Features

Japan in the 1980s was a country on the up. The technology industries were fuelling an unprecedented economic boom, while the country's burgeoning global clout was illustrated by the extent to which American businesses felt the need to churn out paranoid anti-Japanese propaganda.

But Japan's new-found affluence was also a source of internal friction, because at the same time as it was swamping the West with cheap electronic goods, it was in turn being swamped by Western popular culture. And for what is a traditionally authoritarian society, the new influences on teenagers coming from magazines, fi lms and music were, in a sense, selling rebellion.

It was out of this environment that the Bosozoku gangs began to flourish, with more kids able to afford one of the 250cc bikes, as well as the money for resprays and modifications.

The Bosozoku's roots stretch back to the 1950s, but it was during the Eighties that they began to cultivate a reputation as the breeding ground for potential members of the Yakuza, Japan's equivalent to the Mafia. But that's only part of the story. Although they're known as the Yakuza's army, probably 60 to 70 per cent of teenagers that join the gangs leave in their early twenties and go on to pursue perfectly acceptable careers in mainstream Japanese society.

Recruits can be as young as 13 or 14 and, much like the Hell's Angels which provide one of the gangs' infl uences, they follow strict codes within a definable hierachy which sees gang leaders and their lieutenants chosen on the basis of their age and commitment to the group.

One of the earliest gangs to emerge came from Hiroshima, a city whose catastrophic wartime history provides a defining context for elements of the style and attitude of the Bosozoku gangs, particularly the impressive white gowns known as 'kamikaze kimonos' - a reference to Japanese fighter pilots who made a last stand against the Americans at the end of the Second World War. It also provides another correlation with the way in which the Hell's Angels emerged, formed as they were from decommissioned American pilots after the same conflict.

Then there's the golden rosette worn on the kimonos, representative of the Emperor and considered in Japan to be a controversial symbol, something akin to the swastikas worn by some Hell's Angels. It's led people to regard the Bosozoku as an unofficial militia to political extremists, but just as with the Hell's Angels, the primary function of this sort of iconography seems to be to shock outsiders and shroud the gangs in an atmosphere of danger.