Engines of deviance: newspapers, traffic cops, and youth rebellion in 1970s Japan
Christopher Gerteis
Abstract
This article examines how during the 1970s, state, media, and research institutions transformed bōsōzoku – the contemporaneous label for cohorts of motorcycle-riding youth – into an object of governance. Between 1972 and 1979, national news media, police bureaucracies, and legislative authority aligned to transform scattered riding practices into a unified phenomenon. Drawing on police white papers, newspaper databases, and research archives, the article reconstructs the recognition infrastructure through which bōsōzoku moved from journalistic trope to legally actionable population. Preemptive authority did not arrive as a leap but formed the endpoint of a system that had already taught officials what to see, how to count, and when to intervene. Checklists, roadside predicates, and standardized forms aligned across organizations and persisted even as youth practices shifted. The anxiety surrounding bōsōzoku reflected not merely concerns about traffic safety but alarm at working-class youth visibly rejecting corporate-loyalty paradigms of Japan’s “enterprise society.”
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.