British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

 

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr Peter Hill

Kabuki-cho Gangsters: Ethnic Succession in Japanese Organised Crime?

In this paper Peter Hill will discuss his recent fieldwork in Tokyo’s entertainment district of Kabuki-cho. Kabuki-cho contains the highest concentration of restaurants, hostess bars, sexual services establishments and karaoke boxes of any area of Japan. As such it also plays host to a large number of Japan’s organised crime groups commonly known as yakuza. The yakuza provide protection (in some cases bogus but in many cases genuine) to these various industries and in this sense they can be considered to be collectively a ‘mafia’ as defined by Gambetta. In recent years, the Japanese media have generated great anxiety about the so-called ‘Chinese mafia’ running amok in the Tokyo. The purpose of my fieldwork was to determine whether these Chinese gangsters were in fact operating in direct competition with the yakuza as providers of protection and, if so, whether such protection was confined to Chinese-owned businesses or extended to Japanese consumers. My findings are: Chinese criminal groups in Tokyo are fragile and more vulnerable to police countermeasures than their Japanese counterparts; Chinese groups are not operating as providers of protection though in some cases the are consumers of yakuza protection; whilst ethnic succession is not taking place in Tokyo, the Tokyo yakuza syndicates traditionally strong in Kabuki-cho (notably the Sumiyoshi-kai and the Kyokuto-kai) are currently facing very strong competition from the Yamaguchi-gumi group from Western Japan.

Peter Hill is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. He has degrees from the universities of Leeds (Economics and Industrial Relations, 1988) and Stirling (Japanese, 1996). His PhD, completed at the University of Stirling in 2000, was an investigation into the effects of the 1992 boryokudan (yakuza) countermeasures law. A monograph based on this research, ‘The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law and the State’, Oxford University Press, was published in September this year. During 2003 he was conducting fieldwork on the relationships between indigenous and foreign criminal groups in Tokyo and was a visiting researcher at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo.