Gamblers and Stallkeepers — The Origins of the Yakuza

The groups known as yakuza, or as organized crime syndicates, did not appear out of nowhere one day. Trace their outline back far enough and you arrive at several occupational groups that made their living at the margins of early-modern society — the Edo period. There were the bakuto, the gamblers who ran the gaming dens, and the tekiya, the stallkeepers who made their trade at festival fairs. Placed outside respectable society, they nonetheless stood in a position where they could never be wholly cut off from it. This series traces how those groups became entangled with postwar Japanese society and its economy, why they grew so large, and why they are now fading away — following it all as a structure of institutions, money, and organization. The first step begins at the starting point of everything: the origins.

The Bakuto at the Gaming Den — Gambling as an Economy

The bakuto were, quite literally, groups of people who made gambling their livelihood. Gambling itself had existed in Japan since ancient times, and its presence can be glimpsed as far back as the Heian period; but it was around the early-modern era, it is said, that it became organized into groups with a vertical order of bosses and followers. In the Edo period, bakuto bosses set up their bases at the crossroads of traffic — post stations along the highways, river landings, ports — places where people, goods, and money converged. These were spots where travelers and the laborers who carried freight passed back and forth, and they were convenient places to open a gaming den.

What must not be overlooked here is that the activity of the bakuto was a kind of ‘economy.’ A boss managed the gaming dens within his own territory and is said to have taken a share of the money that moved there, in the form of what was called terasen, or a table cut. Gambling was already publicly forbidden by then, so their income arose from the illegal sphere. Running an economy that lay outside the law, through an order backed by violence — this basic structure can be called a character that was passed all the way down to the later yakuza.

The very notion of territory also grew up in this era. The area a boss controlled was called a shima, an ‘island,’ and within that island he monopolized the right to run the gambling. Territory was the group’s source of income itself, and to have it encroached upon meant an economic blow. The distant prototype of the feuds that would be repeated in later ages had already sprouted within the logic of the gaming den.

The Tekiya at the Festival Fair — The Stall as an Economy

The other major origin is the tekiya. Also called tekiya stallkeepers, this group set up stalls at festival fairs and religious celebrations and made their living selling goods. One of their roots is said to lie in the yashi, who went about selling medicines and small wares. The yashi are said to have already existed across the country as a trade by the early 18th century, and they revered Shennong — the legendary Chinese emperor regarded as the god of agriculture and medicine — as their guardian deity. Centered on selling medicine, they drew crowds by combining their wares with spectacles such as sword-drawing displays and acrobatics, then sold their goods; performance, it is said, was often a means to the end of trade.

The tekiya, too, were groups with a vertical order of bosses and followers, just like the bakuto. They flew a house name and settled matters such as admission and expulsion through the boss’s judgment. The form of their organization closely resembled that of the bakuto. The substance of their trade, however, was different. Whereas the bakuto stood upon gambling, an illegal economy, the tekiya’s stall trade was, in itself, originally a lawful business.

So where, then, is the tekiya counted as an origin of the underworld? The key lies in the order surrounding the ‘place’ from which one set up a stall at a festival. The boss arranged which stall could set up where, and received from those who set up stalls something amounting to a fee for the spot. This management of the rights over a place became linked to the notion of territory. A lawful trade, and the management of the rights to control the place of that trade — the peculiarity of the tekiya lay in standing at the boundary between these two. Here was one distant source of mechanisms, like the ‘mikajime fees’ we will see in a later chapter, that draw close to a lawful economy while extracting profit from it.

The Self-Image of Chivalry, and Its Reality

From early-modern into modern times, some among the bakuto became figures of popular affection. Names such as Shimizu no Jirocho and Kunisada Chuji of the late Tokugawa era came to be widely known through storytelling, theater, and later film, and were told of as chivalrous heroes who helped the weak and crushed the strong. Ninkyo — the tale of a virtue that prizes duty and human feeling and causes no trouble to honest folk — was shaped within such tellings, and became the self-image the bakuto and tekiya reached for when they spoke of themselves.

Care is needed here, however. The tale of chivalry is, after all, an ‘image’ of how they made themselves appear and of how people passed the story along — not the actual substance of their activity. Their income came from gambling and from rights over a place, and that order was, in the end, kept up against a backdrop of violence. The duty and human feeling within the tale must be kept separate from the conflicts that actually arose over gaming dens and territory, and from the trouble inflicted upon honest people. Drawn in by the pleasant sound of the word ‘chivalry,’ one loses sight of the structure.

At the Margins of the Modern State

The Meiji Restoration greatly changed the standing of the bakuto and tekiya. As the modern state put in order its institutions of law and police, gambling was strictly policed, and the activity of the bakuto was clearly pushed to the illegal side. The tekiya, too, became the target of regulations and crackdowns over their stalls, and were placed outside the legitimate order of modern society.

Even so, they did not vanish at once. For within the flows of people and goods that modern development produced — the concentration of population in cities, the labor of construction and harbor work, the venues of festivals and entertainment — there were gaps that legitimate institutions alone could not fill. In areas such as the arranging of laborers, the venues of gambling, and the apportioning of stalls, the bakuto and tekiya remained as marginal bearers of the work. Later, in police records and elsewhere, the lineage of the crime syndicates that connect to the present came to be told as falling broadly into three streams: bakuto, tekiya, and the gurentai — delinquent groups of young people. Trace the origins back, and two of those were already present at these early-modern and modern margins.

The more the modern state put its order in place, the more the people who slipped out of that order, and the illegal and semi-legal areas in the gaps of the institutions, came into view. The bakuto and tekiya were precisely the groups that stood in those gaps. Why they came into being and why they survived — the answer lies less in the good or evil of individuals than on the side of the structure of society. And this character of ‘groups born in the gaps’ would appear, in the next age, in a more dramatic form. When the defeat that turned Japan to scorched earth tore the social order up by the roots, this old set of groups would find itself handed an unexpected place to belong.