Elements of Ruffianism
“If journalistic and official reports are to be believed [and their is good reason to doubt some of the most extreme examples they provided] students in turn-of-the-century Tokyo displayed a penchant for public acts of violence on a par with that of Edo's kabukimono. Many carried short swords, cane swords, or knives, and “showdowns” among groups of students were, in one critic's words, “virtually a fashion.” According to a study by Inspector Sakaguchi Shizuo, who recalled being personally outraged at the activities of these hoodlums when he came to the capital as a student in 1903, some forty-five organized gangs flourished in the years between 1895 and 1912. Some of the earliest gangs claimed between one hundred and three hundred members (although the press often suggested even higher membership figures to amplify the menace these groups portended); subsequent gangs tended to count between thirty and fifty members.
Gangs such as the Tōhoku Righteous Young Men's Group, the Kagoshima Club, and the Ōita Club brought together students from the same regional background, thus constituting what Tomeoka Kōsuke called a “corrupted” offshoot of local origin groups established by immigrants to Tokyo, often under the sponsorship of former domain lords. These groups no doubt resembled those that the anarchist Ōsugi Sakae recalled in his memoirs of life in a provincial military academy, where he and his comrades were told to “never permit yourselves to be humiliated by those from other provinces.”
Other groups, such as the KyĹŤbashi Gang, the Shinagawa Gang, and the Kanda Club took their names from Tokyo districts; still others, such as the Eastern Cherry Blossom Club, the White Hakama Brigade, or the Righteous Blue Dragons, bore no specific geographic references. Some gangs apparently included members who were not students, but the principal focus of concern was specifically on students.
Many of these groups fit into the category of “ruffians” (kōha). The term kōha denoted a type of student who concentrated on physical activities like jūdō, adopted a swaggering, aggressive style, and rejected contact with women out of fear of becoming weak and effeminate—a view they held of those students, referred to as “rakes” (nanpa), who dressed well and pursued the company of women. These student types had been present since the 1870s, but in the decade after 1895, acts of forcible male-male eroticism and fights related to this behavior emerged as a defining feature of student degeneracy, as seen in the following complaint issued in 1898 by a group calling itself the Justice Club:
Look at the condition of Tokyo's students. While at first glance they appear unsophisticated in their short hakama [trousers], there is, in this day of rapid progress, an evil among them. What is it? Villainous youths band together with others of similar character and seize young boys at temple and shrine festivals, athletic events, boat races, and other places where students congregate. In extreme cases, groups of three to five prowl near middle school gates, accost pupils on their way home, take them to deserted places and wantonly indulge their beastly desires for [sodomy], thus plunging these pure, innocent boys into the world of depraved lust. Such occurrences are nothing new, but these shameless villains are now spreading their poison at such a rate that young boys without a strong protector haven't the heart to walk outside their homes. Having lost their liberty, these boys have also lost their fighting spirit. Is this not deplorable?
As the examples of the kabukimono and Aizu youths show, such sexual violence was of course not new; it had also been part of the life of many domain schools and the shogunate's academy in Edo. Many Meiji students were from samurai backgrounds, and, as Gregory Pflugfelder has noted, readily adopted the homosocial, misogynous style of masculinity inspired by samurai ideals and with it the male-male sexual practice of nanshoku. Nor was such behavior unique to Japanese schoolboys. “In English preparatory and public schools romance is necessarily homosexual,” wrote Robert Graves. “The opposite sex is despised and treated as something obscene.”
Yet in late-Meiji public discourse, students' nanshoku predations appeared to derive particularly from the culture of the former domains of the southwest, especially Satsuma, whose warriors had played leading roles in the Restoration and in the Meiji government. Nanshoku practices were known as a “Satsuma habit,” and according to the novelist Shibusawa Seika, who grew up “terrified by stories of such youths,” marauding students were commonly referred to as Satsumappo.
Sociologist Furukawa Makoto has suggested that government leaders carried this culture from Satsuma to Tokyo, where it was promoted with particular vigor in the nationalistic atmosphere of the decade from the Sino-Japanese War to the Russo-Japanese War. To Furukawa, aggressive displays of nansboku reflected students' desire to partake in the culture of the elites who dominated the government. In this context, denunciations of such behavior, spearheaded by the crusading newspaper Yorozu chōhō, formed part of a broader attack on the Satsuma clique's pernicious influence in national life (and by extension, on the influence of the clique's Chōshū allies).
 As one Yorozu editorialist put it in 1900, “The greatest inspiration that powerful men of the clique government have given to Tokyo youths is for nanshoku and dueling.” At the same time, Pflugfelder notes, criticism of student nanshoku constituted part of an effort to impose new norms of “civilized morality” on the discourse of the erotic. Within this discursive strategy, male-male sexual relations represented a vestige of the barbaric past (and of a putatively particular regional past), a mode of behavior to be outgrown by the individual adolescent and by the nation as a whole.
Not all student gangs adopted nanshoku practices. Differences in regional backgrounds may have been a factor in these varied approaches to sexual behavior, just as regional rivalries may have fueled showdowns over particular boys. Nanshoku traditions were probably weaker among the sons of wealthy farmers, whose presence in the student body increased greatly at the turn of the twentieth century, although the desire to assimilate to a samurai-dominated student culture may have led some to adopt this behavior. Whether or not the members of the Justice Club, which was itself a major gang, in fact refrained from nanshoku acts is hard to tell, but the authors of the manifesto quoted earlier consciously manipulated public outrage for their own purposes. Such ambiguities aside, the Justice Club's posturing as defenders of the weak highlights a second element in the ruffian cultural repertoire: many saw themselves as heirs of a lineage of “Eastern heroes” (Tōyōteki gōketsu) who did not hesitate to use violence in the pursuit of just causes.”
- David Ambaras, “Civilizing “Degenerate Students”,” Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. pp. 69-71.
