Order in the Ruins — Postwar Chaos and the Black Markets

In August 1945, Japan met defeat. Cities burned by air raids, goods run short, rationing brought to a halt. People were cast into a way of life in which even obtaining the day’s food was difficult. At the moment the order of the state was badly shaken, black markets rose up in front of train stations across the land, as if to fill a gaping hole. The bakuto and tekiya we saw last time, stretching back to early-modern days, found in these ruins an unexpected turn to play. And the new rough men whom the war had produced joined them there. The illegal order that spread in the space where the law had temporarily lost its power — that is what came to shape the prototype of the postwar yakuza.

A Market Stands in the Void Where the Law Had Stopped

In Japan just after the defeat, daily necessities could in no way reach everyone through the official ration routes alone. Rice, clothing, daily goods — all were short. And so black markets, where goods were traded outside the legitimate channels of distribution, spread of their own accord across the ruins and the empty lots in front of stations. At Sannomiya in Kobe a market is said to have stood by what is described as the day after the war’s end, and at the east exit of Tokyo’s Shinjuku station by late August; the black markets appeared almost simultaneously nationwide, and are said to have reached their peak toward the start of the following year, 1946.

Let us restate what was happening here in the language of economics. The legitimate institution of state control over goods and rationing fell into dysfunction, and the place that joined demand to supply ceased, publicly, to exist. That ‘institutional void’ was filled by the black markets, which — illegal though they were — actually moved goods. Go there, and you could obtain things, however dear. Unlawful as it was, it was needed in order to live — and that is precisely why the black markets held power, despite the crackdowns of the authorities.

And merely lining up stalls at random in an empty lot cannot keep a market in order. Who sets up where; who judges when a dispute arises. In a place where the power of the legitimate administration and police could scarcely reach, someone was needed to apportion a different order. The group we saw last time, the tekiya, settled neatly into precisely that role.

Those Who Apportioned the Stalls — The Tekiya and the Economy of the Black Market

Deeply involved in building the order around the black-market stalls were the tekiya, who had long handled the apportioning of stalls at festival fairs and religious celebrations. They decided who set up a stall in which spot, and received from those who set up stalls something amounting to a fee for the place. The mechanism they already possessed for ‘controlling a venue’ could be turned to the running of the chaotic black markets. Indeed, in Tokyo just after the defeat, there are reports of tekiya bosses taking key posts in the stallkeepers’ guilds and pulling together the running of the market.

This can be seen as a moment when the economic structure of the tekiya, reaching back to early-modern times, swelled all at once amid the extreme shortage of goods after the war. The management of the rights to control a venue — a plain enough function in itself — turned into a great source of spoils when it linked up with the stage of the black market, where the trading of daily necessities was concentrated. For the merchants who set up stalls, a relationship arose in which they paid a fee for the spot in return for trading under the tekiya’s apportioning. The structure of drawing close to a lawful trading venue and extracting profit from it was reproduced at a postwar scale.

Why did this role come around to the tekiya? One reason is that they already possessed, in advance, the experience and the organization to take up at once the practical work of arranging the stalls in order amid the chaos, mediating disputes, and pulling the stallkeepers together. It would take time for the administration to recover its functions, and the hands of the police were too few. The fact that, during that interval of void, there actually stood people who could keep the market running strengthened their position. This relationship of gaining profit in return for bearing the order is also the vivid postwar prototype of what would be spoken of in later ages as ‘mikajime fees’ — a mechanism that demands payment from a trading venue. The postwar underworld put down its roots in an area where the line between lawful and unlawful is hard to draw clearly.

The Gurentai, a New Face

Joining the black market as another bearer of the work were the groups called gurentai. These were a new type of group, made up of former soldiers who had been demobilized but had lost any place to return to in society, and of delinquent youths who had been left with nowhere to go by the destruction of the war. Different in origin from the bakuto who made gambling their trade, or the tekiya who apportioned the stalls, some of them are said to have, without holding any clear livelihood, dirtied their hands with illegal activity on the streets — extortion, brawling, involvement in black-market dealing.

In police records and elsewhere, the lineage of the crime syndicates that connect to the present is sometimes told as falling broadly into three streams, adding these gurentai to the bakuto and tekiya. To the two origins reaching back to early-modern times were joined the new rough men whom war and defeat had produced — and the chaotic years of the early Showa 20s were precisely an age in which these three were tangled together. They are said to have often clashed fiercely over spoils such as the black markets, repeating their feuds.

What should be stressed here is the harm that the activity of such groups inflicted on those around them. That there were ordinary people exposed to violence and extortion amid the clamor and the struggles over spoils of the black market, and that there were scenes in which citizens felt unease and fear, must not be passed over. The order born in the ruins held both faces at once: a face that supported people’s lives and a face that threatened them. This age, which tends to be told beautifully as a tale, needs also to be looked at from the side of those who were harmed.

What the Ruins Left Behind

As 1946 set in, the black markets reached their peak while controls by the authorities also tightened. The occupation authorities took issue with the disruption of legitimate distribution caused by illicit dealing, with problems of sanitation and public order, and with the closed character of the groups that apportioned the stalls; by summer, a large-scale crackdown is said to have been carried out. In time, as the economic chaos settled and legitimate distribution recovered, the black markets themselves finished their role and faded from sight.

Yet even as the black markets vanished, the framework of organization and order shaped there remained. The mechanism of controlling a venue, managing the spoils, and guarding them against a backdrop of violence. The form of groups that moved through the vertical relationship of bosses and followers. And the experience by which people of differing origins — bakuto, tekiya, gurentai — were reorganized upon the same postwar stage. These became, so to speak, the foundation on which the organizations would grow still larger in the next age.

Thus the old groups born in early-modern times added new blood amid the unprecedented chaos of defeat and shaped the prototype of the postwar yakuza. What awaited Japan next was reconstruction from the ruins, and then rapid economic growth — an age of leaps that astonished the world. As the economy swelled greatly, the underworld too, in the shadow of that growth, would spread its organizations at a rapid pace and stretch its networks across the whole country.