There are (or were) people who are integral to Japanese festivals. They are called tekiya. In some cases, they are also called yashi. They set up stalls at festivals and fairs to enliven the occasion. They are a diverse group of traders, with kitchen knives, dolls, masks, goldfish scooping, target shooting and so on, in food, drink, cotton candy, okonomiyaki, takoyaki and yakisoba. They control the safety of the festival and maintain hygiene there. By this they earn their livelihood. When the festival is over and the stalls are moved, it is responsibility of tekiya cleaned up afterwards. Sometimes they are also the ones who remove the troublesome festival goes.

They usually settle in their own dwellings, belong to their own, so to speak, economic community and do business according to the strict rule of that community. The community has a responsible person with strong leadership. And they were extremely close to the citizens. For example, I was taught not to complain if the knife I bought from a man of tankabai at a fair was a sloppy one. The reason for this was explained as follows: the money paid was essentially for the performance of using that dull knife to chop through pieces of wood as thick as a 10 mm board, and for the entertainment of drawing guests into this world with its sharpness and, at times, its pleasing precision. Tankabai is a really fun way of doing business, selling commonplace products by entertaining and putting customers in a good mood through clever storytelling. I love it.

However, this would likely be actionable as fraud currently. This is because they are counted as yakuza. In my childhood, tekiya were in a completely different category from the yakuza, but since the passing of the Act on Prevention of Unjust Acts by Organized Crime Group Members in 1993, they have somehow been counted as part of the yakuza. The state strengthened the law and tried to hunt down the yakuza, while gang exclusion ordinances were enacted at the prefectural level to punish citizens who came into contact with the yakuza. Noboru Hirosue’s The Code of the Tekiya empirically describes how a former tekiya, who after quitting the business, ran a construction business, was excluded from the business as a gang-related person under pressure from the client. Hirosue’s description is presented as a problem that is happening today. He also asserts that tekiya are not gangsters.

I cannot help but notice the concurrent nature of this process of tekiya elimination with the abolition of the state’s Dowa project, the betrayal of those who pretended to be on the side of the Buraku Liberation Movement, and the campaign by Mark Ramseyer in 2018 to eliminate the Buraku through his campaign to associate Buraku with criminal gangs. I have written before that employees of security companies recognize and act upon Buraku as targets of social security surveillance, and I recalled that interview from 2006. I believe that violence of episteme is at work in the exclusion of the tekiya. This can be seen in the research stance of Hiroaki Iwai. His Structure of Pathological Groups is unique in its meticulous research, but I believe there was a serious problem in recognizing both the yakuza and tekiya as socially pathological groups. I can state categorically that the tekiya is not the gang, nor are they a pathological group, referring to Hirosue’s book. Just as the relational theory of academism and the essentialist perception of the Buraku have distorted the image of the Buraku, one factor that has fostered an ideology that excludes the tekiya may also be found in the world of episteme.

By the way Hirosue’s book is the result of his own experience of life as a tekiya and his sincere approach to the life-history of the tekiya. In this sense, the story draws me in. I, however, would like to make one word of objection. That is the perception of the tekiya as a body of the ‘underworld’. Hirosue lets the existence of the tekiya’s slang speak for itself. Slang is a part of many jobs. I remember that carpenters, barbers, taxi drivers, and other artisan or merchant worlds have their own slang. Jazzmen in the US liked to use ‘Pig Latin.’ Japanese jazzmen also imitated the US jazzmen and made conversations with upside down terms. Jazz is zūja, and base is sūbē.

I believe that society does not exist in dichotomy of world and ‘underworld.’ Using the term ‘underworld’, we imagine something ‘underworld’ as something that has nothing to do with the ‘law-abiding society.’ Of course, the tekiya world as a substance exists. The tekiya described by Hirosue is a part of ‘civil society’ and work in the family business. Some are humane, ethical and caring. And, as a phenomenon that can also be seen in ordinary citizens, they get into gambling. In short, it is hard to draw hard. Everybody knows that ‘law-abiding society’ has many malefactors who are feared by the malefactors of the ‘underworld.’