BANCHŌ & SUKEBAN

Japan, as conservative and organized as it may be, is no exception when it comes to juvenile crime, which saw a significant rise from the 1950s up until the 1970s. A form of organized crime crept its way into high schools, turning a place meant to be a safe space for future generations into a breeding ground for delinquency. Bullies and small groups of delinquents can be found in every school worldwide, but in early postwar Japan, these crimes were taken to a new level in terms of scale and organization. Violence, intimidation, and theft were the bread and butter of the Bancho and Sukeban, groups of young Japanese delinquents who struck an interesting balance between being innocent students and actual gang members.

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 Sukeban had on pop culture.

This is the history of the Bancho and Sukeban: Japan's delinquent school gangs.

September 22, 1950:

A vehicle containing 1.9 million yen in cash, the salary for over 100 employees of Tokyo University, is on its way back to campus when a 19-year-old university co-worker named Yamagiwa Hiroyuki forces the car to pull over. Yamagiwa takes out a knife, slashes the neck of one employee, forces the others to exit the vehicle, and takes off with the 1.9 million yen. Two days later, Yamagiwa and his girlfriend and accomplice are caught, but not before spending around 200,000 yen on a brand-new suit and a hat. Despite his desperate attempt to convince the police he was an innocent Japanese American citizen, his subpar English skills betrayed him, and he uttered the only phrase that came to mind: "Oh mistake."

The aptly named "Oh Mistake Incident" immediately made headlines across Japan, and the phrase "Oh mistake" became one of the most widespread buzzwords of the early 1950s. During the difficult early postwar era of Japan, plagued with violence and poverty, more severe and brutal crimes were committed regularly. However, this case sparked a huge debate among the Japanese public, stemming from how the robbery was carried out and by whom it was carried out. Yamagiwa was around 14 years old when Japan surrendered to the Allied Forces. He witnessed the war, the defeat, and the beginning of the subsequent occupation by the US, a culturally vastly different country. Now, while still basically a young kid, he was stealing large sums of money and pretending to be half-American to save his skin, all without a shred of regret or remorse.

To many, the "Oh Mistake 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 was now blamed for a rapid rise in youth delinquency. Whether this shifting culture and the American occupation were actually to blame is incredibly tough to answer. Crime among teenagers was on the rise not only in Japan but worldwide. The fact that Japan was on the losing side of the war might have amplified this problem, and the numbers were indeed noteworthy. Before the war, the average number of crimes committed by under-19-year-olds over five years sat at around 48,000. The five years 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 but 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 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 and 15 years old, an age that many of us can confirm is generally very problematic. It's no surprise then that junior high would also become a hotspot 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 gangs started forming around the strongest student in junior high, who received the title "Bancho" a title thought to have originated from a position of the same name inside the Japanese Imperial Guard between the 8th and 10th centuries.

While murder and human trafficking were not on the crime curriculum of the Bancho, the way their gangs were organized is quite interesting and in some ways similar to their more violent adult counterparts like the Yakuza. The Bancho was probably the closest thing to adolescent kingpins in Japan then. What were these gangs up to?

Overall, it is nothing that wouldn't happen in any school outside of Japan. The crimes of the Bancho gangs were fairly harmless in most cases: intimidation, theft, and violence against members but mostly against non-members of the group. What made the Bancho gangs stand out was the high degree of organization within these groups. Every year in either September or October, a secret election took place where the next Bancho would be chosen. to find a successor, the reigning Bancho would organize a fight on the school grounds where everyone could show off their strength. The strongest usually won the election, with four or five other strong students becoming his subordinate lieutenants.

The rank of Bancho was usually held by one of the older students, but occasionally a boy from a lower grade would prove to be particularly aggressive and strong, becoming a sort of sub-Bancho, which might give him an advantage when the next election rolled around. One main source, a book titled *Heritage of Endurance*, mentions a meticulously planned, well-organized scheme carried out by a Bancho leader who ordered his subordinates to extract money from other students for some sort of gang project. Japan took things to the next level even when it came to taking lunch money.

The size of these gangs varied depending on the school's size. In Tokyo's Arakawa Ward, where enrollment ranged from 700 to 1,000 students, the Bancho usually controlled gangs containing 20 to 60 students. This was enough to cause trouble for other students. Violence at the hands of these well-organized delinquents wasn't reserved exclusively for students; at times, even teachers could become victims. An interview with three former Bancho gang members provides insight into why there were occasional physical altercations between students and teachers:

"There are two types of teachers: one group is understanding towards the kids, and the other 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 airs as if to emphasize that teachers are a different form of existence from school kids. These guys should be punished; otherwise, they harm 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 the boys and decide to scare them first. They act strictly, but this simply makes 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. If teachers can communicate with them soul-to-soul, person-to-person, the kids will obey them. 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 there are enemies as well as friends in this world."

Winning a sense of authority over teachers occasionally gained the Bancho and their gangs a certain amount of respect and popularity among other kids. One teacher recalled students paying as much as 1,000 yen to have their photo taken with a Bancho. Such a photo provided more than just bragging rights; showing it to gang members and claiming to be friends with the leader was an effective way of protecting oneself. The gangs' weapons of choice were their fists, but outside school, bike chains, wooden swords, and steel pipes were used. Sometimes, competing schools fought each other. The Bancho of the losing side often became a "disciple" of the victorious Bancho, which could result in a merger of the two gangs. Reportedly, members of actual Yakuza gangs gave food and lodging to Bancho leaders who ran away from home. While there was no clear-cut connection between Bancho and Yakuza, it makes sense that former Bancho might eventually join actual Yakuza or Bosozoku gangs.

The Bancho didn't stick around for long, ending sometime during the 1970s. Their spirit was kept alive by the Sukeban, groups of rebellious girls not allowed to join the Bancho gangs. These female delinquent gangs, often larger than the male ones, created their own style by altering their school uniforms, most notably by making their skirts much longer and decorating them with kanji and slogans. This was both a stylistic choice and a form of protest against the mini-skirts of the school uniform. A longer skirt was also useful for hiding weapons.

At their peak during the 1970s: Tens of thousands of girls across Japan were thought to be part of a Suiban gang. The largest 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 Suiban's influence and common culture are also pretty hard to overstate. The style of the Suiban became iconic. A whole subgenre of movies inspired by Suiban, called "pinky violence," became all the rage in Japan during the 1970s. These action movies offered viewers a new type of badass violent female protagonist that hadn't 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 series, which also spawned multiple TV shows and movies over almost four decades.

Takui Aro, creator of the world-famous Sailor Moon series, was inspired by the Banjo style, while her husband gave some of the characters in his own manga series YuYu Hakusho 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 Suiban-inspired character named Gogo Yubari, a 17-year-old Japanese high school student and assassin who 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 Gogo Yubari might be a bit too short for a real Suiban, though.

There's a Japanese female pro wrestling league 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 Suiban somehow lives on. Youth delinquency in Japan is still a thing and always will be, though not as much as in the '60s and '70s. It's all just a lot less organized and big-scale compared to a century ago.

The number of juvenile crimes in 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 why there simply isn't a place for large-scale "organized crime" in Japanese schools anymore. Even things like bullying unfortunately still pose a huge problem.