Born and bred in Scotland, Peter Hill is currently a research associate (a polite euphemism for unemployed hanger-on) at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford having failed to find a proper job at the end of his British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. The publications of which he is most proud are The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law and the State (Oxford University Press: 2003) and a chapter on the Kamikaze in Making Sense of Suicide Missions (ed. Gambetta, Oxford University Press: 2005).

In total he has spent roughly 5 or 6 years in Japan mostly in Iwate and Tokyo. He has degrees from the universities of Leeds (Economics and Industrial Relations: 1988) and Stirling (Japanese: 1996), graduated from the JLI programme at Sophia and has a PhD in Japanese Studies from Stirling. His Japanese is dreadful.

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Interview: February 28, 2005

We ask this question because every answer is different: what brought you to study Japan?

Can I start by thanking you for inviting me to be interviewed. Given the eminence of your other interviewees, I feel honoured indeed.

My first degree was in Economics and Industrial Relations at Leeds University. I had chosen both subject and university pretty much at random but fortunately Leeds had a truly excellent Karate club. At this stage of my life Karate was my main interest in life and, when I graduated, all I really wanted to do was go to Japan to train at the JKA Honbu dojo and acquire great wisdom and superhuman powers of destruction. At that stage, the martial arts were the only aspect of Japan that grabbed me and I spoke no Japanese when I arrived other than mispronounced karate terms. After nine months in Tokyo (and the JKA Honbu), a chance acquaintance introduced me to his father’s friend who taught Karate in a small fishing port in Iwate-ken. I went up to meet him, we got drunk, broke some wooden boards together and he invited me to stay. I was there for two years.

I returned to the UK and worked for two years as a school teacher. Although, in retrospect, I think this is something that I did do well, at the back of my mind I was plagued by the idea that if I was ever to be better than mediocre at anything in my life, being good at Japanese was my best shot. I enrolled at Stirling University for a degree in Japanese thinking that a few years would sort out the problem. Twelve years on and I am still butchering the devil’s tongue.

What gets your vote for best and worst book on Japan?

I once reviewed a book about Japanese prisons by an American penologist who didn’t seem to know much about Japan; he had been taken round by interpreters/minders from the Ministry of Justice, shown what they wanted him to see and given a bunch of statistics. He had apparently swallowed this package whole and the result was purely descriptive, uncritical and dull. As a general rule I don’t persevere with books I don’t like so it is perhaps unfair to single this particular book out for abuse, but it is typical of a style of book I dislike. I also have problems with essentialised treatments of Japan or those which employ black-box cultural explanations of social phenomena.

I think there are now a lot of very good books out there about Japan. I recently finished Theodore Bester’s Tsukuji: The Fish Market and the Center of the World (University of California Press: 2004) which I thought was a splendid piece of research. Closer to my own field, David Johnson’s The Japanese Way of Justice: Prosecuting Crime in Japan (Oxford University Press: 2001), is an excellent book.

What are you reading right now? In general, what do you like to read?

I suppose one reason I have ended up as an unemployed academic is that I am a pathological book junkie. I have to severely ration my fiction intake otherwise I would never get any sleep. Living in a town with such fantastic libraries and bookshops is very dangerous.

I have just started Bjorn Lomborg’s Global Crises, Global Solutions which is the report of the Copenhagen Consensus. I think this is a really interesting attempt to prioritize remedial action in the face of the many big problems facing the world. I think they have been slightly disingenuous in the way they have framed their treatment of global warming (in their defense, perhaps this is a problem which defies conventional economic analysis) but the book is a refreshingly hard-nosed approach to tackling global misery. More strength to their arm.

I am a big fan of popular science (Matt Ridley, Steve Jones, Jared Diamond and Geoffrey Millar come to mind as particular favourites). During my second degree, I was a part-time paratrooper with the territorial army and I still furtively read military non-fiction in an attempt to relive my brief and inglorious military career.

Can you tell us a little more about your current projects? What are you working on now? What future projects interest you?

I had planned to leave the academic business and to go back to Japan and research a novel drawing on my two main research interests, the yakuza and the special attack corps (kamikaze). However, last October I fell in love and, as long as the woman I love loves Oxford, here we stay. I am consequently hanging around Oxford without gainful employment, trying to finish off some academic projects and wondering whether I can still afford to write the novel.

The purpose of my post-doc fellowship was to look at the relationship between yakuza groups and non-Japanese criminal groups in Kabuki-cho. I had a fantastic time doing fieldwork in Tokyo over the course of 2003 and was incredibly lucky with the contacts I made. However, due to a combination of impossibly ambitious aspirations, a lack of concrete deadlines, and the wonderful distractions Oxford has to offer, writing it up has been less successful.

I am also currently helping organize a graduate workshop on Economics and Organised Crime for the European Science Days at Steyr in Austria. We have persuaded some very good people indeed to join the faculty so it should turn out to be a very worthwhile project (intellectually if not financially).

What books needs to be written on Japan? Will you be writing it?

If I was to stay in the business, I would like to write (or at least edit) a book covering crime, deviance, criminal justice and social control in Japan. Japan is changing in all sort of ways and it would be a fascinating exercise to look at these changes through a criminological prism. Towards the end of my fieldwork in Kabuki-cho, it struck me that it would be a great site for a full-on ethnography; it is filled with all sorts of interesting characters. Of course, it is a pretty small place and many of the habitués would prefer not to have their profiles raised but I think it could be done. Whether or not my fiancée would be happy for me to spend my nocturnal quality-time hanging out with the denizens of Kabuki-cho is another question altogether.

Why study the Japanese Mafia/Yakuza?

There are all sorts of intellectual justifications for studying marginalized and deviant groups. The truth is I fell into this by accident; my karate sensei’s cousin was a famous gang boss in the north of Japan and I met him several times and it seemed like an interesting thing to write about for my sotsuron at Sophia. The sotsuron grew into my undergraduate dissertation at Stirling which, in turn, led to the PhD.

Tell us a little about the Yakuza: what are the essential facts we should know?

I suspect that readers of Japan Review will know the basics so I will confine my answer to one observation concerning temporary trends amongst the yakuza, namely their self-presentation. Not all yakuza currently drive Mercedes-Benz, have tattoos or amputated fingers and hardly any of them have punch-permed hair (so 1980s). This is not to say that they have all merged with the general population. Ultimately these people only have any relevance if they can present a credible threat of violence. One way of visibly maintaining that threat is by at least some gang members displaying reliable signifiers of thuggery. Fashions change: the message remains the same. Having said that, groups operating in legitimate markets however, also require people who adopt a lower profile. One Yamaguchi-gumi interviewee told me that his sub-group tries hard to look like ordinary businessmen.

Tell us a little about your book, The Japanese Mafia.

The book was based on my PhD thesis which was an investigation into the effects of the 1992 boryokudan (yakuza) countermeasures law (botaiho for short) on the yakuza. Of course, the extraneous noise generated by the bursting of the bubble and consequent economic slump made it impossible to precisely identify what impact legal changes have had.

The book examines how the yakuza have changed over recent decades taking into account both legal and economic changes. Given the paucity of recent academic writing in English on this subject, I think that my book does make a contribution but I am all too aware of its deficiencies and there is certainly scope for more research in this area. In particular, I think that I was not particularly successful in integrating the theoretical and empirical sections of my book. I was aware of this at the time but my editors were keen to publish and I wanted to move on to new projects. In the light of my more recent fieldwork in Kabuki-cho, I feel that I could now more powerfully argue the case that the core competence of yakuza is the provision of private protection.

Perhaps I should add as a caveat that there is less racy ethnographic detail in the book than some might like; when I was doing my research, I was quite self-conscious about being identified as a yakuza-groupie rather than a serious academic so I tried to present my work in a fairly dry way. I am slightly more relaxed about what I do now and am currently working on a micro-ethnography of one aspect of my more recent fieldwork.

How does one go about systematically researching the Yakuza? How did you develop contacts? How do you separate fact from fiction? It seems that it would be difficult for a foreigner to “blend in” the background and simply observe Yakuza. How did you go about doing your field work? What was particularly challenging? Any one particularly memorable? Any good stories? Any unpleasantness?

I was woefully ill-prepared for my research but perhaps this is always the case; it is only by actually going out and doing it for the first time that you realize what the research process is all about. Looking back, I shudder at the mistakes I made during my PhD work. I made fewer with the Kabuki-cho research but it would be a lie if I was to say that I have mastered fieldwork methodology.

Although there are obvious problems with doing this sort of work, I think that the yakuza are more accessible than comparable groups in other OECD countries. In addition there is a mass of literature of varying quality in Japanese. The sleazy “gokudo journalism”, though disparaged by Japanese academics, is read widely by both the police and the yakuza themselves and I think it is a useful resource. The police also produce a lot of open source data which are useful. Of course, both sources must be treated with caution. My own feeling is that Japanese academic work in this field tends to be overly dependent on police sources.

In terms of actually getting out and talking to yakuza, it is essential to know people. Personal connections are everything. I have been very lucky in this respect: my sister’s German exchange did a home-stay in Kansai with a criminal defense lawyer who does a lot of work for senior Yamaguchi-gumi members and he has introduced me to various clients and colleagues; the family of the girlfriend of an old university friend is the close friend and protectee of a boss in central Japan; towards the end of my PhD fieldwork, I befriended Mizoguchi Atsushi, the foremost yakuza journalist in Japan, and he has been enormously generous in introducing me to key gatekeepers in Kabuki-cho.

Obviously there is a degree of selection bias (I only spoke to the people who agreed to speak to me) but the yakuza I have met have generally been very good to me; for a yakuza to get on, he needs, amongst other things, to have well-developed social skills. They can be very entertaining hosts and it is easy to see how researchers can “go native”. This is of course something that one must be aware of and when doing research you must always be careful how close you get to these people; on several occasions I have been asked how easy it would be for me to get hold of guns or drugs in Britain. I have also twice been asked if I would like to join yakuza groups, once in Tokyo and once in Kansai. Working out just how close you want to get to these people is difficult.

Why were these people prepared to speak to me? I think that, apart from my good introductions, I had a number of factors working in my favour: I am not Japanese; I am an academic rather than a journalist; during both my main periods of fieldwork I was attached to Tokyo University’s Institute of Social Science (Shaken). This combination made me an object of curiousity but also lent me kudos. Reputation is absolutely crucial for yakuza and for someone to come from the lofty academic heights of Todai to seek the truth from them makes them important.

Another important resource for a yakuza is the extent of his connections and I think that some of my interviewees felt that I might be a useful addition to their list of contacts. An example of the way in which I might be useful is the case of my trip to Southern Japan with “Kashimoto” from Kabuki-cho. One of Kashimoto’s protectees was having problems with his teenage tearaway son; it was hoped that, by spending some time with this youngster, I might be able to restore him to the path of virtue. I very much doubt that any effect I might have had was beneficial but it is interesting that they thought that it potentially might be.

One of the main methodological problems with doing this sort of research is maintaining fieldwork discipline in adverse conditions. I did conduct some formal recorded interviews but most of the time I would meet people in circumstances where taking out a notebook or tape-recorder be inappropriate. These are hedonistic people and much of the time I would meet yakuza it would be in bars and restaurants. Staying sufficiently sober to write coherent notes at the end of the evening whilst not refusing their hospitality and appearing relaxed was not easy; just as my brain was getting duller, their tongues were getting faster, their regional accents stronger and the data richer. More than once I woke up to find incomprehensible scrawls in place of the razor-sharp observations I had jotted down on the train home.

Another crucial problem is that these guys are frequently full of crap. To an anthropologist there is no such thing as bad data but I was after concrete answers to my research questions. Sometimes it was obvious when they were shooting a line and when not. Of course, there were also times when I was interviewing the police when I felt I was getting a partial representation of reality too so it cuts both ways. In both cases, recently retired personnel seemed to have less need to slant their story.

Equally difficult, we would imagine, is collecting information on mafia collusion with the state. Can you tell us how you conducted field work with the Japanese police? How did you get them to talk to you on this subject?

Because it was a bit too close to home, I did not make use of my yakuza-related contacts in Iwate-ken. However, my karate sensei did introduce me to his old class-mate, who was at the time head of the police academy in Iwate where I consequently spent two fascinating weeks doing fieldwork. Because he had formerly been head of the local riot squad, this man had ex-kidotai kobun in all of the various police departments (except for the security police—which is a closed world), so everywhere I went, they bent over backwards to be nice to me. When I went through official channels to the police, the answers tended to be very one pattern and confined to the sort of stuff I could have got out of the Police White Papers anyway.

In Iwate, the senior people I talked to conceded that “to a certain extent” the authorities had made use of the yakuza. At a lower level, the veteran cops from the anti-boryokudan room talked wistfully of the days when they would pop into local gang offices to sit down and chat with the yakuza over a cup of coffee and a cigarette. They told me that this was now a thing of the past. Two of my yakuza contacts (both Yamguchi-gumi, one in Tokyo one in Osaka) offered to introduce me to their friends in the police. In both cases I was unable either to take up this offer or subtly probe further as to the exact nature of this friendship.

When we talk about police-yakuza relations, I think it is a mistake to treat either group as a monolithic entity: yakuza (at both individual and gang levels) do not all adopt an equally co-operative attitude towards the police; at the same time there is the horizontal cleavage within the police separating the administrative elite from the rank and file; there are also the vertical departmental cleavages—the security bureau, with their historical concerns with the threat of left-wing subversion have had a different relationship with yakuza groups than the anti-boryokudan sections or the neighborhood omawari-san; finally, the overall trend in relations between these two groups has not remained constant over time. The oft-expounded view that the yakuza-police relationship is systemically symbiotic is an oversimplification of a much more complex and dynamic set of relationships.

With respect to politician-yakuza relations, these are now less openly flaunted than in the past and it is only with big scandals such as Sagawa Kyubin (and the revelation of Kanemaru’s links to the Inagawa-kai boss Ishii Susumu) that things are laid bare. I would like to think that things are getting better but it is hard not to be cynical. One of my informants is the book-keeper for a “business-brother” of a very senior Inagawa-kai executive. This person tells me that both the business brother and his yakuza protector regularly attend fund-raising events hosted by an LDP faction leader. I sought confirmation of this with my friend Mizoguchi who said “Isn’t he [the politician] Yamaguchi-gumi?” At a slightly lower level, I was interviewing a middle-ranking Yamaguchi-gumi boss in his gang office when the secretary of a local politician came in to discuss a land deal. When he left, the boss told me that he had been friendly with the politician for years but he no longer felt able to give as much money at fund raising parties because it might cause embarrassment; he now gives tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands.

One of the problems with studying underground economic activity is the lack of data—how did you get around that? Underground economies have incentives to minimize their numbers, and just as equally, compilers of police data have political incentives to mask the data.

This is of course a massive problem and I hope I have not given the impression that anyone knows the true extent of the yakuza economy. One police researcher told me he was continually pestered by foreign journalists asking for some magic number they can put in their headlines: he has little more idea than they do. An individual boss might know what his own personal revenue stream looks like but that will be as good as it gets. Once we get beyond that we are in the realm of heroic assumptions and estimations scribbled on the back of a cigarette packet.

One of your conclusions in your book is that the Yakuza are not that different from other mafia in its relationship to the state (Italian, Chinese, Russian)—could you elaborate on that?

One of the things I wanted to do with my work was to look at the supposedly symbiotic relationship enjoyed by the yakuza and state. As I have said above, things are slightly more complicated. However, to the extent that this has been the case, this is by no means unique to the yakuza. Obviously different jurisdictions differ in their legal regimes, efficiency of governance mechanisms, levels of economic development and so forth, but if we examine the historical evidence, we can see patterns of mutually beneficial elite-mafia co-operation in Sicily, pre-revolutionary China, post-Soviet Eastern Europe and South America as well as Japan.

The Yakuza is steeped in myth—that they are “robin hood” figures and that they have a code of honor, that they are guardians of the community etc. What myths were true? What were false?

Of course, the power of myths is derived not from their objective truth, but from whether or not we believe them. My feeling is that for many decades, cosy “yakuza-as-Robin-Hood” myths did have currency amongst mainstream Japanese but that they are no longer widespread and certainly not seen as relevant to the contemporary yakuza.

Many of the yakuza I have talked to like to tell me about “protecting the weak and crushing the strong”, their history as agents of social control within their territory and so on. As you pointed out in your review of my book, my thinking on the yakuza is heavily influenced by Diego Gambetta’s analysis of the Sicilian Mafia as a set of firms which specialize in private protection. This is another way of saying that they exercised a guardian role. This of course does not mean that the mafia is a “good thing”. As Diego points out, private protection is partially provided, at a cost and, typically, the people protected are, in terms of net-social benefit, the wrong ones. At a more extreme level we are presented with cases of “protection” in which the only protection provided is from the providers themselves (i.e. extortionate or bogus protection).

What are the key changes in the Mafia economy? With the collapse of “The Bubble” of the late 1980s, large scale Yakuza economic activities were curtailed—with as slight recovery underway, will the Yakuza fortunes recover, or are their glory days over?

I think that the long-term future of the yakuza is bleak. The reasons for this are more profound than medium-term economic vicissitudes. On one hand, both the law and its enforcement are getting progressively tougher as far as the yakuza are concerned (this is one factor behind Watanabe’s recent decision to stand down as head of the Yamaguchi-gumi). On the other hand Japanese society is changing in all sorts of ways that make many of their existing economic activities harder: transparency is increasing; there is an increased use in alternative formal channels of dispute resolution; society is becoming more tolerant of alternative lifestyles and marginal groups (making both recruitment and retention more difficult). The yakuza will adapt to these changes (historically, they always have, and rapidly) but the economic and social space within which they can operate is shrinking.

What do you think the shape of future organized crime will be? Will organized crime move toward white collar crime or remain based in local protection rackets? Does globalization matter?

Confining my answer to the yakuza, I would say that they have long been based in what we might call white-collar protection (for example sokaiya). For reasons outlined above, I believe the scope for such operations is diminishing. Yakuza are of course trying to muscle in on other scams, such as “ore ore” fraud, but they do not necessarily have any advantage in such businesses over ordinary criminals. The impact of globalization is complex. We might expect that international capital markets encourage the development of global accounting standards and transparency and formal legal mechanisms for dispute resolution. On the other hand, increased international labour market mobility facilitates the entry of foreign criminals and illegal goods.

In your analysis, what organized crime group is the most well organized, well run crime syndicate today?

The state.

What does crime say about society?

We could spend a long time here talking about Durkheim and so on but with specific reference to the yakuza, it is perhaps worth pointing out that these groups do not exist in a vacuum. If the yakuza were a purely predatory set of gangs who did not provide goods and services that some members of the wider society desired, they would not exist in their current form.

Why do you think people remain fascinated by the Yakuza?

The devil has all the best tunes, doesn`t he? Most of the places I have lived in Tokyo are along the Chuo line so day after day I would spend many hours jammed in with honest, decent commuters living respectable lives. Now maybe all these guys love their jobs and have great home lives but it didn’t strike me as a lifestyle I would aspire to. The yakuza do very bad things and I certainly don’t aspire to their life either, but there is something superficially very refreshing about people who rip up the rules and do things differently.

What books (for the general reader) on the Yakuza/organized crime do you recommend? Any novels?

In Japanese, anything by Mizoguchi Atsushi is going to be good. I bang on about this guy quite a lot but his work was recommended to me by both police researchers and yakuza interviewees. He has since become a good friend and mentor and I owe him an enormous debt in so many ways. I also think the Takarashima Bessatsu series is worth having a look at. They really churn them out so it is impossible to keep up; I have a big pile of them mocking me from my shelves. In English, Harold Stark’s 1981 PhD thesis is still well worth reading. Unfortunately it is unpublished. Apparently Stark went into business as soon as he graduated and has disappeared from view. I have not read any yakuza novels though I understand that my fellow Japan Review interviewee Peter Tasker has written a few. I am a big fan of Takakura Ken’s films. I love that bit where he mutters the opening lines of the Hojoki just before he goes into battle in the English language film “The Yakuza”.