Zoku

There was an interesting post on the meaning and history of the usage of the kanji "zoku" in Neomarxisme recently:

Anyone interested in the history of Japanese youth culture is already familiar with the word zoku (族). Essentially meaning “tribe,” the word has been used to mark off a certain subculture from the mainstream and other youth groups. The 1970s working-class motorcycle gangs that terrorized rural neighborhoods in kamizake jumpers were called the Boso-zoku (暴走族) — “The Reckless Tribe.” The late 1970s kung-fu dancers in Yoyogi Park became known as theTakenoko-zoku (竹の子族) — “The Bamboo Shoot Tribe,” in reference to their favorite clothing store, Boutique Takenoko (Boutique Bamboo Shoot).

Not every youth subculture has taken the zoku suffix: for example,Kogal/Kogyaru, Rollers, or the Shinjinrui (”New Breed”) of the 1980s. But the word zoku by itself has come to connote “subculture” in a generally anti-social form: zoku are not just new “consumer segments,” but wayward youth with values antithetical to mainstream society. Zoku feels like “tribe” in the sense that “good society” spied into the wilderness and discovered them in the midst of some jaw-dropping primitive behavior.¹

Surprisingly, however, this sense of zoku as “subculture” only dates from the post-war. As Mabuchi Kosuke explains in his book The Post-War History of the ‘Tribes’ 『「族」たちの戦後史』, the word fell into its usage in a somewhat roundabout way. The key lexical element for zoku’s derivation is not minzoku(民族, “ethnic group”) but the word kizoku (貴族), which means “noble” or “aristocrat.” (The word kazoku 華族 also basically means the same thing.) When Americans abolished Japan’s feudal aristocratic titles (Baron, Prince, etc.) and took hundreds of upper class families off the government payroll immediately following the war’s end, most of these families were forced to sell their property and belongings to generate a source of income. This organized impoverishment of the upper classes was best captured by author Dazai Osamuin his 1947 book The Setting Sun — Shayo 「斜陽」in Japanese. The post-war media found his book the best descriptor of the social phenomenon and started referring to this class of fallen aristocrats as the shayo-zoku (斜陽族). In this case, zoku was meant to reflect the aristocratic zoku, not the ethnic zoku. In other words, “socioeconomic class,” not “tribe.”