This chapter provides a political-sociological study of the authoritarian police tradition in postwar Japan through an analysis of the organizational change, career paths, and retirement patterns of elite police bureaucracy. It assesses the organizational impact of the sweeping democratization reforms of the police bureaucracy implemented during the US Occupation, as it also pays attention to the persistence and revival of some important institutional and cultural legacies of the prewar police in spite of the regime change. The evolving institutional ties of the police bureaucracy with other state institutions, political parties, and socioeconomic actors are analyzed throughout the era of the political contestation that followed in the 1960s and 1970s, the neoliberal turn of politics and economy in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally, the renewed polarization of politics and society since the 2000s to date.