Yakuza alive, well and still kicking in Japan

Originally published by Asia Times

This is the first of a five part series on the yakuza’s still wide reach in Japan

In recent years, foreign reporters in Tokyo have written about the decline of Japanese organized crime – the yakuza – owing to the passage of new anti-yakuza regulations. They’ve predicted the eventual fading away of the country’s unique criminal subculture.

It’s true that those rules prohibiting all dealings providing financial benefit to organized crime have inconvenienced some gangsters at the bottom of the yakuza pyramid and reduced the numbers of formal yakuza members.

However, organized crime writ large remains well entrenched in Japan, as many yakuza have simply gone underground – and it is a serious problem.

Admittedly, serious means different things to different people. Yet if one considers Japan’s well-funded underworld groups operating largely unchecked in the nation’s economy and financial world – and how yakuza financial resources have strengthened organized crime’s already strong political influence – this seems to meet the definition of serious.

Given the extent of organized crime involvement in Japanese finance, politics, bureaucracy and legitimate commerce, one might even consider Japan the G7’s version of Russia –although with less violence.

Many Westerners and even the US government have never really understood the yakuza.

They too often imagine the stereotype of curly-haired louts with tattoos and missing fingers, making money from drugs, prostitution, extortion, illegal gambling and loan sharking. All in all, a lurid and exotic part of Japanese society, but harmless in the grand scheme of things.

This has always been an oversimplification, especially over the past 25 years, as the yakuza became a permanent and expanding fixture in the legitimate Japanese economy, including the upper reaches of the financial industry.

To understand the scale of yakuza influence and why it matters, one must look beyond the punch-permed street thugs. At the other end of the yakuza spectrum, there is a different type of yakuza (so-called keizai or, “economic” yakuza) operating in another universe and posing far more risk but receiving less attention.

Based on over two decades’ researching the yakuza, I propose to tell you about organized crime’s deep, ongoing influence in today’s Japan and – as importantly – why it matters.

Click HERE to read more.