When he was in his mid-20s, the man worked as the chauffer for a gang boss in Tokyo. He received 700,000 yen ($6,300) a month. But he was expected to be at the beck and call of his boss at all times. In those days, the man would often have sushi or grilled beef dinners at restaurants. Working in the construction industry today, the man makes about 200,000 yen a month, so his dinners consist mainly of bento meals from convenience stores. But he says he does not mind the switch to the less luxurious fare. "Meals after a hard day of work are really delicious," he said. "I should have realized much earlier how great a normal life is."
The agency said there were about 78,600 gang members across Japan in 2010, but that fell to about a third over the span of a decade, to 25,900 in 2020. Between 2011 and 2020, about 5,900 gang members have left their gangs behind after receiving help from police and local organizations striving to drive out organized crime. However, it can be tough to find help once they leave gang life. Only about 210, or 3.5 percent of the total, have found jobs through the association set up to help such individuals return to a normal life.
The Mainichi Shimbun investigated the situation with the Kudo-kai, one of Japan's largest yakuza groups, which is based in the southwestern Japan prefecture of Fukuoka. In Fukuoka's Chuo Ward, a high-rise apartment building with over 100 apartments stands along a main road. One of these apartments is used as the office of a gang operating under the Kudo-kai, which is headquartered in the Fukuoka Prefecture city of Kitakyushu. Looking at housing registry records, ownership of the apartment was transferred to a business in the city of Fukuoka about 20 years ago. A senior member of the Kudo-kai was listed as a director of the company. Fukuoka Prefectural Police recognize the apartment as an office affiliated with the Kudo-kai. When a Mainichi Shimbun reporter talked to people living in the building, most of them gave responses such as "I've never seen a gang member," and "there's no interaction between residents amid the coronavirus crisis, so I don't know about that." According to one investigative official, there are many days when there are no gang members present in the daytime, so in the event of a criminal investigation, the group may be contacted to come and unlock it. There are believed to be about 100 gang offices in Fukuoka Prefecture, and one investigation official divulged, "Gang offices in Fukuoka are often in one apartment, and there are quite a few offices that forward calls."
The National Police Agency in February provided written guidelines to prefectural police departments on procedures to enable former gangsters, who have severed all ties with organized crime, to open bank accounts. The NPA, through the Financial Services Agency, also notified financial institutions, from megabanks to community banks, about the assistance measure for former mobsters. Lacking a bank account hampers the social reintegration of former gangsters because, for example, they have difficulties receiving automatic deposits of their wages. The NPA's move is intended to encourage as many gangsters as possible to quit their yakuza groups and get reintegrated into society. "It is a key element of anti-gang measures to allow those who have left yakuza groups for good to open their own bank accounts," a senior police officier said. "We hope to work steadily and do whatever we can do as a police force." The decision on opening accounts is ultimately up to financial institutions, which have their own anti-gang provisions.
The Anegasaki-kai was regarded as a leading ticket scalper in Tokyo as it monopolized the business in the capital. The group also made a handsome profit running stalls at summer festivals, the sources added. For well over a decade, the group would "hire" part-timers to buy up tickets in bulk for concerts featuring prominent live acts or sports events, such as professional baseball games, a source close to another crime syndicate said. This activity was its main source of funds. The Anegasaki-kai prospered by reselling those tickets at inflated prices to diehard fans near the event venues. However, the group's membership plummeted from about 700 in 2003 to 85 or so at the end of 2021.
They all should go into politics , seems to be where all the money is made nowdays , LOL.
The managers of three restaurant and sex establishments in Tokyo found themselves on the wrong side of the law for paying protection money to a local yakuza gang that operates in the busy Kanda commercial district of the capital. [...] Aside from the three outlets, several other stores in Kanda are known to have offered mikajimeryo as well. Officers at the Kanda Police Station estimated the three managers paid a combined total of 720,000 yen ($5,000) in mikajimeryo to a senior member of a gang affiliated with the Sumiyoshi-kai syndicate between October 2019 and January of this year. The gang member has already been indicted for extorting protection money from the operators in breach of the ordinance. The MPD in March arrested the senior member and three others linked to the same group in a separate case of extortion over a five-year period from an "izakaya" pub operator. Investigations revealed the gang coerced more than 10 outlets located around JR Kanda Station that included an izakaya and a hostess bar to pay mikajimeryo over the course of 10 years or so.
The [bar] manager knew that paying protection money was wrong as it brought no discernable benefit to his establishment. But he feared that his staff and customers would be assaulted and the bar's reputation undermined. "My predecessor and all the others paid protection money," the manager said. "I simply viewed the payments as a necessary expenditure like utility expenses in order to dodge risks." He did not bother to consult with the police, saying, "It is impossible for the police to protect us day and night." Looking back on those days, he said, "The idea of sharing the problem with the police never crossed my mind."
The yakuza is dominated by men and leaves only informal roles to women. Typically a woman involved with the yakuza might be an anesan, a boss' wife who takes care of young affiliates and mediates between them and her husband. Wives and partners of the members support the group in a peripheral way. Some get involved to the extent that they manage yakuza-owned clubs or deal drugs. When I interviewed Nishimura recently as part of my research, she told me that when she had become involved with the yakuza at 20, she took up both roles. But she went one step further – Nishimura is the only woman who has ever partaken in the sakazuki ceremony of exchanging sake cups. This is the ritual that confirms formal affiliation with a yakuza group.
"It was such a relief to see firsthand that we had finally come this far," said a resident as she recalled hearing that Nomura had finally been arrested. That was on Sept. 11, 2014. The gang's propensity for violence earned it the special designation of the most dangerous yakuza group in Japan. In the woman's view, Kudo-kai was "too ferocious to be merely called a gang." "Kudo-kai was more of a terrorist group," she said. "But this was not fully understood at that time, which is why not everybody was eager (to fight the yakuza)." The woman was working as a hostess at a nightclub in the city's Kokura-Kita Ward in August 2003 when a Kudo-kai member lobbed a grenade into the establishment, injuring 12 individuals, including her. The club, which has since closed, was run by a man who spearheaded a campaign against Kudo-kai. Even after the audacious attack, mobsters from Kudo-kai openly roamed the streets of Kita-Kyushu at night. The woman relocated to another club nearby, only for the same gangster to show up and sit next to her at her new workplace. In April 2012, a former police inspector who had headed investigations into Kudo-kai was gunned down on the street and seriously wounded.
It is in the process of selling its headquarters in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward, according to investigative sources. But police are still not sure where the gang plans to set up its new base. The NPA said Sumiyoshi-kai has about 3,200 members on its payroll as well as others who engage in all sorts of criminal activity although they are not full-fledged members. In November 2023, the Tokyo Metropolitan Public Safety Commission designated the Shinjuku condominium now on sale as the Sumiyoshi-kai headquarters. In June 2024, the Tokyo District Court, acting on a request from the local neighborhood association, issued a temporary injunction banning use of the condo as the gang's headquarters. As of August, the gang was in the process of moving out of the office, investigative sources. However, it has not been completely cleared because the gang could not find a moving company willing to remove large items, such as desks.
Maybe they went on to become the leaders of China, Russia and the USABack in the early 70's , Yakuza members started coming into the bar where I worked. Most just had their pinky finger missing , but a few had several missing. Almost all of them carried a knife they liked to show off. I guess we didn't impress them as after a few weeks they all disappeared.
In August 2015, some gangs of the Yamaguchi-gumi left the group and formed Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi. The split is said to have been caused by strong dissatisfaction with the management of the Yamaguchi-gumi, which was centered around the Kodo-kai. Kodo-kai, based in Nagoya, is the organization that Yamaguchi-gumi's leader Kenichi Shinoda, who is also known as Shinobu Tsukasa, originated from. Violent conflicts broke out immediately after the split, resulting in deaths and injuries for members of both groups. In January 2020, both groups were designated as dangerous criminal organizations based on the anti-organized crime law.
Among those arrested was Kajiro Shirai, 51, who officers identified as a member of the Chinese Dragon gang – a group largely composed of descendants of Japanese nationals who were left in China after World War II and later repatriated. Also detained was Kazuyuki Tajima, 53, who police described as a senior member of the Sumiyoshi-kai, one of Japan's largest yakuza syndicates.
Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan and an authority on the nation's underworld groups, said the Japanese authorities' crackdown on yakuza had dramatically cut into their profits and hit recruitment. The only way for them to survive, he said, was to form new alliances and diversify their operations. "These groups are joining forces in order to expand into the international drug trade," Adelstein told This Week in Asia. "The 14K triad controls methamphetamine routes in Southeast Asia and tying up with the Sumiyoshi-kai will give them access to overseas drug supply chains." According to Adelstein, a second opportunity lies in money laundering through the booming tourism and property sectors. "The boom in Chinese tourists coming to Japan has created channels to launder cash via duty-free shops and property deals," he said. With the 14K known to have expertise in cybercrime and the Sumiyoshi-kai's ability to provide "local infrastructure" in Japan, Adelstein said both groups together "are capable of conducting phishing scams and cryptocurrency fraud, both crimes that are rising sharply in Japan".
A total of five individuals, including senior figures from organized crime groups, have been arrested on suspicion of reserving a hotel room without disclosing their ties to criminal organizations. Authorities believe the site was used to conduct an alliance ceremony between a Japanese gang and the Hong Kong-based mafia group known as 14K. Kazuaki Tajima, 53, identified as a top leader in the Sumiyoshi-kai syndicate, and Utaro Shirai, 53, a senior figure in the quasi-gang group "Chinese Dragon", allegedly concealed their gang affiliations when booking a hotel in Yamanashi Prefecture two years ago. Police suspect that during the hotel stay, Tajima participated in a ritual known as sakazuki-goto—a sake-sharing ceremony signifying a formal alliance—with members of the 14K mafia, mediated by Shirai and others.
If you were going to summarise the life (and death) of Tadamasa Goto, one of the most ruthless yakuza (gangsters) in Japan, the best word would be "不愉快" (fuyukai). It literally means "unpleasant". It may seem a benign word for a man Japanese police thought was responsible for countless crimes and several murders. He was one of the most famous living yakuza in Japan, but not the most typical. Typical yakuza have, at the very least, a rudimentary sense of honour.