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A further ambiguity is illustrated by the elaborate typography which covers the kimonos. A foreigner might imagine it's all tub-thumping rhetoric or profound haikus, but most are translations of very Western biker phrases like 'Born to ride'. And the gangs themselves often vary a great deal from each other - one of them, for example, takes it's styling cues from a variety of African influences.

This might all start to sound rather quaint, but you'd be a fool to think it was all just a pose. Some gang members carry baseball bats and have been known to cause havoc when they take over seaside towns, an act which conjures up images of clashes between the Mods and Rockers in Sixties' Britain. In 1999, around 1,000 Bosozoku gang members in downtown Hiroshima threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at police in a riot that lasted three days.

Gangs also fight each other with bats, knives and swords, and such confrontations have inevitably led to deaths, which are in turn whipped up in the Japanese media as examples of the juvenile delinquency destroying the fabric of society - a belief which has received its own satirical retort in films like Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale.

The pictures you see here are taken from a book on the Bosozoku by the photographer Masayuki Yoshinaga, featuring portraits of the gangs and images of them out riding. Yoshinaga was granted such unadulterated access because in the Eighties heyday of the Bosozoku, he too was gang leader. He also happens to be the son of a prominent member of the Yakuza.

Yoshinaga believes that the Bosozoku are misunderstood by most people, and says in his foreword to the book that the gang members 'know what it feels like to be liberated and have something to teach us all'. Yoshinaga is personally linked to a colourful anecdote regarding the pictures in the book. A few years ago, he sent them to a famous Japanese editor who failed to pay any attention. But when

Yoshinaga's work started to get picked up by a lot of the younger, trendier Japanese magazines, the editor got back in touch with a view to publishing them. Yoshinaga, who felt he'd been insulted, demanded a demonstrative apology. So it was that the editor in question arrived at work one morning with a shaven head.

These days, a persistent police crackdown has seen the number of people joining the Bosozoku decline, some gangs consisting of no more than 25 members. But evidence of their progressive nature can be seen in the admission of female members and even female gangs, which have equal status and respect within the Bosozoku. Given the patriarchal nature of Japanese society, it's an attitude that seems to suggest, in spite of everything else, that the kids are alright.