The Bosozoku: Classics on the bad path

Classics on the bad path

The 1% biker clubs, such as Angels, Satudarah etc. are motorcycle clubs that you do not want to belong to if you have to compensate if you have no trauma. But that those people have been busy with motorcycles since their inception, you can tell them that.

The De Bosozoku

Japan also knew that kind of 'outlaw bikers' in imitation of the Angels: De Bosozoku ("violent running tribe") was a Japanese subculture in the bad motorcycle club and gang world. The phenomenon first appeared in the fifties. ^{The members were men from the lower social class with resentment and an urge to apply.} The name bosozoku was only invented by the media in the early 1970s. These gangs were located in major metropolitan areas such as Osaka and Tokyo. Most of the members were young people under the age of twenty (you are not yet mature in Japan under the 20). After their twentieth birthday, they often became professional criminals or dissatisfied family members. Their occupation consisted mainly of annoying handling in clothing that seems to come from cartoons plus violence among themselves and towards others. .A piece of emancipation in patriarchal Japan was that more and more female members came, and even completely female gangs emerged.

Bosozoku style

Bosozoku was often concerned with customizing and tuning (and often illegal in Japan) motorcycles and cars, whereby making as much noise as possible seemed to be the starting point. The modifications were generally useless and freakish. The typical bosozoku engine was usually a light to medium-weight ordinary Japanese engine, pimped with the mixed elements of the American chopper style and British café racers. The whole was usually sprayed in cheering colors and provided with motifs such as flames or the rising sun (a reference to the club's own kamikaze row style). Stickers and flags with the Rising Sun with the logo or the symbols of the gangs are also characteristic of the external festivities. Think: "Japanese cartoons".

And that they were not riding on Harleys, but mostly on 400 cc motorcycles, that was a matter of Japanese legislation on cylinder contents in the home market. The Bosos were no less annoying.

At the end of the 1990s, new legislation and the economic crisis largely broke the phenomenon. What remains now is a lifestyle cult-like phenomenon and 'Bosozuku light'; members on scooters.

And they wear helmets nowadays ...

When are we going to see the first Honda CB 400 N built in Bosozuku style here?
We do not know.