Hangure: A New Generation of Gangsters Takes Over Japan’s Underworld

As a young man, Nan Wang had some anger issues.

Bullied at school for his Chinese origins, Nan Wang became a leader of the Chinese Dragons street gang in Tokyo and an enforcer for the yakuza, Japan’s infamous mafia. One day another crook, a wannabe gangster who drifted between several crime families, stole his wallet. But later, he took him out to dinner to apologise. As the organization didn’t brook internal conflict, Nan Wang accepted. 

But trouble revved up again when the man tried to put the bill on the yakuza’s tab.

“I got mad at him, but if I punched him in the face others would notice. So I started punching him where they couldn’t see,” Nan Wang recollected, sitting in a dimly-lit bar in eastern Tokyo. “Then he began making fun of me, saying I was only a wannabe bōsōzoku [biker] and that angered me even more.”

Nan Wang used a bokutō (wooden sword) to break the man’s arm, then instructed a younger associate to bring a real sword, a katana, and chopped the man’s arm off.

“Blood was gushing out. I realised this guy’s not gonna make it, so I tried to finish him off,” Nan Wang continued. “I tried to cut his head off from the back. But the sword was already broken, so the blade just bounced off his neck.”

Meanwhile, a younger gang member got onto the phone to their boss.

“Nan Wang’s really pissed and he’s not gonna stop,” he stuttered, “please come.”

The senior mobster, an ex-kickboxing champion, arrived, kicked Nan Wang out of the way, and had the victim driven to hospital. The man lived, and Nan Wang eventually spent thirteen years in prison. He now runs Honnikaeru [1], an initiative providing books for prisoners.

Out with the yakuza, in with the hangure

The recent arrest of a group of Japanese men allegedly operating a burglary ring from their jail cells in the Philippines [2] has shined a light on organized crime in Japan. Although none of the suspects were formally yakuza, one of the ringleaders may have had ties [3] to Japan’s largest crime syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi.

Traditionally, formality is everything in the Japanese underworld. But that’s something a new generation of gangsters, the so-called “hangure”, are casting aside.

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