MOST SCHOLARLY HISTORIES are revisionist, with some arguing for big changes in our understanding, others for modest ones. This study of violence in modern Japan's political life belongs in the latter category, but the revision is important. Violence, says the Williams College professor, has not been episodic or peripheral, as most historians think; rather, it has been “a systemic and deeply rooted element of modern Japanese political life” (2). Marshalling an eclectic array of sources – journalistic reports and essays, memoirs and autobiographies, secondary analyses – she argues that from the 1850s through the 1950s, both left and (more often) right constantly utilized ruffians, zealots, “violence specialists” and yakuza to win elections, influencing democratic practices for both good and ill in the process.

The precipitators of violence varied across time. Early on, we see idealistic shishi (“men of spirit”) challenging the Tokugawa order, while bakuto or gamblers helped officials enforce order. In the 1880s and 1890s, thuggish sōshi (ruffians) were employed by people across the political spectrum. By the early 1900s, the political parties had developed pressure groups (ingaidan) that hired their own sōshi to intimidate and corral voters. In the 1920s, the political establishment began using yakuza elements and nationalist societies in draconian ways, to suppress both the left-wing and the labour movement, and to export imperialist ideologies abroad through tairoku rōnin (continental adventurers). And in the 1950s, a complex assortment of actors, left and right, brought violence into the Diet and out onto the streets.

Three themes dominate Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists. First is the enabling role played by a public that accepted violence as a natural part of politics. “The fluidity between the ruffianism of the streets and politics at the highest levels,” says Siniawer, “suggests there was little, if any, stigma or political cost to becoming … a violence specialist” (106). While she overlooks a number of popular condemnations of this violence – a 1914 case during a naval scandal, for example, when the press blasted Home Minister Hara Kei for sending his sōshi to beat up reporters – her argument is generally convincing, as is her observation that violence declined after the 1960s, when opinion leaders began to “hone in on violence as a way to discredit their opponents” (149).