Bakuto

Bakuto were itinerant gamblers active in Japan from the 18th century to mid-20th century, and one of the forerunners of the yakuza crime syndicates. Like the tekiya street peddlers, the bakuto's ranks were filled from the same quarters, namely the poor, the landless, and the delinquents. The bakuto tended to operate along the busy highways and towns of Tokugawa-era Japan, while the tekiya operated among the nation's growing markets and fairs. The first gambling gangs were recruited by government officials and local bosses of the Tokugawa Shogunate who hired them to get back the substantial sums of money they paid to irrigation and construction workers by having the workers gamble their pay away. The hired gamblers soon attracted misfit merchants, artisans, samurai, and sumo wrestlers and formed organized bands, operating along the great trunk roads and becoming the kernel of organized crime groups in Japan.

The bakuto not only gave the yakuza is central tradition of gambling, but also its customs of finger-cutting (yubitsume) and the first use of the word yakuza (taken from a losing hand at a card game, hanafuda, 8-9-3; it essentially meant "good for nothing"). After the bakufu ordained that all lords visit Tokyo once a year and that their families reside in the city permanently, the bakuto lured in nobles, servants, and couriers along the increasingly busy roads into Tokyo and made great profits from the misfortunes of the rich travellers. The bakuto began to operate along the new Tokaido Highway from Kyoto to Tokyo after its construction in 1603, and the bakuto would early on develop a set of rules that included strict adherence to secrecy, obedience to the oyabun-kobun system (the patron/client relationship of old), and a ranking order determining one's status and role within the group. Promotions were likely to be based on members' performances during gang fights; gambling skills and loyalty to the oyabun also figured greatly. Low-ranking kobun would often be assigned jobs such as polishing dice, cleaning the house of the oyabun, running errands, and babysitting.

Cowardice, disobedience, and revealing gang secrets were treated not only as betrayals but as loss of honor, and offenses such as rape and petty theft were considered taboo. If bakuto were expelled from their gangs, they would not be allowed into any other band, as the bands would send each other postcards telling each other not to take in expelled members. For serious violations not meriting death or expulsion, bakuto were forced to sever the top joint of the little ringer in a ceremonious manner. Finger-cutting would ultimately prevent a gambler from handling a sword efficiently, forcing the errant kobun to depend more on the protection of his boss. Yubitsume later spread to the tekiya and other crime groups, and it increased since feudal times; by 1993, 45% of yakuza had severed finger joints, and 15% had performed the act at least twice. In addition, Japan's crime groups adopted full-body irezumi tattoos, which had previously been assigned to criminals; they would often blend famous gods, folk heroes, animals, and flowers into one fluid portrait, and, by the late seventeenth cenntury, porters, stable hands, carpenters, masons, and even geisha and Tokyo and Osaka prostitutes would also wear irezumi tattoos.

The bakuto became the leading characters in popular matabi-mono ("stories of wandering gamblers") literature starting in the early 1900s, and Shin Hasegawa's works transformed the yakuza into popular heroes after 1912, as he portrayed the yakuza as faithful and humane people. During the Meiji Restoration era, the yakuza expanded their activities in step with the groowing economy, manufacturing rickshaws and recruiting laborers for construction and dockworking jobs. The bakuto continued to prioritize gambling, but police crackdowns forced many bosses to start legitimate businesses as fronts and to pay protection money to the local police. The bakuto and tekiya gangs also played politics, developing close ties to important officials and cooperating with politicians to obtain government sanction and stave off a crackdown. The government found use for the organized gangs as muscle. Ideology had little to do with the association between politician and hitman in the early days, as it remained pure opportunism on both sides. There was a strongly conservative cast to the relationship, but, late in the 19th century, that conservatism began to veer to the right as Japan began to climb to militarism abroad and repression at home. By the mid-20th century, the bakuto had organized themselves into larger crime syndicates, some of the first yakuza organizations.