Bosozoku : Japanese motorbike Gang

A rolled-up licence plate, a wall of engine noise at two in the morning, then silence again. That was a bosozoku night run through a Japanese city.

Bosozoku are Japanese motorcycle gangs known for reckless riding and noisy night parades. The first ones appeared in the post-war years, the movement peaked in the early 1980s, and its numbers collapsed in the 2000s.

Here is how these Japanese biker gangs marked Japanese and international culture, in their own way.

What is a Bosozoku?

The term bosozoku (暴走族) translates literally as "reckless driving tribe". It gives a fairly accurate picture of these Japanese motorcycle gangs, who roamed the roads of the archipelago for nearly 50 years, revving up their engines.

They were known to shout, honk and brandish weapons like baseball bats and bokken (木刀), the wooden training sword. They blocked traffic and caused chaos in Japanese cities. In the city centers, they marched proudly in the colors of their clan. A flag bearer, the hatamochi, waved the sign of the clan the way samurai retainers carried banners during the wars of the shogun.

The members of these clans, aged between 16 and 20, mostly came from working class backgrounds. Still, there was a hierarchy:

• a leader (the sentōsha),
• captains
• and young recruits,

A gang could have several hundred members. Nightly parades and clashes between clans over territory and honor filled the daily life of the bosozoku. Those constant clashes are one of the main reasons the word bosozoku became tied to juvenile delinquency.

These gangs of young bikers still held strong values: honor, loyalty, courage, respect.

Those values seem inspired by the Hagakure (葉隠), the book that codified the samurai way. To join a clan, you had to prove yourself first. Recruits had to show that they were not afraid of death.

Members rode in a dangerous and irresponsible way on tuned motorcycles.

Their attitude was paradoxical, because they claimed the values of old Japan, the Yamato Damashii (大和魂). The term refers to a set of Japanese spiritual values, a kind of moral code.

Underneath the menacing appearance were rebellious teenagers fighting a society that did not fit them.

50 years of chaos on Japanese road

The first bosozoku appeared in the 1950s. They were not called bosozoku yet, but the beginnings of the movement can be traced to bikers riding tricked-out motorcycles.

These precursors were called kaminari zoku, the "thunder tribes", because of the noise of their bikes. They took their cues from bikers in the United States.

One film mattered in particular: Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray in 1955. Young Japanese riders borrowed its clothes and its symbolism of a generation revolting against the one before, after the Second World War.

American motorcycle gangs like the Hells Angels also left a mark. That is why you find greaser codes among the bosozoku: the pompadour haircut, the dark glasses, the heavy jackets.

The first members of these Japanese biker gangs were war veterans who had not expected to come back alive, and pilots whose missions were cancelled. Unable to resume a conventional life in Japanese society, they looked for a way to recreate the camaraderie and the danger they had known at the front. The first bosozoku clans were born that way.

That post-war mix of American cut and Japanese embroidery also gave birth to the sukajan (スカジャン), the souvenir jacket sewn for US servicemen stationed in Japan. It is the piece I reach for when someone wants the era without the gang codes.

The movement soon gained momentum. By the 1960s, these motorized groups of young people breaking urban traffic rules were multiplying across Japan.

The expansion came with cheaper, more modern motorcycles, and with a change in the riders themselves. They were no longer ageing veterans, but young people determined to question the established rules and defy authority.

They drew the attention of the media, which gave them the name bosozoku. The culture developed and peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, with 42,510 members spread across 754 gangs counted in 1982.

The currents diversified in that period. Some clans wanted to fight the police. Others favored illegal races and mass gatherings.

Repression intensified, which led to two days of riots in Toyama on 17 and 18 June 1972, and to scuffles between bikers and police in several cities. This glorious decade for the movement was also marked by clashes between clans, sometimes involving several hundred participants, which pushed the authorities to act.

So began the decline of the bosozoku Japanese counter-culture, which survived a few more years thanks to manga and Japanese animation.

The inevitable decline of the bosozoku counterculture

In 2004, a law on road traffic allowed Japanese police to arrest riders who until then had been tolerated and simply reprimanded. That law dealt a fatal blow to the movement.

Riders understood that their acts now carried real legal risk. The second cause of the fall was the economic crisis that hit Japan in the 1990s. Work became precarious, income was no longer assured, and this young generation could no longer afford motorcycles or the parts used to decorate them.

In the later gangs, young bosozoku were even riding scooters.

Official counts kept falling through the 2010s, from around 7,000 members in 2012 to a few thousand riders in barely a hundred active groups by the end of the decade. Some former bosozoku, now adults, moved into the yakuza world.

A movement that powerful cannot be erased in a flash, and the bosozoku counter-culture did not disappear.

The bosozoku's outfit

A bosozoku gang member is easy to identify. The outfit carries distinctive signs that show membership of the movement, and also tell you which clan the rider belongs to.

The traditional outfit is the tokko-fuku (特攻服), literally "special attack clothing", a name borrowed from wartime uniforms because of the kanji 特攻.

Many kanji inscriptions cover the tokko-fuku. They give the name of the clan and of the wearer, his rank in the gang, and provocative anti-police or anti-society slogans. Others sum up the mentality of these riders, like "I go through life at full speed, without regrets".

The uniform often goes with:

• a headband
• a hachimaki
• a surgical mask
• and sometimes, the bosozoku wears small round glasses.

The hairstyle is very often a rocker's pompadour, like the one worn by young Onizuka in the manga GTO.

The attitude relies on aggressive language and a low crouching posture, a blunt way of saying that ordinary rules do not apply here. Not everything was provocation, though. Some clan mottos read almost like poetry:

"No time to wait, I have to live".

If you like that embroidered back panel without the slogans, the same craft shows up in modern Japanese menswear, where animal motifs replaced the gang kanji.

The main element of the bosozoku is of course the motorcycle, modified to be unique.

The bikes used ranged from 250cc to 400cc, but raw power mattered little. The rider wanted his machine as showy and as loud as possible.

So he covered it with stickers and writings. It was painted in flashy colors, with a horn chosen for its disturbing sound. The seat back rose high behind the rider. The license plate was folded up to make the bike harder to identify.

What Japanese people think about bosozoku?

In Japan, a bosozoku member is immediately associated with a violent, uneducated thug. Yet these young people followed a moral code close to that of the samurai. So we can ask whether the image spread by the media created a kind of myth around the movement.

When the phenomenon spread across Japan in the 1970s, television stations and newspapers began covering the misdeeds of these young offenders. Every time, the headlines showed violent and dangerous acts.

Violence sold. Between 1986 and 2011, the country's two main dailies, the Yomiuri Shimbun and the Asahi Shimbun, published 5,569 and 6,711 articles respectively containing the term bosozoku.

That was enough to persuade readers of the brutality of these motorcycle gangs.

Look at the real activities of the bosozoku, though, and the main nuisance comes from engine noise and night parades in the cities.

Gang wars did not concern ordinary citizens. The clans had no desire to harm them. The closeness of some members to the local Yakuza mafia reinforced the image of the bosozoku as a violent thug.

Part of the picture is legend, carried by manga, films and series, and by former members who remember their youth with nostalgia.

The legacy of the bosozoku movement

Bosozoku inspired manga like Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo, films such as the sixteen Furyô banchô movies, and Japanese dramas. Fashion took over the style of these young rebels too, from embroidered coats to loud graphic prints.

That influence is still visible in Japanese streetwear, where long silhouettes, back embroidery and kanji graphics keep circulating.

Bosozoku were rebels in a country that does not like non-conformism. They marked several generations with their tuned motorcycles.

The movement has almost disappeared today, and it is unlikely to come back in its old form. It left a cultural heritage that Japan fans like us can still enjoy through manga, anime and clothing.

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