Let me tell you about a boy who goes back in time to save a
girl.
His name is Hanagaki Takemichi, and he’s the hero of an
anime called Tokyo Revengers. He’s twenty-six and going nowhere, the
kind of guy who has already folded his hand and is only waiting for the game to
end. Then he gets shoved into the path of a train (or something like it; time
travel stories always have a hinge, and this is the hinge), and he wakes up in
2005 with twelve years peeled off his life. His mission is to save his
ex-girlfriend, Tachibana Hinata, who in the future he left behind is dead, killed
by the Tokyo Manji Gang and its leader, Sano Manjiro.
You’d expect a monster, wouldn’t you? Takemichi expects one,
too. He remembers the man Manjiro became.
But the Manjiro he meets in 2005, the one everybody calls
Mikey, is just a kid. He’s cheerful and easygoing, and he has a way of grinning
at you like you’re both in on a joke. He’s what you’d call a stand-up guy, and
he won’t pick on the weak. It’s a little eerie, honestly. You keep waiting for
the other shoe to drop, and the shoe stays up there in the dark, listening.
One afternoon the two of them are sitting by a river. It’s
the kind of scene that, in my line of work, usually comes right before somebody
finds a body, but this time nobody does. Mikey just talks. He talks about his
dead older brother Shinichiro, ten years his senior, and about how the world
has changed its mind about boys like him.
“These days people call furyo uncool, right?” he
says. Furyo, delinquent teens. “Back when my brother was around, there
were a lot of bōsōzoku in this area. They’d cruise around the
neighborhood blasting their horns. They’d throw their shoulders and elbows
around like they owned the place. Even if all they did was fight, they settled
their own problems.”
The bōsōzoku were Japan’s motorcycle gangs, kids who
turned rebellion into chrome and noise. If you’ve ever stood on a quiet road at
two in the morning and heard an engine coming from a long way off, that sound
crawling up the dark like something with intentions, you have some idea of what
the neighborhood felt like.
Here’s the thing about Mikey’s little speech, though. It isn’t
really Mikey talking. It’s Ken Wakui, the manga artist who made him.
Wakui told Le Monde that he was a furyo
himself when he was young. He said he gave Takemichi the power of time travel
for a specific reason: it let him move the whole story into the past. Not just
any past, but a past where the delinquents still had a code, where they didn’t
mess with ordinary civilians. “Being in a gang, at least in my day, was more
about lifestyle and looks,” he said. “If we fought, it was between furyo,
never with regular people. Toward them, we stayed polite and respectful.”
I believe he believes it. Nostalgia is the most powerful
time machine we’ve got, and it doesn’t need a train or a flash of light. It
only needs a little distance, and a little forgetting.
Because the past, as I’ve noticed, has a way of getting its
hooks into the people who go looking for it.
---
The bōsōzoku were real, and they ruled Japan’s
streets for decades. According to the Japan Times, the scene hit its
peak in the 1980s and then started its long, slow fade in the early 2000s. But
the knights of the street Wakui remembers are only half the picture. The other
half is a trail of crime that runs behind them like the exhaust from a bad muffler.
The sociologist Ikuya Sato traced the beginnings in a 1982
paper with the wonderfully blunt title “Crime as Play and Excitement.” In the
mid-1950s a handful of young men began calling themselves otokichi,
motorcycle maniacs, and banding together over a shared love of the machines.
The newspapers soon had a better name for them: Kaminarizoku, the
Thunder Gangs, after the deafening roar of their unmuffled pipes.
They weren’t dangerous yet. Motorcycles were expensive back
then, so the early riders were mostly kids from well-off families, or mechanics
who built the bikes themselves. Their sins were traffic violations and
high-speed zigzagging. Call it mischief. Call it the part of the movie where
the monster is still just a shadow on the wall.
Then Japan’s economy took off, and the motorcycle industry
went with it. Bikes got cheaper, and cheaper means anyone can have one. By the
mid-1960s the Thunder Gangs were drawing kids from every class and corner of
the country, and the labels multiplied: thrill-zoku, circuit-zoku, Mach-zoku.
They performed in streets and parks, and the crowds came, hundreds of them,
sometimes thousands, to watch.
And crowds, as anybody who’s ever read the news (or one of
my books) knows, are the most dangerous thing in the world. A crowd is a single
animal with a thousand heads and no brain.
In May 1969, near the Nagoya TV Tower, thousands of
spectators watching a gang performance got carried away, and they flipped cars
in the street. Japan’s White Paper on Police calls it the first major riot
involving motorcycle gangs. It wouldn’t be the last.
That came in 1972. Sato records it as the biggest incident
of all, the Toyama Incident: more than three thousand people took part in the
riots, and 1,104 were arrested. Afterward the media and the police stopped
using the old names, kaminari-zoku and circuit-zoku, and began
calling these groups bōsōzoku. Wild motorcycle gangs. The monster had
been given a name, and once something has a name, it’s real.
The numbers tell the rest of the story. In 1973 there were
about 12,500 members. By 1981, Sato counts 40,600 of them in more than 750
groups. A year later the figure hit 42,500, the highest in the history of
Japanese motorcycle gangs. And as the ranks swelled, the crimes got worse. They
weren’t just running red lights anymore. There was violence, and there were
weapons.
---
Kazuhiro Hazuki knows this better than most. He was once the
twenty-first-generation leader of Narashino Specter, one of the largest bōsōzoku
groups in the country, and he’s still carrying that world around with him. “The
bōsōzoku world is a scary place,” he told VICE. “You have to prey before
you get preyed on.”
Read that again. It’s the first law of the jungle, from a
man who lived in one.
And yet, and here’s the part that makes the hair on my arms
stand up, Hazuki says that if he had a time machine, he’d go right back. “If
you’ve ever been bōsōzoku, those memories never leave you. Those were
the best days of my life.”
Why? Why would a man look back so fondly on a world of blood
and life-threatening danger?
The scholar Joachim Kersten took a run at the question in a
1993 paper, “Street Youths, Bosozoku, and Yakuza.” His answer, as I understand
it, is that you can’t separate the appeal of the gangs from the collision
between modern Japanese society and the oldest question in the world: Who am
I?
Think about who these kids were. Most of them were between
sixteen and twenty. At school and at home they lived under strict rules about
clothes, hairstyles, and behavior, and on top of it all lay the crushing weight
of academic pressure. A pressure cooker doesn’t make a sound until the moment
it does. Some of those teenagers felt desperate for a different outlet, and
they found one the way kids always do, a little at a time. First came the
cigarettes, then skipped classes, then nights crashing at a friend’s place,
then glue, and then, finally, a gang.
What they got in return was freedom of expression: dyed
hair, eyebrows shaved to sharp lines, and the tokkō-fuku, the customized
jackets embroidered with slogans and symbols, treated as nearly sacred. Each
gang had its own strict aesthetic rules, and those rules set them apart from
their rivals and forged bonds of belonging as tight as blood. For a lonely kid,
that’s a hell of a thing to be offered: a family that understands you.
And then there was the thrill of risk. The nighttime
convoys. The howl of modified exhausts. The high-speed chases with police. It
was an adrenaline rush you couldn’t find anywhere in a daily life made of
rules.
But the freedom was temporary, as it always is. Sato notes
that most members stayed active only until they were nineteen or twenty. Then
adult worry began to creep in, quiet as a cold draft under a door: Who’s going
to hire a man with a criminal record? So they “retired.” They left behind the
sweet memory of living free, and they made their peace with the very rules they’d
once fought against.
Which brings us back to the nostalgia. Nobody mourns the bad
parts, only the best days. That’s how memory works. It’s a hell of a salesman.
---
By then, of course, the government had noticed. As the bōsōzoku
became a public nuisance, officials began a serious crackdown, and they
tightened the screws one turn at a time.
First came the 1978 revision of the Road Traffic Act, which
let police go after coordinated groups of vehicles that could obstruct traffic.
In 1982 came the San Nai Undō, the “Three No’s Movement.” High school
students were barred from getting motorcycle licenses, from buying bikes, from
riding them at all. Overnight the link between Japanese teenagers and the
motorcycle world was severed, like a power line coming down in a storm.
In 2004 another revision of the traffic law gave police
broader powers to ticket reckless driving without having to prove that anyone
was actually endangered. Penalties rose: up to two years in prison, or a fine
of 500,000 yen (roughly $3,500 to $4,000 at the time).
And then, in 2013, the final hammer fell. The National
Police Agency classified the bōsōzoku as bōryokudan, organized
crime groups. They were no longer treated as juvenile delinquents with loud
pipes. They were criminal syndicates, with all the heavy penalties that
implies.
But the law didn’t do it alone. Something quieter was
happening, too.
Customizing a bike and ordering a custom tokkō-fuku
had become expensive, out of reach for most modern teenagers. A motorcycle shop
owner in Nishihara told the Okinawa Times that young people these days
prefer small-displacement bikes: cheap to maintain, and useless for street
racing. “It feels like they value motorcycles more as transportation than as
tools for wild racing.”
And then there were the screens. Video games, smartphones,
the internet: the new addiction, one that didn’t require you to risk your neck.
Daiji Nakaza, of an organization called HOME that helps at-risk youth, put it
plainly. Teenagers now have smartphones, so they can connect with people
instantly. Their awareness has changed. Instead of high-risk street racing
where you might get caught, they choose other forms of entertainment.
You can almost hear it, can’t you? The roar of the engines
going quiet, one street at a time, replaced by the soft blue glow of a thousand
bedrooms.
The numbers bear it out. In the 1990s, about 28,000 members
remained. By 2011 the figure had fallen to 7,193. A decade later, only 4,579
were left. According to the Japan Times, 90 percent of the tokkō-fuku
orders at one retail shop now have nothing to do with motorcycle gangs at all.
The customers are ordinary people: pop-culture fans, or families who want
something special for a celebration. The jackets outlived the gangs. They
always do.
---
So the bōsōzoku still exist, but they’ve largely
faded from the streets, like a ghost fading from a window. And Ken Wakui’s Tokyo
Revengers, serialized from 2017 to 2022, stands as a nostalgic monument to
the thing that’s gone.
In that monument, the journey of Takemichi with Mikey and
the Tokyo Manji Gang is heavily romanticized. The bōsōzoku are groups
bound by friendship and a code of honor. They fight only each other, never
civilians. The dark side of the motorcycle-gang world, the rioting and the
weapons and the world where you prey or get preyed on, is set carefully aside,
like a body wrapped in a blanket in the back of the closet.
And still, and this is the part I keep coming back to, there’s
something true in it.
Takemichi starts as a crybaby, a man who has given up on
himself. Over the course of the story he becomes brave, and he becomes
responsible. And that transformation points at something real about the bōsōzoku
in their heyday. For all the blood and the noise and the wreckage, they were a
vehicle (pun fully intended, and I’m not sorry) for Japanese teenagers
searching for an identity and a taste of freedom.
Maybe that’s why the old men still want to go back.
Not for the violence. Not even for the bikes. But for the
moment, just once, when they were sixteen, and the engine was screaming, and
the road ahead of them was empty, and the whole dark country was theirs.
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