What the yakuza can teach us about cancelation
Banishment is one of the most severe punishments in the Japanese underworld. That alone should tell us something about the consequences of cancelation.
You’re covered in tattoos and missing the top portion of a few fingers. Your job skills include extortion, racketeering, violence (lethal and non-lethal), and total obedience. Society doesn’t want you because they think you’re a gang member. The criminal underworld doesn’t want you because they know you’re not.
“The Last Yakuza” by Jake Adelstein relates the history of the Japanese yakuza through the life and underworld career of Saigo, once an upper level crime boss.
Yakuza can only leave their organization in one of two ways: death or banishment. Saigo’s 20 years as a yakuza ended with the latter.
Adelstein describes the immediate impact of hamon, banishment:
A banished yakuza is immediately treated like a leper. The rules of banishment prohibit other members from associating with the individual. Thus everyone avoids him. Your closest friend doesn’t know you within hours after you’ve been kicked out.
The freshly outcast yakuza isn’t waiting for someone to come help him, nor ruing the disloyalty or cowardice of his comrades. They are not weak or disloyal friends. They are loyal yakuza. They follow the rules, including the rules of banishment.
The yakuza’s rules of banishment are explicit, and every member knows them from their day of initiation. Associate with a banished yakuza and face banishment yourself. Given the profound sense of honor and obedience at the yakuza core, the banished member would probably shame anyone who broke ranks to help him.
Every culture and subculture has their norms of banishment. They are usually implicit, with more wiggle room than the yakuza’s.
Some subcultures make a virtue out of transgressing other subcultures’ or the mainstream culture’s rules of banishment. Jesus’ outreach to criminals, prostitutes, lepers, and other outcasts is a recurring theme of the Gospels and is foundational to Christianity. It was a rebuke to the norms of his day—and a great way to recruit new followers and, later, members.
The Western tradition prizes loyalty and steadfastness towards those close to us above almost all things—certainly above affiliation towards groups or institutions. Betrayal is one’s ticket to the Ninth Circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. Dante’s eternal punishment distinguishes between those who betray family, country, friends or guests, and benefactors.
Three blocks of ice for betraying individuals, one for betraying a group or entity.
The immediate, total abandonment is one of the most jarring aspects of being canceled. The canceled person might understand being maligned or sold out by a rival at work, or getting the eyes-down-and-look-away treatment from acquaintances who only know what the headlines told them.
But when close friends vanish, you start questioning if you were wrong about absolutely everything: them, yourself, friendships, relationships, human nature, our culture, and our place in it.
“The one thing that could have stopped [my cancelation] was never going to happen. It’s like what they say about firemen: when the building’s on fire, everyone else is running away from the building, but the firemen run into it. But you only do that if you have courage. No one had it. Not one of them,” a canceled person told me.
Forget trust. The canceled person loses the basis to predict what might happen next in even the smallest moments.
For a banished yakuza, the isolation—as painful as it is—confirms their understanding of the social order and their place in it. For many canceled people, the isolation and the betrayal that brought it about are an existential double-tap.
Everybody has a part to play in banishment
Being banished from a yakuza organization is not like being fired. You can’t just go work for another group. The banishment order, hamonjo, goes out to all yakuza organizations—and to the police.
The all-encompassing severance tells the rival groups: “We are so over and done with this guy that he’s not even worth your time to beat up.” Additionally, the code of honor between yakuza gangs precludes one gang from recruiting another group’s outcasts.
Likewise, it tells police: “If you want to arrest this guy, go ahead. But it’s barely worth your time. It won’t make a dent in our gang, and you won’t get any credit for taking on organized crime. He’s just a civilian now.”
The canonical description of hamon in English is in an unpublished 1981 doctoral dissertation by David H. Stark. Stark illustrates the formality of hamon (explusion) and zetsuen (permanent expulsion) with diagrams of the cards that yakuza groups would disseminate to other groups, and post within their headquarters, announcing a banishment.
This person is not good for our group. We expelled him on [date of expulsion]. He has absolutely no more relations with our group.
For zetsuen, the card reads:
The person listed on the right is expelled on [date of expulsion]. He is expelled because of his bad behavior which often opposed our group’s goals and ideals and was not permissible by the code of chivalry. Therefore, we are informing you that this person is absolutely cut off from our group. In addition, we want your honorable group to firmly reject forming any brotherhood bond, membership, friendly association, or business association with this person.
Within the yakuza subculture, the cards create a searchable, public blacklist. If you encounter someone or hear a rumor, you can check their name against the hamon and zetsuen files (or maybe a bulletin board wall of shame), and proceed accordingly.
Implicit in the reciprocal respect accorded to other groups’ banishment is a combination of trust and fear. Trust, that the other group has good cause to expel that member, and that he’s therefore not the sort of person we’d want to associate with. And fear of retaliation if either an individual or another club were to associate with him.
Stark explains:
Once expelled or discharged, an ex-member can stay in the gang’s territory but he may not claim membership or influence by virtue of past affiliation or current connection to a gang... He is banned from joining another gang, is warned against roaming the streets aimlessly, and must refrain from the use of mannerisms and styles of a gangster. If caught doing any of the above, the ex-member would be challenged by the gang.... and [attacked] until he would repent.
Canceled people are not physically exiled from their town or city. They can stay in their former employer’s and their former social circle’s “territory, but [they] may not claim membership or influence by virtue of past affiliation or current connection to” their old job, network, civic organizations, and friend group. Those entities do everything they can to distance themselves from the target of cancelation, whether they instigated the canceling or are acting out of respect and fear for whoever issued the hamonjo for the social transgression of the day.
Canceled people don’t get hired for new jobs—they don’t even get called back for interviews—they don’t get invited out for lunch or coffee, they’re removed from Facebook groups and group chats. If he or she points to their previous affiliations, those institutions are quick and loud to say “But not anymore, because we got rid of them.”
Few even speak in their defence, and when they do, it’s just that: speaking. Those in a position to actually do something for them, don’t.
Everyone except for the canceled person knows what they are supposed to do or not do. Somehow, they all know the part they are to play in the banishment. The canceled person alone, in every sense, is left to discover everybody’s role in their new social existence.
Yakuza keep pains in perspective
At least there’s no physical pain or disfigurement associated with cancelation or banishment. It could be worse, you may be thinking.
Obviously, you’re not a yakuza.
“Less severe than membership loss is the loss of a finger,” known as yubitsume, Stark writes.
The absence of physical trauma is one of the difficulties in conveying to and convincing people of the traumatic nature of cancelation. Post-traumatic stress disorder is unique among all the conditions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V) because it requires a specific cause. Depression or anxiety, for example, are diagnosed and assessed solely by their symptoms. PTSD requires the clinician to add, “Yes, but what caused this?”
All of the possible causes in “Criterion A” for a diagnosis of PTSD are physical in some way.
Banishment, humiliation, and betrayal are outside this realm. Someone who has “merely” suffered a betrayal leading to a public humiliation, which creates a stigma that results in their social and professional banishment, cannot recieve a by-the-book diagnosis of PTSD.
The 1976 Supreme Court case Paul v. Davis upheld the government’s ability to blacklist citizens, even without criminal conviction, opening the door for everything from TSA watchlists to debanking to the US Center for SafeSport’s Centralized Disciplinary Databse.
In his prescient and insightful dissent in Paul v. Davis, Justice William Brennan wrote (emphasis added):
The hardships resulting from this official stigmatization—loss of employment and educational opportunities, creation of impediments to professional licensing, and the imposition of general obstacles to the right of all free men to the pursuit of happiness—will often be as severe as actual incarceration, and the Court today invites and condones such lawless action by those who wish to inflict punishment without compliance with the procedural safeguards constitutionally required of the criminal justice system.
Brennan and the yakuza don’t have to minimize the trauma of physical punishment to argue that the social and psychological consequences of public banishment exceed those of incarceration or partial digital dismemberment.
Stark writes that “[i]f yubitsume is thought of as punishment, it should be viewed as self-inflicted.”
Self-inflicted, starting at the line between coercion and free will. Penitent yakuza remove part of their finger “to add the necessary dimension of sincerity to an apology for misconduct and reassert their allegiance to their Boss and gang.”
Yubitsume is a hedge against hamon: taking the initiative to do something physically painful and debilitating to hopefully avoid something existentially painful and debilitating.
“Pain is easy,” said one of the most damaged canceled coaches I’ve talked to. “I’m a lifelong athlete. Everything has been hurt. But emotional is different.”
Outsiders may marvel at the fanaticism and toughness of finger-removing yakuza. But for the yakuza, it’s a matter of keeping perspective. Losing part of a finger is painful and traumatic, but it beats the “painless” alternative of having an intact hand and nothing else.
Related:
“The Last Yakuza: Life and Death in the Japanese Underworld,” by Jake Adelstein
An enquiry into the effects of public punishments upon criminals and upon society, by Benjamin Rush
Run out of town (Abuse of Process)
Defending Reputation from Defamation-by-Blacklist (American Spectator)
Cover photo: Screenshot from HBO Max’s Tokyo Vice.
It really taps in to the most dark and painful aspect of sociological behavior. Really great article.