The Anti-Boryokudan Act — The State Strikes Back

As the bubble swelled and then burst, organized crime and the Japanese economy had become entangled more deeply than ever before. Land sharking, stocks, the collection of bad debts — as we saw in earlier episodes, the boundary between the legal and the illegal dissolved into ambiguity, and vast sums of money flowed into the underworld. On the side of society, frustration and unease piled up.

Then, on March 1, 1992, a single law took effect. Its formal name was the ‘Act on Prevention of Unjust Acts by Boryokudan Members,’ commonly called the Anti-Boryokudan Act. It was the most systematic move postwar Japan had made against organized crime. In this episode, we trace what this law changed — not as a tale of punishment and arrests, but calmly, as the ‘structure of an institution’ through which the state reorganized its relationship with these groups.

Why criminal law alone was not enough

Until then, the policing of organized crime had relied mainly on the criminal code. Extortion, assault, gambling, stimulant drugs — commit a crime, and you would be arrested and prosecuted. As with the summit operations touched on in Episode 3, the police pressed forward even with the arrest of bosses and senior figures.

But there was a structural limit here. Demands for protection money, or ‘civil intervention violence’ — muscling into private disputes to extract a settlement fee — were hard to prosecute as criminal cases, because victims, gripped by fear, were reluctant to come forward. Demands backed by the group’s intimidating power could make people comply without any actual violence being used. Money moved without ever taking the visible shape of a crime. There genuinely existed a domain that slipped neatly through the mesh of criminal law.

Designated boryokudan — the institution of naming

The most distinctive institution the Anti-Boryokudan Act brought about was the ‘designated boryokudan group.’

Rather than treating all antisocial collectives uniformly, this law had a public safety commission name only those organizations meeting certain requirements as ‘designated boryokudan groups.’ The reported requirements included: that the group used its intimidating power to have its members raise funds; that members with criminal records made up a certain proportion; and that a pyramid-shaped chain of control, with the boss at the apex, was in place.

In other words, the authorities officially certified the reality of the organization and its intimidating power itself. Only once a group was designated could cease orders and the like be applied to ‘violent demand acts’ by its members.

There was an easily overlooked paradox here. Naming a group also means making its existence publicly visible. Where, and at what scale, do such organizations exist? The state grasped this as if keeping a ledger, narrowing its targets and applying regulation. It can be described as a conception that sought to drag organized crime out of the ‘shadows’ and place it under institutional management.

Making it impossible to demand protection money

The ‘violent demand acts’ regulated by the Anti-Boryokudan Act expanded through repeated revisions, but at their center was the regulation of protection money, long a source of underworld income.

Demanding money or goods from shops operating within a turf — whether labeled a greeting fee, protection money, or a bodyguard fee — was clearly positioned as a prohibited act. Acts forcing entry into public works or transactions through intimidation, and acts of taking on debt collection as a group, were progressively added to the list of targets as well.

What matters is that this was an institutional design protecting the ‘side that pays.’ A shopkeeper who was made a demand did not have to come forward and stand in a criminal trial himself. The public safety commission ordered the group to cease, and punished it if it did not obey. While lightening the burden on victims, it thinned out the funding source itself. It aimed to drive a wedge straight into the economic structure — seen in Episode 4 — that parasitized the boundary between the legal and the illegal.

The genius of this design lay in how it destabilized the very business model of organized crime. Income from protection money held together only because shopkeepers kept quietly paying. But the moment a path was opened — in which the party being pressured, rather than suffering in silence, could consult the authorities and have a cease order issued — the premise of the demand collapsed. The one doing the threatening now had to carry the risk of not knowing when an order might come, or when punishment might follow. Revenue that had relied on the intimidating power of violence was, through the cold mechanism of administrative procedure, turned into something that could no longer be reliably calculated.

A shift in the relationship — from policing to squeezing

The Anti-Boryokudan Act changed the very relationship between the police and organized crime.

After taking effect, the law was revised several times, and regulation tightened in stages. The 2008 revision broadened the scope of bosses’ ‘employer liability,’ and it was reported that it became easier to seek damages from those above even for economic harm caused by low-ranking members. Holding the top of the organization responsible for the deeds of those beneath — it was a conception that turned the pyramid structure against itself, applying pressure at the apex.

The 2012 revision established a mechanism placing groups that repeated unjust demands under designation as ‘specified-dangerous boryokudan groups,’ and groups that repeated dangerous feuds as ‘specified-conflict boryokudan groups,’ subjecting them to even heavier regulation. Once designated, demand acts within a designated alert zone could become subject to punishment without waiting for a cease order.

The state set about reorganizing its relationship with organized crime from the ground up. It stretched an administrative net outside the criminal code, made organizations publicly visible by naming them, and thinned out their funding sources. The Anti-Boryokudan Act was the first step.

Yet there remained a limit to cornering the underworld by the hand of the police alone. The groups changed their labels and their methods, trying to slip through the net of regulation. Here, another major shift in thinking occurred. Rather than leaving enforcement to the police alone, society itself would sever its very ties with organized crime. The pressure slips out of the hands of the police and spreads across society as a whole.