Conflict and Social Unrest — Violence Seen from the Side That Gets Caught in It

In the previous episode, we saw how the money of the underworld had parasitized the boundary between the legal and the illegal — entertainment, construction, finance. The system of protection money, the intimidation that went by the name of debt collection, the figure of the corporate racketeer: the organizations quietly put down roots in the shadows of the economy and grew vast.

But as an organization grows larger, conflicts of interest arise both within it and outside it. Territory, rank, succession — when such disputes erupt in the form of violence, the harm does not stay confined within the organization alone.

This episode is not meant to recount the methods of the conflicts themselves. Quite the opposite. How did violence between organizations cast utterly unrelated citizens into fear, what harm did it inflict, and how did it change the mood of society — I want to look at this era again from the side of those who got caught in it.

Violence That Spilled Into the Streets

For a while after the war, disputes between crime groups tended to be received by the public as ‘a quarrel in the underworld that has nothing to do with us.’ But as the 1980s began, one conflict came to shake that perception profoundly.

It was the conflict over the split of a certain enormous organization, said to have continued from 1984 to 1989. The group divided internally over who would succeed to its top position; one side broke away to form a separate body, and the standoff between the two was reported to have dragged on for years. According to reporting and records, this conflict left many dead and wounded on both sides, and police officers and ordinary citizens were also said to have been injured.

The problem was that the violence did not stay self-contained within a ‘closed world.’ Where an organization’s office stood within a residential district, the people living nearby were exposed to the fear that a gun might be used in front of their own home at any moment. In fact, shootings on the street and in public places were repeatedly reported in the Kansai region, and there were recorded cases in which uninvolved bystanders nearby were injured by stray bullets.

What was happening here was a phenomenon in which the danger of violence was ‘externalized’ — passed from the parties who had chosen it to the neighboring residents who had chosen nothing. The logic of a dispute that mattered to an organization seeped, one-sidedly, into the living space of people who dwelt outside it. For those residents, there was neither the freedom to move away nor the option of stepping out of a quarrel; only the danger was pressed upon them. Was it all right to let the children play near the office, to walk outside at night — people who should have had nothing to do with it came to carry such questions day after day.

What matters here is the danger of narrating such violence through stories of ‘chivalry’ or ‘honor.’ Those who suffered the harm were people unconnected to any such tale, who simply happened to live there. Standing on their side, it was neither a noble story nor a stylized form, but only an unreasonable fear.

The Mood of ‘No Longer Someone Else’s Problem’

The incidents in which uninvolved citizens were caught in the crossfire were not limited to this single conflict.

According to reporting and case records, in the disputes between crime groups, there were people killed after being mistaken for gang members, people who happened to be at the scene and were struck by stray bullets — victims who were not parties to the conflict arose in many places. There were also reported cases in which shops, bars, and other places that people came and went from in the ordinary course of life became the scene. In a series of disputes in Okinawa, uninvolved people, including a high school student, were recorded as having been caught up in them.

As such incidents were reported again and again, the way society received them changed. People who had until then watched at a distance, calling it ‘an affair of the underworld,’ began to feel that ‘I, or my family, could be caught up in it at any time.’

Public materials such as the National Police Agency’s white papers also place this period as the time when conflicts between crime groups came to be strongly recognized as a problem threatening the peace of citizens’ lives. The crime groups ceased to be a mere concern of public order and became an object of the anxiety that citizens carried in their daily lives.

The Turning Point Toward Stricter Enforcement

The rising anxiety and backlash of citizens eventually became a force that moved the institutions.

Until then, the violence of crime groups had been addressed mainly by cracking down on incidents one by one after they occurred. But as long as the disputes of the organizations drew in citizens, the recognition grew within society that merely responding after an incident occurred was too late. A mechanism was needed to hold down the activity of the organizations themselves at an earlier stage — such public opinion is said to have given the push.

This current led to the Anti-Organized Crime Law (the Law Concerning the Prevention of Unjust Acts by Organized Crime Group Members), which came into force in 1992. The anxiety over conflicts that drew in citizens is often spoken of as one of the backgrounds that prompted the legislation. We will look at its detailed contents from the next episode onward, but what I want to confirm here is the fact that at its starting point lay ‘the voices of those who got caught in it.’

It also means that the accumulation of people who had been in positions where it was hard to raise their voices — victims and their families, residents living nearby who carried anxiety, the people of the community who faced the scene — eventually became public opinion and moved the institutions. Whereas measures against the crime groups are often spoken of in the framework of ‘police versus organization,’ beneath them lay the existence of nameless people whose right to live in peace had been threatened. Without this perspective, we lose sight of why society stepped into regulation even at great cost.

What I want to be careful about is that the assessment of this era is not simple. As for the scale of the conflicts and the harm, the numbers vary across reporting and records, and there remain parts that cannot be fully fixed. That is precisely why we should speak within the bounds of what has been publicly reported and confirmed, and must avoid both stoking fear with unconfirmed anecdotes and, conversely, trivializing the violence.

What is certain is that the violence between organizations invaded the daily life of people who were not parties to it, and that this harm and anxiety moved society in the direction of ‘we can no longer leave this alone.’ Not the splendor of a chivalrous tale, but the pain borne by the people who got caught in it — that is what lies at the core of this era.

And just around the same time that this social pressure was mounting, the Japanese economy was rushing toward an unprecedented boom — the bubble. As land prices and stock prices soared without limit, the underworld would come into possession of money on a scale it had never known. An era in which the economy and violence drew closer than at any point in history. In the next episode, let us look upon its light and its shadow.