie. Okay, cool. I stand behind that. I'll try and convince my girlfriend to watch that tonight. Wait, you've never seen that? You've seen these other cartoons, but you've never seen... I've seen the first one. Oh, bro. I thought I was... Oh, come on. Yeah, Vincent Diesel. I don't know. He's not been on the list for a while. I've never heard someone say the phrase Vincent Diesel before in my entire life. Yeah, I just think his name's far better if you call him Vincent. But I mean...

Anyway, as we come to the end of this episode, I mean, I know, guys, there wasn't a lot of murder and horrible extortion and the kind of shit that you guys are usually here for, but I'm hoping you're enjoying this, right?

That police crackdown on the bozos and the demise of the bozozuku, that's actually led to something kind of brilliant, which is the christening of sukaban bozozuku gangs, or girl bosses on bikes. At first these groups are just the girlfriends of bikers, but as social mores for Japan's women continues to be pretty conservative in the cultural mainstream, all female biker gangs become a modern way to break the shackles.

writes Day's Claire Marie Healy again, quote, Today you can spot them by their embellished and embroidered jumpsuits, floral tattoos, long manicured nails and bright pink heavily stickered bikes. Usually considered a separate subculture of the delinquents, the female Bozozuku are nonetheless related to Sukaban culture and their creator of girl gangs,

that refuse to bow down to the boys and their emphasis on customization as a tool with which to rage against the norm. I mean, there's a reason we're quoting Dazed and other fashion magazines here. This is like a style subculture sort of thing associated with gangs these days, but not really. So anyway, next time you're watching an anime or a Japanese movie or anything Japanese or just...

you know, interacting with Japan Danny at all in any way. I don't know why you hate them so much. Keep a close eye out for the Suka band and the Bozuzuku. And they might not steal as many headlines as the Yakuza. And there's a good reason for that, obviously. But they are a massive part of post-war Japanese crime culture. And I mean, who wants a boring black suit when you can rock out with a pompadour and a multicolored jumpsuit?

And in a weird way, these gangs have got a lot to thank Asanuma's assassin, Otoya Yamaguchi, for. Just not maybe in the way he'd imagined in 1960.

And I'll leave you with this pretty crazy fact. Matt Brainard, who worked on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and last year organized a rally for January 6th defendants, he was so enamored with Yamaguchi that he started a magazine and named it after him. And it's called Atoya Literary Journal of the New Nationalism. And that is a pretty cool and strange way to end the show, eh? Yeah, that was really interesting, man. Thanks for doing that. And for everyone else...

Thanks for listening and coming back after our break. And yeah, patreon.com slash the new world podcast. We are going to have a bonus episode where Sean is going to go into detail about his favorite 70s Japanese schoolgirl exploitation films. So if you want to hear that, guys got weird taste. What can I say? But yeah, until next episode.