Bakuto (博徒) were itinerant gamblers active in Japan from the 18th century to the mid-20th century. They were one of two forerunners (the other being tekiya, or peddlers) to modern Japanese organized crime syndicates called yakuza.
Bakuto (博徒) were itinerant gamblers active in Japan from the 18th century to the mid-20th century. They were one of two forerunners (the other being tekiya, or peddlers) to modern Japanese organized crime syndicates called yakuza.
==History== Beginning around the 17th century, bakuto plied their trade in towns and highways in feudal Japan, playing traditional games such as hanafuda and dice. thumb|Example of elaborate tattooing During the Tokugawa shogunate, violent bakuto ikka (families) rose to power with the gambling spaces they ran, occasionally hired by local governments to gamble with laborers, winning back worker's earnings in exchange for a percentage. They had varying qualities of relationships with the villages in which they lived, often as well with the government, despite their connection.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).