Police banned this yakuza initiation ritual

Anatomy of a blood-bonding rite

Longtime readers will know that I believe rituals to be of great importance.

Rituals are important.

The individual who participates in ritual transcends themselves. For a time, they step beyond their individuation into a universal form.

As we write ourselves into these rituals, so they write themselves into us. The values that they represent are embodied as we adopt them and act them out.

— The sins of our fathers

Rituals address two key needs.

Our online discourse risks losing all significance if it never translates into action and real world effects. Rituals serve as the connective tissue between theory and action: as formalized and symbolic rites they reflect specific truths, while their physical enactment brings these truths into our embodied dimension.

This physicalization of truth serves a further purpose, which is to bolster conviction in the truth itself. If our actions are never shaped by our truth claims, this is an indicator that we may not truly believe at all. Over time, a lack of action undermines our conviction in the truth. Rituals begin to remedy this.

I am particularly interested in rituals which have survived to our present age and have played an important role in maintaining the integrity of outsider groups. This includes well known and widely practiced rituals, like prayer and sacramental participation.

Another focus has been initiation rituals, which provide a psychological and spiritual vector by which to dissolve young men’s commitment to our current godless existence and affirm their absolute commitment to a higher purpose.

In philosophical terms, initiation is equivalent to a basic change in existential condition; the novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation; he has become another.

— Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth

As such, I will conduct an anatomy of a ritual that I believe to have lessons for us: the yakuza sakazuki (盃) blood-bonding initiation ritual, portrayed beautifully and accurately in Tokyo Vice:

Sakazuki, the cup-exchange, is the most important ritual in the yakuza world. Although declining in frequency in recent years, it still most fully expresses the ‘spirit’ of the yakuza, the will and determination of the members to strengthen the bonds of the organization, and the complexity of the rank and function of relationship. It is hardly surprising that police repeatedly attempt to restrict the ritual, or ban it altogether.

— Jacob Raz, Insider Outsider: The Way of the Yakuza (in ‘Kyoto Journal’)