Hello! Two different (native-speaker) Japanese teachers were surprised to hear students use 「親分」as “boss” instead of 上司（じょうし）. They separately told me (and my friend, who I heard about later) that 親分 is strictly for “gang boss”, not your own boss at work. The example sentences seem to reinforce this, but the vocabulary explanation does not mention this.
Does anyone know of 親分 being used except for criminals?
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… also, is this the right forum to post discussion of the Wanikani explanations and context sentences?..
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I’ve seen it in a novel before where a group of grade-schoolers was described as having an 親分子分の関係, but that’s still adjacent to the yakuza boss meaning and definitely not in line with 上司
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This just cracks me up. Imagine starting a job at a Japanese company and calling your boss “親分”. 
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A year ago, a made a little writeup about 親分: https://community.wanikani.com/t/leech-deepdive-1-an-adventure-with-%E8%A6%AA%E5%88%86/64315
It’s a fascinating word but I was also fooled by WK into thinking it meant the boss at your job. It’s not like we don’t call mafiosos “bosses”. It’s just it’s pretty far down the line of most common usage for that word. Hell, the video game notion of a “boss” is probably more common nowadays (Even though that usage comes from the crime boss usage)
I mostly think about this word as being more like “godfather” than “boss”. 親分 is literally father-like and it falls in line with a bunch of other related 分 words, 子分 as “underling”, 兄分 and 弟分 as sort of “sworn brother” and even 姉分 and 妹分 as “sworn sister” though some of these words aren’t super common.
Anyway I still think the default definition for this word should be “crime boss”, it’s just really misleading otherwise.
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The alternatives already are “kingpin”, “chief” and “head” if I’m not mistaken. It’s usually best to use the alternatives as a broader scope of nuance rather than just “alternatives.” There’s a lot of cases with WK where those give a better contextual pattern or nuance rather than just being another way to phrase the same thing. (Not always, and they definitely don’t do this enough)
I do agree that they should probably swap one of those around and make “Boss” a secondary. Otherwise, I was never really too confused by this. But that’s probably because I’d seen enough Japanese media to be familiar with the word by the time it came up for me.
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I think that the 親 kanji is a good hint too, I think it’s a similar concept as “godfather” in English. It would be a bit odd too have this kanji in a work context I suppose, although given how messed up the Japanese work culture can be, who knows…
Not completely related but I also encountered 親玉 to refer to a dungeon boss in a videogame.
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I have never heard it used without having at least Yakuza-ish connotations. I think Godfather is a good comparison - I guess you could use it to refer to a regular person in authority, but…
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Thanks for this, I passed this feedback on to the 親分… I mean, regular not-crime boss at the content team to see what they say.
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Hi! Is there any update on this? It still seems to be unchanged in WK.
Had I not stumbled on this thread, I would’ve unironically used 親分 to say “boss” without any shame lol
The description in the “Explanation” section does seem to cover this. At least that is what I got out of reading it.
We have changed the explanations in WaniKani since this was posted.
Previously, the explanation read:
Who is part parent to you? Your boss! They make it so you can take care of yourself by paying you, don’t they? They’ll break the legs of someone who crosses you. But they won’t help you get back to sleep after you have nightmares. So they’re only part like a parent.
The new explanation reads:
Who plays a parent part to you? Your boss or your leader!
親分 is an informal and sort of old-fashioned word for someone who’s in charge of close-knit groups, like in gangs or traditional trades such as carpentry and fishing. The 親分 is like a parent figure who takes care of the other members.
We also added the following words to the allow list:
Kingpin
Chief
Head
Crime Boss, Yakuza Boss, Gang Boss, Crime Leader, Yakuza Leader, Gang Leader,
Parent Figure
Guiding Figure
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Relevant Kaname
(at 13:55)