BANCHŌ & SUKEBAN - Japan’s Delinquent SCHOOL GANGS

Japan as conservative and organized as it may be is no exception when it comes to the existence of juvenile crime which actually saw a significant rise in the Land of the Rising Sun from the 1950s up until the 1970s in particular so much so that a form of organized crime crept its way into a place that should be a safe space for future Generations High School bullies who take your lunch money and small groups of delinquents can be found in pretty much every school worldwide but in early postwar Japan these fairly harmless crimes were taken to a new level well at least in terms of scale and organization violence intimidation and theft were the bread and butter of the Bano and suiban groups of young Japanese delinquents who managed to strike an interesting balance between being an innocent student and being part of an actual gang today we take a look at the rise of Youth delinquency in postwar Japan the gang-like structures that found their way into schools and the impact that the bancho and sugan ended up having on pop culture if you end up enjoying this video then please don't forget to leave a like And subscribe if you want more Japanese crime and history content if you're particularly impressed with my work then feel free to check out my patreon page where you can support the production of future videos for as little as $1 per month now without any further Ado this is the history of the banjo and sukun Japan's delinquent School gangs [Music] September 22nd 1950 a vehicle containing a total of 1.9 million yen in cash the salary for over 100 employees of Tokyo University is on its way back to campus when suddenly a 19-year-old University coworker named yamagiwa hiroyuki forces the car to pull over yamaga takes out a knife slashes the neck of one employee while forcing the others to exit the vehicle before taking off with the 1.9 million yen 2 Days Later yamagiwa along with his girlfriend and accomplice was caught but not before spending around 200,000 of the stole money some of which was spent on a brand new suit and a hat my man was in trouble but at least he looked good when the police came to arrest the two yamagiwa actually made a desperate last Stitch attempt to conin the police officers that he was in fact not the guy that they were looking for but an innocent Japanese American citizen problem was his English skills were subpar at best and so he uttered the only phrase which came to mind oh mistake the aptly named oh mistake incident immediately made headlines across Japan while the phrase oh mistake itself became one of the most widespread bus wordss of Japan in the early 1950s but why after all all during the difficult early post-war era of Japan that was plagued with violence and poverty much more severe and brutal crimes were committed on a regular basis however it was this case that sparked a huge debate among the Japanese public a debate that stemmed from the manner in which the robbery was carried out and by whom it was carried out yamagiwa was around 14 years old when Japan surrender to the Allied Forces he witnessed the war itself the defeat as well as the beginning of the subsequent occup ation by the US a culturally vastly different country and now while still being basically a young kid he was stealing large sums of money and pretending to be Health American in an attempt to save his own skin all without a shred of regret or remorse to many the oake incident was emblematic of a larger problem frustration poverty and confusion caused by a rapid shift in culture and politics were widespread and that same shift in culture was now blamed for a rapid rise of you delinquency whether or not this shifting culture and the American occupation were actually to blame or not is incredibly tough to answer crime among teenagers was under rise not only in Japan but worldwide the fact that Japan was on the losing side of the war might have Amplified this problem quite a bit though and the numbers were indeed pretty noteworthy before the war the average number of crimes committed by under 19y olds over a 5-year period set at around 48,000 the 5year period after the war saw this number go up to a staggering 126,000 more worryingly the number of juvenile crimes in Japan not only failed to decrease it actually went up reaching a peak in the early 1960s crimes carried out by individuals also became increasingly rare with crimes committed in groups growing more and more popular among the Japanese youth in Japan Junior High School is the final step of compulsory education preceded by six years of primary School junior high students are between 12 to 15 years old an age that I think many of us can confirm is generally very problematic it's no surprise then that Junior High would also become a hot spot for groups of young delinquents with students from lower class families who usually stopped attending school after Junior High being very susceptible to committing crimes some of these troublemakers managed to stand out though Japanese School Gang started forming around the strongest student in junior high who receiv received the title Bano a title that is thought to have originated from a position of the same name inside the Japanese Imperial Guard between the 8th and 10th Century while murder human trafficking and the likes were not on the crime curriculum of the banjo the way that their gangs were organized is actually quite interesting and in some ways pretty similar to their more violent adult counterparts like the Yakuza the banjo were probably the closest thing to adolescent kingpins in Japan at the time so what were these gangs actually up to well overall nothing that wouldn't happen in any school outside of Japan the crimes of the gangs surrounding the banjo were fairly harmless in most cases intimidation and theft were a regular occurrence but so was violence against members but mostly against non-members of the group what made the Bano gangs stand out however was the high degree of organization found within these groups every year in either September or October a secret election took place where the next banjo would be chosen in order to find a successor the reigning banjo would organize a fight which took place on the school grounds where everyone got to show off their strength to the other students the strongest of them all usually won the election with four or five other strong students becoming his subordinate lieutenants the rank of banjo was usually held by one of the older students but every now and then a boy from a lower grade would prove to be particularly aggressive and strong in that case he would receive the honor of becoming a sort of sub banjo which might give him a big Advantage by the time the next election rolls around one of my main sources a book titled Heritage of endurance also mentions a meticulously planned well-organized scheme carried out by a buano leader who ordered his subordinates to go out and extract money from other students for some sort of gang project Japan just knows how to take things to the next level even if it's about taking a lunch money the size of these gangs varied of course depend depending on how large the school was the aforementioned Source mainly investigated schools located in Tokyo's arakawa Ward where enrollment ranged from 700 to 1,000 students the banjo in these schools usually controlled gangs which contained anywhere from 20 up to 60 students doesn't sound like all that much but it was certainly enough to cause other students a fair amount of trouble but actually violence at the hands of these well organized delinquents wasn't reserved exclusively for students at times even teachers could become the victim of a Bano and his men or his boys I should say an interview with three former banjo gang members gives us some insight into why exactly there were occasional physical altercations between students and teachers quote there are two types of teachers one group of teachers is understanding towards the kids the other group is old-fashioned and rigid the former is popular among the kids the latter is hated a school teacher must be willing to talk frankly with his boys some teachers give themselves ears as if to emphasize that teachers are a different form of existence from school kids these guys should be punished otherwise they do harm to less aggressive kids when some boys don't behave well in the classroom perhaps they want to show off their authority to other kids they say come outside I will punish you young teachers fresh out of college don't want to be beaten up by a boys and in order to avoid such problems they decide to scare the boys first they act strictly they're making a great mistake their efforts simply make the boys more rebellious against them those teachers who are disliked by the boys are poor teachers who do not know how to handle the boys properly the kids are all very simple-minded after all therefore if the teachers can communicate with them soul to soul person to person the kids will all obey them but now I'm grateful to those stubborn rigid and Bad Teachers because they taught me that the world is not made up of my friends thanks to them I learned that they are enemies as well as friends in this world end quote winning a certain sense with authority over the teachers occasionally gained the banjo and their gangs a certain amount of respect and popularity among other kids who weren't involved in that sort of business actually in some cases the Bano were kind of like celebrities inside the respective schools one teacher recalled students paying actual money as much as 1,000 yen just to after photo taken with a Bano such a photo would sometimes provide a kid with more than just bragging rids at school showing them to members of the gang and claiming to be close friends with the leader would in some cases be an effective way of protecting oneself against being attacked or robbed of that precious lunch money the gang's weapons of choice when it came to comet on school grounds were their own fists but when things got serious outside of school objects like bike chains wooden swords and steel pipes were often utilized sometimes you'd even have competing schools fighting each other which I know sounds like something straight out of an anime but apparently it's true the bancho of the losing side of such a battle between between two schools often became a quote unquote disciple of the Victorious banjo which could also result in a merger of the two competing gangs reportedly there were members of actual Yakuza gangs who gave food and loding for several nights at a time to Banu leaders who ran away from home there honestly seems to have been no clear-cut connection between banjo and the Yakuza but seeing that both groups are usually made up in large parts of social outcasts and or people from lower class families former banjo eventually joining an actual Yakuza or buzuku gang does kind of make sense the banjo didn't manage to stick around for too long generally it is thought that their time came to an end sometime during the 1970s their Spirit however was kept Alive by a group of young delinquents that was formed at around the same time by those who were not allowed to join the buano gangs why were they not allowed to join well because they were girls and if the boys wouldn't let them join their best option was to just form groups of rebellion delinquents themselves groups that would actually manage to become much much larger than those which were composed exclusively of male students these exclusively female delinquent gangs would eventually receive the name suiban and just like their male counterparts they created their own style which allowed them to distinguish themselves from all the other students most notably they altered their school uniforms by making the skirt much longer sometimes decorating them with kanji and slogans kind of similar to the biker Jack of the pooku the lengthening of the skirt was more than just a stylistic choice though motivated by a growing Japanese feminist movement that started gaining traction starting in the 1960s a long skirt sort of represented a protest against the mini skirt that had become a part of the school uniform a longer skirt was also pretty useful when it came to hiding weapons at school the most popular of which were chains and Razer blades used to commit a similar set of crimes as the bancho gangs namely theft as well as violence against other students and rival gangs and just like the Bano gangs they had a rigid hierarchy and followed a pretty strict set of rules disrespecting a superior or stealing another girl's boyfriend for example would result in punishment a popular way of doing so was by burning the offender with a cigarette which was actually considered to be one of the less painful types of punishment reserved only for minor offenses at their Peak during the 1970s tens of thousands of girls across Japan were thought to be part of the suuban gang the largest of of these gangs the Kanto women delinquent Alliance reportedly boasted a membership of around 20,000 members which would have put them well above the country's biggest Yakuza gangs maybe not in terms of power money or influence but definitely in terms of sheer membership numbers pretty impressive the sugan's influence and common culture is also pretty hard to overstate the style of theban became iconic a whole subre of movies inspired by sucab ban called pinky violence became all rage in Japan during the 1970s these action movies offered viewers a new type of badass violent female protagonist that hadn't really been seen in Japanese Cinema up until that point for something even more mainstream look no further than anime and manga like 1975's suiban dea serus which also spawned multiple TV shows and movies over a span of almost four decades takuo creator of the world famous Sailor Moon series was inspired by the zukan style while her husband gave some of the characters in his own manga series YuYu hakuzo a look that was undoubtedly inspired by the banjo these are just a few of countless examples of banjo and suiban finding their way into popular Japanese media but even the West couldn't quite escape the unique style of Japan's young delinquents Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume One features a sugan inspired character named goo y a 17-year-old Japanese high school student and assassin who basically kills for fun Tarantino is known to be a huge fan of Asian Cinema so I guess there's a good chance that he watched a few pinky violence movies himself at some point that skirt on gogou yub might actually be a bit too short for a real suiban though oh and apparently there's a Japanese female pro wrestling leag called suiban which made research for this video a bit more difficult than it needed to be nowadays the entertainment industry is pretty much the only place where the spirit of the banjo and suan somehow lives on youth delinquency in Japan is obviously still a thing and always will be though definitely not as much as in the' 60s and '70s it's all just a lot less organized and big scale compared to he a century ago the number of juvenile crimes Japan has fortunately been on a steep decline during the past decade especially with only 16,000 reported cases in 2021 down from 47,000 in 2012 compare that to the numbers of the 60s or the 70s and it's pretty obvious where there simply isn't really a place for large scale quote unquote organized crime in Japanese schools anymore even with things like bullying unfortunately still posing a huge problem regardless it's kind of interesting to see that the hierarchies and social structures that seemingly find their way into every nook and cranny of Japanese Society could once also be found among groups of underage Junior High School students looking to cause a bit of trouble which Japanese criminal organizations or subcultures would you like to see next let me know in the comments down below also want to thank all of my patreon supporters listed here including busner who actually suggested the suan as a topic and gave me the idea to make this entire video and to everyone who stuck around until the end as always thank you so much for watching [Music] say [Music]

Channel: ANIKI

Views: 663,786

Keywords: japan, japanese, school, highschool, crime, gang, gangs, history, sukeban, bancho, yankii, criminal, delinquents, bully, bullying

Id: UEITKSiHMc0

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 24 2023