Meet the ‘yankii,’ the Japanese subculture that embraces American trashiness
What junior high school you went to means everything
This is the fourth article in our series on youth subcultures. Check out the installments on Zazous, Chongas, and Straight Edge.
After the chaos of World War II, Japanese society swung back to the country’s stereotypical uniformity. Except for the yankii, who openly rejected the rigidity of societal norms. It was a youth subculture based on rebellion and embracing of class distinctions. And it’s still around today.
Yankii began as a mostly working class and sometimes suburban youth movement that much of Japanese society still associates with juvenile delinquency. From adolescence, they embrace punkish rebellion and are often associated with Japan’s infamous motorcycle gangs, “speed tribes” known as bōsōzoku. To “respectable” Japanese society, they’re often seen the same way American coastal elites perceive “white trash” from the hinterlands.
The etymology of the term “yankii” (pronounced yahn-kee) is contested. Some call it a corruption of the American “yankee,” but most agree the group only loosely adopted the moniker following Japan’s first introduction to American G.I. culture — rock ’n’ roll music and army/navy surplus clothes. Author Ikuya Sato’s research points to a “general impression of vulgarity and gaudiness associated with Americans or American popular culture as a possible reason for the application of this term to a deviant sartorial style.”
Yankii often dye their hair red or blonde and, if associated with bōsōzoku gangs, as many from the Kansai region are, wear long jackets embroidered with kanji characters that signify their group names and mottos. More recently, yankii women wear modified school uniforms, or miniskirts and platforms. In general, members can be seen posing in the unko suwari position, also known as the “shit squat.” Writes Sato, the “pervasive tone of their gatherings is boredom and the vague anticipation of something that may happen” — the prevailing tone of disaffected youth the world over.
Yankii members tend to stay in tight-knit communities formed during middle school and maintained into adulthood. As they grew up in the late 1980s and early ’90s, yankii men occasionally entered construction and teen women had children and dropped out of high school — both stereotypes that persist today. The young yankii mothers — yan mama — were often ostracized by other mother groups and struggled to assimilate to their new identities as parents. Thus, magazines like Yan Mama Comic sprung up in the early 1990s to serve a growing need of yankii families. Within a year of publication, Yan Mama Comic had reached of circulation of 120,000, helping to bond socially isolated communities of young mothers.
Intrinsic to their isolation, yankii maintain strict social codes and customs. According to Sato’s sources, hairstyles play an important role in readiness to fight. A man who wears a tight perm “will take up the gauntlet at any time;” the style is seen as a sign of pride, and says, “I don’t want to be seen as a sissy.” When hanging out, yankii often aggressively stare at passersby. “What are you lookin’ at?” they demand, followed by, “What junior high did you graduate from?” or “How old are you?” It is shameful, an easy fight, for an older yankii to fight someone younger or from a different social clique like surfers and punks, who are considered more effeminate (hetare). Thus, although society deems yankii as delinquents, the group’s fighting code is organized around selective, limited violence.
The yankii cannot be discussed without mentioning a few overlapping counterculture groups. In certain regions, yankii often choose to take the bōsōzoku role. With its more focused and theatrical road-warrior lifestyle, bōsō is considered a step above hoodlum (gurentai), a more masculine, valorous role full of action and police chases. One ex-bōsō leader described the first time he saw a drive in Kyoto: “How can I say it? I felt that they were similar to me. My heart beat, beat so fast…I cried in my heart, ‘I want to be like that!’” Should yankii and bōsōzoku desire riskier, more dangerous pursuits, they may go on to become yakuza, members of the Japanese mafia.
Yankii communities are so proud and close-knit that many members never “grow out” of the lifestyle, part of the reason for the movement’s longevity. In a country known for myriad subcultures, yankii stand out for their relative consistency over time; it’s one reason the subculture still exists today.
As Kaori Shoji writes in The Japan Times, “On weekends they’ll pile into yankii Dad’s kaizosha (car specially customized with his own hands), rev up the engine and screech over to a freeway famiresu (the Japanese equivalent of a diner) for a jolly meal, while the rest of us who dutifully studied and went to college will gather to moan about the lack of dateable men, how we may never get married, and where we went wrong.”
