With Risk, Japanese City Takes On Once Accepted Fact of Life: Its Gangsters

KITAKYUSHU, Japan — Two years ago, the authorities in this gritty rust-belt region declared war on the yakuza, Japan’s entrenched organized crime syndicates. And that is exactly what they got.

Since this city and other local governments beefed up regulations to take on the yakuza — making it a criminal offense for companies and individuals to do business with them — there has been a death threat against Kitakyushu’s mayor and his family, hand grenades tossed at the homes of corporate executives and a construction company chairman gunned down in front of his wife.

The police say the attacks, and many other lesser threats and intimidation tactics, are the doing of the Kudokai, a gang with more than 650 members that officials call one of the most dangerous of Japan’s yakuza. The attacks have prompted the National Police Agency to propose giving law enforcement more powers to search and arrest gang members.

The yakuza remain a remarkably visible presence in Japan, as they have been for centuries. But law enforcement officials say the violence in Kitakyushu may prove a turning point, by shocking a public that has become increasingly fed up.

Any romantic aura that may have enveloped the gangsters in the past is falling away, the authorities say. They added that the Japanese increasingly see the yakuza simply as mobsters much like their counterparts in other countries, making money from drugs, gambling and extortion, particularly from their favorite target, Japan’s bloated construction industry.

Full Story (NY Times)

Assassination exposes Japan's underworld

(07-29) 04:00 PDT Nagasaki , Japan -- For all the trouble he had caused, Nagasaki gangster Tetsuya Shiroo had atoned by cutting off half a little finger and the tips of two others.

And things were not looking up.

The code of the yakuza, or organized crime syndicate, calls for troublesome members to perform the joint-by-joint amputations when they upset the bosses. Shiroo was an old-style gangster, a man who believed in the rituals.

But yakuza life was hard and getting harder for Shiroo. Everyone knew he had money troubles. His bosses expected him to kick about $3,000 a month their way in homage, and it was tough coming up with the cash in a city where business had been so bad for so long. Even worse, the once- lucrative option of skimming money from public-works projects was dying now that the Japanese government had turned off the geyser of public money.

BI bans strip-searches to find Yakuza tattoos

Philippine immigration officers have been ordered to stop forcing some Japanese visitors to disrobe as they try to flush out suspected members of Yakuza crime syndicates through their distinctive tattoos, the immigration chief said Thursday.

Marcelino Libanan ordered the new "no-touch" policy following complaints that many Japanese visitors sporting tattoos were being harassed by immigration personnel at the airport, a statement from the immigration department said.

Death penalty for yakuza stands

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld lower court decisions to hang a former yakuza for killing two other gangsters in 1997.

"The crime was systematic and pre-arranged, and brought about the gravest consequence. . . . A death sentence is inevitable," the presiding judge, Toyozo Ueda, said in handing down the ruling to Sumio Nakahara, 60.

2 million yen phone fraudster nabbed

Police arrested a yakuza who headed a telephone fraud ring Monday on suspicion of bilking an elderly woman out of 2 million yen last year.

The ring headed by Satoshi Nagasawa, 24, of no fixed address, allegedly telephoned the home of a 75-year-old woman in the city of Kagoshima last June and told her that her daughter, an elementary school teacher, injured one of her students through corporal punishment.

The hidden hell of yakuza families

04 July 2007 06:00

It is only when Shoko Tendo removes her tracksuit top that you appreciate why, even on a hot day, she prefers to remain covered up in public. Outwardly she is much like any thirty-something you would encounter on a Tokyo street. Her hair is of the dark-brown hue favoured by many Japanese women her age, her greeting is accompanied by a bow, and her voice seems to be pitched a little on the high side, a common affectation in the company of strangers. But her protective layer comes off to reveal stick-thin arms covered, from the wrists up, with a tattoo that winds its way to her chest and across her back, culminating, on her left shoulder, in the face of a Muromachi-era courtesan with breast exposed and a knife clenched between her teeth. It is an appropriately defiant image for Tendo and the most obvious sign that, as the daughter of a yakuza (mafia) boss, she hails from a section of Japanese society that most of her compatriots would rather did not exist. Her story, Yakuza Moon: Memoirs of a Gangster's Daughter, became a surprise bestseller in Japan in 2004, shining a light into a dark and little-understood corner of modern Japan.

Yakuza: Former gangster details Yamaguchi-gumi

TOKYO - Shinji Ishihara's story, as he tells it, starts with a murder.

It was the summer of 1970. Though the Yamaguchi-gumi was easily the biggest gangster syndicate in Japan, with tens of thousands of members, it was still trying to crack the huge Tokyo market for vice, which was tightly controlled by smaller but deeply entrenched gangs.

Ishihara was one of the first Yamaguchi-gumi bosses to try to break their monopoly. With several underlings, he rented a small apartment near a popular red-light district and started a series of scams aimed at cheating the competition out of its profits.

"We'd target other gangs," he recalled, "mainly because they had money and they weren't going to run off and complain to the police."

Often, he would deliberately arrange a violent confrontation with a local gang that would lead to a negotiated truce, and then an alliance. If that didn't work, he had an array of other options that usually had a common result — money in his pocket.

Blasts, gunshots at Fukuoka yakuza offices in apparent infighting

(Kyodo) _ Explosions and gunshots occurred Sunday night in Kurume, Fukuoka Prefecture, involving the Dojin-kai crime syndicate and infighting is suspected, police officials said Monday.

The police said that the ruckus, suspected to be infighting over the Dojin-kai leadership, took place at the headquarters and four offices of the crime organization.

The police collected dozens of empty cartridges apparently from a machine gun at the group's headquarters, and said they believe explosives were used at three of the four offices and a gun at the remaining office.

The police received calls from people who heard explosions and gunshots around the sites at about 11 p.m. Sunday. Nobody was injured.

Enryakuji temple leaders resign over yakuza service

OTSU--Under fire for allowing a yakuza memorial rite at Enryakuji--the head temple of the Tendai sect of Buddhism--the temple's entire leadership has stepped down.

Chief representative and priest Gyoun Imadegawa and his six deputies all resigned Thursday to take responsibility for permitting a Yamaguchi-gumi memorial service to be held April 21 at the temple's Amidado Hall on Mount Hieizan.

About 90 people associated with the nation's largest crime syndicate attended, many of them bosses of its direct affiliates.

Enryakuji had rejected the Shiga prefectural police's request a day earlier to call off the event, saying it was too big to cancel on such short notice.

Yakuza on the rise again in Japan

ELEANOR HALL: The power of Japan's mafia, the Yakuza is on the rise again, as the criminal gangs cash in on a rebounding economy.

After a decade and a half in the economic doldrums, Japan's property market is showing signs of movement.

But as the prices have risen so have acts of extortion and even murder.

And while police have arrested one Yakuza leader this month over a suspicious property deal, there are accusations that authorities are not doing enough to control the criminal gangs.

From Tokyo, Correspondent Shane McLeod reports.

SHANE MCLEOD: After 15 years in the economic doldrums, things may be finally looking up for Japan.

There's been sustained economic growth, and the corrosive deflation of property prices may finally be at an end.

But the optimistic outlook doesn't just apply to the economy.

For Japan's organised crime gangs, the Yakuza, the return of good times applies to them as well.

Raisuke Miyawaki is a former head of the National Police Agency's organised crime division.

RAISUKE MIYAWAKI: The Yakuza have always had a strong connection to the Japanese real estate business in performing with Jiage - obtaining separately owned properties through coercion, and joining with them into a single developed property.

SHANE MCLEOD: Mr Miyawaki is known as the man who labelled Japan's economic downturn as the 'yakuza recession'.

He pointed out that the bad times had been more prolonged than they might have otherwise been, because of Yakuza links to many of the bad debts being carried by Japan's banks.

Now, with the dark years apparently in the past, things are looking up, and looking like a Yakuza recovery.

RAISUKE MIYAWAKI: Everything the Yakuza do is so they can make money. And the real estate industry picks up. The Yakuza have more opportunity to provide services and to make more money. It's really quite simple. The Yakuza want money, and they can easily make it in the real estate world.

SHANE MCLEOD: There are already signs of the Yakuza's growing confidence in the property market.

Earlier this month police detained 10 men, including the head of a Yakuza gang, in an investigation of a suspicious property transaction in Tokyo.

Companies linked to the gang had taken control of the ownership of a 12-story building, around the same time as a real estate agent, whose company part owned the building, had been stabbed to death.

And it's not just Japanese companies that suffer harassment.

With foreign investors driving much of the boom in Japanese property, Mr Miyawaki gives the example of an American investment company that's been harassed by Yakuza-linked groups.

RAISUKE MIYAWAKI: If a Japanese company was investing in New York City and was being harassed by the Mafia, the US Government would put a stop to the harassment immediately. In Japan, however, nothing is done to control Yakuza extortion.

SHANE MCLEOD: Mr Miyawaki says part of the problem is a lack of will by Japan's politicians, some of whom rely on the same Yakuza groups to maintain political support.

Yakuza members arrested

This morning at 3 AM in Japan, four members of Yamaguchi-gumi’s top committee were arrested in relations to events surrounding the Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye 12/31/2003 Kobe Wing Stadium show. The arrests made were in relation to events concerning Mirko Cro Cop’s non-appearance on the event, and also attempts to stop Emelianenko Fedor from working the show.

Yamaguchi-gumi is Japan’s largest crime syndicate.