ive been thinking about how majima relates to the men around him and mad dog, and the thoughts need to go somewhere. yes, this is going to be about Gender. (content warning for discussion of sexual violence)
let's look at majima's role in the tojo. he is their attack dog, heavy hitter, and wild card. his reputation precedes him. he is literally called "shimano's mad dog", and he embraces the role and plays into it. what this does, in effect, is make people fear him *and* want to control him. they want to "leash" him. majima's entire existence is a challenge, that's how he carries himself, and that's how people perceive him. "tame me if you can" is the unspoken dare he throws out into every room he walks into.
as such, holding majima's "leash" is an extraordinary status symbol in the tojo. either by having majima respect you enough to willingly bow to you, or being strong enough to force him to do it regardless -- and i would actually argue there is no difference between those things as far as the clan is concerned. because majima only "respects" or "willingly bows to" strong men who can beat him in a fight anyway, as he loves to remind everyone (even though it's not entirely true)
he is so powerful and respected that his backing of a new chairman can sway the opinion of the majority of the clan. this is why kiryu asked him to support daigo as the new chairman, because no one took daigo seriously at the time. he hadn't earned the clan's respect yet. and what finally changes that? majima publicly losing to him in a fight.
but majima is in a really interesting position here, because while everyone wants to own and control him, that's exactly where his power *comes* from. he relies on his status as a wild animal that everyone wants to tame to *remain* in power. if people stopped wanting to control him, if he stopped being the "mad dog", he would also lose his power and authority. he relies on having people who want to "leash" him to avoid *being* leashed. he is a commodity, and his market value is at its highest when he is in demand. the higher his value, the fewer people can "afford" him -- afford holding his leash. this is simple economics to majima.
why *this* strategy, though? i think it's because majima understands something about his position relative to men, socially, that makes this the an effective way of navigating power relations for him. that is to say, he understands that his relative lack of power compared to them is *non-negotiable*. whatever it is about him that results in men treating him the way they do, he *cannot* change it. he knows this like he knows 2+2=4. he is not "one of the boys". and he might not understand the reason, but he's intimately familiar with the consequences: he will be used as a tool to further their ends, and have his agency and boundaries violated in the process.
so what he's doing is *willingly* becoming a tool to regain control over the situation via mad dog, just like he did with lord of the night. he has nothing to lose by doing so, because he's already being treated this way -- he's just trying to turn this into an advantage. he has no intention of letting anyone actually own him, hold his leash, so he becomes one of the highest ranking officers in one of the most powerful yakuza organizations. and as such, the only way his agency can be taken away from him is if someone outsmarts or physically overpowers him. for someone in majima's position, that is very difficult to do, and mad dog is HOW he achieves this.
i've talked about majima and sexual violence before, but i think the most relevant example of it is in yakuza 3, in this scene:
i highly recommend watching the whole scene, because the screenshots don't really do it justice, but look at the way his personal space is being invaded. look at the way his physical boundaries are being so *deliberately* violated. look at how fucking CREEPY hamazaki is, leaning in to whisper in his ear, dragging his hand across his shoulder as he leaves. it's genuinely uncomfortable to watch. the threat of physical violence is explicit: "just do it, or your head's the one that'll roll." the sexual harassment however is subtler, more sinister, and harder to prove, but felt just as strongly, both by the audience and majima. and majima does not so much as flinch. he barely even blinks. majima, the MAD DOG OF SHIMANO, the guy who is "too much for the tojo to handle", is just letting this happen. because he is forced to.
this scene is insane to me because it shows us that THIS is what's at stake for majima if he loses power. THIS is what he understands as a fundamental part of his reality -- that if he ever loses his power over other men, they will not just take his assets or kill him -- they will violate his body. majima has to become hard to kill to fulfill his obligation to saejima, but even harder to *manipulate* if he wants to protect his bodily autonomy.
but men specifically enjoy asserting their authority over majima, and he is consistently a target of their sadism. because they perceive him to be in constant *rejection* of their authority over him, so they want to "put him back in his place". this is the "challenge" i mentioned at the beginning. and his response is basically, "you cannot *have* me in a way that matters -- even if you violate my body, you cannot have my respect." because that's literally all majima has to bargain with. it's "you can force yourself on me, but i will never willingly bow to your authority." it's about pride, dignity, freedom of choice. these are the things that matter most to majima. if he can't choose what happens to him, he can choose how he feels about it -- and that *has* to matter. because without that, he has nothing.
i think this is not unrelated to the fact that majima is seen as an "other" by the men around him. but i won't go into that in this post. what i want to point out here is that, in trying to prevent this -- prevent being forced to bow to authorities he doesn't recognize -- majima is constantly *inviting* the violence that leads to it.
in trying to turn his status as an object (a tool, a weapon, something to be "owned" and controlled and used) into an advantage, he is constantly inviting people to try and leash him, as *part* of his strategy. and sometimes! it happens! it's an incredibly high-risk-high-reward gamble. but majima understands, and more importantly *accepts*, without any ifs, ands, or buts, that there is nothing he can do to become immune to this kind of violence. if there was, he would've done it decades ago. so he has to account for its possibility every step of the way -- whether consciously or not. and i think this is one of the most fundamental things that characterizes majima's relationship to men. his dynamic with men, men as a gender class, *revolves* around the fact that majima assumes men want to hurt him, that they are going to do it if he lets them, and that it's going to have a sexual element. it's *built* on this anxiety, which he is refusing to acknowledge.
the mad dog persona is, once again, both a solution and a cage for majima. while it enables him to navigate his social environment freely -- with more freedom than he would be able to without mad dog -- it also requires him to treat the men around him as enemies and not comrades. he feels he is uniquely vulnerable to harm in some way, but in trying to combat this, he is the first one to reinforce this vulnerability by acknowledging there is something to combat in the first place, and taking precautions. all the while denying any of this motivates or shapes his behavior in any way, because he cannot acknowledge his own victimhood.
and *he* is the one who feels alienated from men before they even have the chance to "other" him. he rejects them before they can reject him, and rejects himself on their behalf before they can. because he knows it's coming regardless. majima cannot and will never "fit in" with men, because how can you fit in with people you cannot tell apart from your abusers?
to sum up, "mad dog" is his solution to all of these things combined. he is setting himself up as an object AND as an unpredictable, unknowable, "uncanny" being. all of which are things that men *already* see him as. at the same time, he's making himself *valuable* to men (invaluable even, as shimano certainly seemed to think) as part of his survival strategy. he has to remain "in demand" as an instrument, a weapon, an object, to remain in power. he has to turn himself into a coveted status symbol. and it only cements his status as an outsider, but it's no big deal to majima, because to him, that's already a given.
his "strategy" here in navigating this power structure is one you would expect to see from people who are NOT in power. this is the narrative of a character who lives among men but is not seen as one of them, and is prevented from fully climbing the gender class ladder to truly *be" one of them. a character who does not benefit from the same privileges other men do, and is trying to leverage that fact to his advantage with the only means he perceives as available to him. which could mean nothing.
TLDR majima is the tojo's trophy wife. goodnight
(if you find this subject interesting, i would highly recommend this article about gender classes, or the longer updated version if you want to go more in depth. also recommend this article on the difference between objectification and dehumanization which addresses a few key concepts that are relevant to this post)
