Japan’s yakuza gang wars
Facing a shrinking pot of spoils, five mafia syndicates are waging an unusually vicious gang war in the coastal prefecture of Fukuoka.
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Kenichi Shinoda, the boss of Japan’s largest ‘yakuza’ gang, the Yamaguchi-gumi, walks at Tokyo’s Shinagawa station to return to his his home in Kobe, western Japan on April 9, 2011 after he was released from a Tokyo prison after serving time since 2005. (Jiji Press/AFP/Getty Images)
KITAKYUSHU, Japan — Visibly nervous, the chairman of a local construction company asks that we lower our voices at the lunch table, and that his name be withheld from publication.
A few shady characters nearby are eavesdropping, he says. This neighborhood is the territory of one particularly violent faction of “yakuza,” the powerful criminal underworld of Japan.
Every month, bargaining with the mid-level mobsters and shakedowns have become draining tasks.
“The yakuza have a hand in all sorts of industries, and working with them is just a part of doing business in this city,” admits the executive, who himself was a mafia-connected negotiator for a construction company for almost 40 years.
But times are changing.
“We used to have a sort of harmony with these bosses,” he laments. “They were enforcers, protectors who asked for our money to smooth out permits and deals, but who kept the battles to themselves. Now they’re out of control.”
Facing a shrinking pot of spoils, five mafia syndicates are waging an unusually vicious gang war in the coastal prefecture of Fukuoka. It’s a rustbelt region on the southernmost island of Japan proper — known as Kyushu — which has the largest number of organized crime groups in the country, according to the government.
The fighting is sucking in police and, at times, innocents. Thugs have occasionally tossed hand grenades — known in yakuza parlance as “pineapples” — into their archenemies’ headquarters, and into the homes of corporate executives who have declined extortionist requests from organized crime.
Last year, the Fukuoka Prefecture Police even became the first in Japan to offer bounties of $1,200 to citizens who reported suspects in possession of the explosives.
The yakuza, who number about 5,000 in the prefecture, have also shown they’re willing to go after the officials who no longer tolerate their presence. The mayor of Kitakyushu and his family have received death threats, a motorbike gunman shot and wounded a retired detective, and gangsters gunned down the head of a construction company in front of his wife.
The attacks became more intense three years ago, when the local government declared war on the yakuza and passed a number of restrictions on them. The moves came alongside a growing body of national laws.
In late 2011, Japan passed the first laws completely outlawing payments to the yakuza. In Fukuoka, police have taken special measures to prevent members of certain gangs from gathering in groups of five or more in public; starting in June, they’ll be banned from entering some business districts.
In December, public safety commissions in Kyushu took the additional step of identifying the Kudo-kai as the only syndicate among five that is “particularly dangerous,” drawing on evidence that it is behind many of the grenade incidents. Two other organizations, the Dojin-kai and Kyushu-Seido-kai, were given a less restrictive ranking as “combative” that will be lifted in June.
It is a legal marker that gives law enforcement wider search and seizure powers. “This organized crime group, the Kudo-kai, is especially bad,” explains Tetsuya Nishida, a police commander in the organized crime division. “They don’t mind hurting civilians, and they go into construction companies and restaurants to get what they want.”
The Kudo-kai did not respond to a request for an interview sent by snail mail to their headquarters.
The Fukuoka gang war has erupted at a time when, in other areas of Japan, yakuza belligerence has subsided. For several years, the country’s three largest underworld organizations — including the massive Yamaguchi-gumi consisting of 55,000 members — have consolidated power and haven’t engaged in much open fighting, said Jake Adelstein, the author of “Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.”
In Kyushu, on the other hand, no single victor has emerged among the fractious foes. “Fierce competition makes for fierce fighting,” Adelstein said, drawing a comparison with the capital. “Tokyo gangsters don’t lob hand grenades at each other.”
Yet the mob maintains a potent and quiet reach in the Japanese business world, and experts are in disagreement over whether lawmakers will ever stamp out the yakuza completely. One in five companies admits to paying them off, reveals a November study by the National Police Agency, the organization that sets law enforcement policy.
Mob bosses also carry the backing of a titanic fan base. For years the yakuza were, and continue to be, revered by some as benevolent scofflaws who enforced a code of honor. They were seen as keeping the battles to themselves and avoiding civilians.
In the same way American pop culture finds romance in the stories of cowboys and pirates, the yakuza are glorified in fan magazines, comic books, and action films all over Japan.
But unlike the American underworld, the yakuza at times operate in the open without much thought to the eyes of police. The address of the Kudo-kai headquarters, a walled compound in Kitakyushu, is widely available on the internet, and the group sometimes offers interviews to journalists.
The National Police Agency acknowledges that it’ll have a hard time thanks to an amendment in the Japanese constitution that guarantees freedom of assembly. The restraint has become apparent in Fukuoka, where the Kudo-kai sued the prefectural police in January over the “dangerous” label. The group’s lawyer claims it infringes on their constitutional right to free expression.
Legal issues like these make Fukuoka residents doubt the effectiveness of striking the yakuza too hard.
“The police simply aren’t powerful enough,” says the construction executive. He thinks the mob presence will never go away, even if it is seeing a nationwide decline.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/japan/130502/yakuza-fukuoka-gang-wars
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/japan/130502/yakuza-fukuoka-gang-wars
giovedì 6 giugno 2013
Yakuza. Evolution PART I (ENG)
According to the report of the NPA, the Japanese National Police Agency, in 1988, there were 3197 active criminal groups, bōryokudan, for a total of 86,552 members. Of these members, 34,492 were, and probably still are, members of one of the four major unions of the Yakuza mafia: Yamaguchi-gumi, Sumiyoshi-kai, Matsuba-kai and Inagawa-kai. These main clan have had, unlike the other, a real increase in terms of affiliations and conquered territory.
One of the main features that makes the Yakuza organization almost invulnerable, equal to and in some ways superior to organizations such as the Cosa Nostra and the ‘Ndrangheta, is definitely its solid structure. Fundamental is the relationship oyabun-kobun (father-son) which is to be established between the head of the family and his subordinates. Since the XVIII century, the relationship between oyabun-kobun lays the foundation of the first social relations between master and apprentice, basic relationship not only to analyze the Yakuza as a whole but the entire Japanese society. This bond that is created, very often tends to create a sort of divination by apprentice against the senpai, master. The young student also entrust his life in the oyabun’s hands (head of the union mafia) and will do everything what you will need for his welfare and his “family”. The sociologist Hiroaki Iwai says that the kobun, in the struggles between rival gangs, is used as a shield on which always rely for survival and safety dell’oyabun, a kind of lightning rod of the Yakuza which will, among the many tasks the to protect his boss at all costs. We will assume for example the blame in the case of crimes committed by his boss or his superiors, so as to safeguard the integrity of Ikka (family) or will perform kamikaze actions against rivals. In return, the oyabun will take care of him and his “children.”
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Figura n° 1. Struttura della Yamaguchi-gumi, 1989. |
Once he joined the organization, the young kobun will go live in the home or in private accommodation of the clan, become his “family”, while that of origin, will be helped in the event of death of the young or arrest. This relationship of absolute loyalty to their leader has greatly influenced the entire japanese social web, by the army, with the family and of course to the underworld, especially since the XX century. Currently this link is perceived with less intensity in the country while, in reality criminal, continues to endure. A proverb is always in the head of a yakuza: “if the oyabun say that passage of a crow is white, everyone will agree, even if it will be black.”
http://www.orientalcrimeblog.com/2013/06/yakuza-evolution-part-i-eng.html
Yakuza magazine – for the well-read gangster
Yamaguchi-gumi Shinpo is the newly published official magazine of Japan’s most powerful crime syndicate
Justin McCurry in Tokyo
Kenichi Shinoda, boss of the Yamaguchi-gumi. Photograph: Jiji Press/AFP/Getty Images
Its pages are filled with haiku poetry, articles on the innocent pursuit of angling and entreaties to its readers to perform good works. It sounds like a humdrum church newsletter, but the Yamaguchi-gumi Shinpo is the newly published official magazine of Japan‘s most powerful crime syndicate.
The magazine, which is not publicly available, has reportedly been distributed among the group’s 27,700 regular members in a bid to raise morale amid tougher anti-gang laws and a slew of bad publicity surrounding the yakuza, Japan’s network of influential, and violent, underworld organisations.
The Yamaguchi-gumi, headquartered in the western port city of Kobe, is still the biggest and most feared yakuza group, despite losing 3,300 members last year, according to police.
The front page of the magazine, a professionally produced publication featuring the gang’s familiar diamond-shaped logo, carries a piece by its boss, Kenichi Shinoda, instructing younger members to observe traditional yakuza values, including loyalty and discipline.
The magazine’s publication, which was reported by the Japanese media, comes soon after an apparent end to a damaging seven-year turf war involving other yakuza groups on the southern island of Kyushu, in which innocent “civilians” were among the victims.
“The problems in Kyushu reminded people that the yakuza can be violent and disruptive,” said Jake Adelstein, an expert on the yakuza and author of Tokyo Vice, a memoir of his stint as a crime reporter in the Japanese capital.
“The magazine is the Yamaguchi-gumi’s attempt to show the public that it’s an old organisation that upholds traditional Japanese values; that its members are not a bunch of violent thugs like those guys down in Kyushu.
“It has sent the magazine only to regular members, but it knew that the details would leak out.”
In his column, Shinoda concedes that new anti-gang laws have made it harder for the group to make easy cash. Although membership of the yakuza is not illegal, the gangs’ activities are. They are deeply involved in extortion, payday lending, racketeering and blackmail, but have recently moved into white-collar crime, setting up front companies in an attempt to survive.
“They may feel that it has become harder to carry on with their activities under anti-mafia ordinances that bar them from opening new bank accounts and signing real estate contracts,” the Mainichi Shimbun quoted a police source as saying.
Pressure on yakuza finances intensified last year when the Obama administration said it would start freezing the Yamaguchi-gumi’s US assets and ban it from conducting business in the country. The move came after the US treasury department said the group was earning billions of dollars through drug dealing, human trafficking, money laundering and other cross-border activities.
Last year total membership of the yakuza stood at 62,300, down 7,100 from the previous year, according to the national police agency. The Yamaguchi-gumi accounts for about 40% of the total.
The magazine may not succeed in recruiting members, but it at least offers light relief to those already leading lives of crime. Along with senior members’ diaries of recent fishing trips, there is a section devoted to satirical haiku and pieces on the strategic board games of go and shogi.
Newly introduced penalties for individuals and firms that associate with crime groups have hit the once-thriving market in yakuza fanzines, and manga comics detailing the exploits of notorious gangsters have become far less visible on bookstore shelves, said Adelstein. “With yakuza PR fading, this magazine looks like an attempt to fill the gap,” he said.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/yakuza-magazine-yamaguchi-gumi-shinpo
Sunday, January 1, 2012
The Atlantic Wire: The Yakuza and the Nuclear Mafia
The article is written by Jake Adelstein, who has written about the yakuza (Japanese ‘mafia’) extensively in the past. I believe he was also the one who reported on one of the earliest and the most substantial disaster relief effort which was carried out by the yakuzas, who sent truckload after truckload of goods to the disaster-affected areas in Tohoku right after the earthquake/tsunami on March 11, 2011.
I have the second half of Tomohiko Suzuki‘s press conference report to post, but while you wait for that, here’s Jake Adelstein’s article.
From The Atlantic Wire (12/30/2011), emphasis is mine:
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the monolithic corporation that controls all electric power in Greater Tokyo, and runs the Fukushima Daichii nuclear plant that experienced a triple meltdown following the March 11 earthquake, is on the brink of nationalization according to Japanese government sources. The official reason is that the firm may not be able to handle the massive compensation payments it owes to victims of the meltdown without going bankrupt. Unofficially, the firm has such long-standing ties to anti-social forces, including the yakuza—that some members of the Diet, Japan’s national legislature, feel the firm is beyond salvation and needs to be taken over and cleaned up. A Japanese Senator with the Liberal Democratic Party stated on background, “TEPCO’s involvement with anti-social forces and their inability to filter them out of the work-place is a national security issue. It is one reason that increasingly in the Diet we are talking de facto nationalization of the company. Nuclear energy shouldn’t be in the hands of the yakuza. They’re gamblers and an intelligent person doesn’t want them to have atomic dice to play with.“
In June we reported that yakuza were working at the Fukushima nuclear power plant as cleanup crews and manual labor, but the post-meltdown yakuza ties were only the tip of the iceberg. This month, a new book was published, Yakuza and The Nuclear Industry: Diary of An Undercover Reporter Working at the Fukushima Plant (ヤクザと原発–福島第一潜入記–鈴木–智彦) in which a former yakuza fan magazine editor Tomohiko Suzuki reports on the nuclear business-industrial-political and media complex in Japan known as the “nuclear mafia” and Japan’s actual mafia: the yakuza. The book is already generating controversy and renewed examination of Japan’s “dark empire” and its ties to the underworld. It presents more solid pieces of evidence that Japan’s nuclear industry is a black hole of criminal malfeasance, incompetence, and corruption.
It is not that the industry ties to anti-social forces were previously unknown. Engineers who worked for the firm noted the practice dated of employing yakuza members at nuclear plants dates back to the 1990s. Police sources also recognize that yakuza having been supplying labor to the area for decades. In the Japanese underworld, the nuclear industry is the last refuge for those who have nowhere to go. One yakuza explains it as folk wisdom, “Otoko wa Genpatsu, Onna was Seifuzoku･男は原発、女は性風俗”–, in other words, “When a man is has to survive doing something, it’s the nuclear industry; for a woman, it’s the sex industry.”
The Fukushima plant is located in the turf of the Sumiyoshi-kai, which is the second largest yakuza group in Japan with roughly 12,000 members; it has a well-known office in Tokyo’s Ginza District and operates under the banner Hama Enterprise. One mid-level executive in the organization even defends the role of his members in the Fukushima disaster. “The accident isn’t our fault,” he said. “It’s TEPCO’s fault. We’ve always been a necessary evil in the work process. In fact, if some of our men hadn’t stayed to fight the meltdown, the situation would have been much worse. TEPCO employees and the Nuclear Industry Safety Agency inspectors mostly fled; we stood our ground.”
However, while the symbiotic relationship between TEPCO and the yakuza has existed for decades, the relationship is officially “unacceptable.” The controversy became so great after the accident that TEPCO pledged on July 19 to try to keep yakuza members from participating in the reconstruction of the power plant and related projects. They have been working with the Japanese National Police Agency (JNPA) to accomplish this but sources inside that agency are dubious as to whether there have been any real results. TEPCO officials met with the National Police Agency and 23 subcontractors in July and created a conference group on organized crimes issues according to government sources and they have met several times since. TEPCO explained at the time, “we want to people to widely know our exclusionary stance towards organized crime.”
According to TEPCO and police sources, since the reconstruction project has picked up speed, the number of workers has dramatically increased to several thousand. The JNPA has directed TEPCO from as early as June, to keep the yakuza out—although many of the subcontractors of the subcontractors are known yakuza front companies. Over 140 workers have been found to have used fake names when getting jobs doing reconstruction work and are presently unaccounted for. In reporting for Yakuza and the Nuclear Industry Tomohiko Suzuki was able to get into the reactor as a cleanup worker under false pretenses partly by using organized crime connections. According to Suzuki, three of the fabled “Fukushima Fifty” who stayed behind during the most dangerous days of high-level radiation leaks were local yakuza bosses and soldiers. He does not specify which groups they belonged to.
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When asked what were the major differences between the yakuza and TEPCO the same Senator paused for a minute. “The primary difference between TEPCO and the yakuza is they have different corporate logos.” He explained, “They both are essentially criminal organizations that place profits above the safety and welfare of the residents where they operate; they both exploit their workers. On the other hand, the yakuza may care more about what happens where they operate because many of them live there. For Tokyo Electric Power Company, Fukushima is just the equivalent of a parking lot.”
(The full article at the link.)
“[T]he yakuza may care more about what happens” – well, I’m not so sure. Maybe in an idealized version often depicted in the films and books, and in the minds of the yakuza themselves as their self-portrait. But what do I know. The writer probably know more about the Japanese underground than me.
I do think the Senator he quotes in the article is too harsh on TEPCO. Many in Japan know that the Police is in a close symbiotic relationship with them, and many thinks the politicians are worse than the yakuza when it comes to treating people. They are also well-known for ties with the yakuza themselves. For a LDP politician to criticize TEPCO’s yakuza ties is preposterous, and to say nuclear power is safer in the hands of politicians like himself than in the hands of TEPCO and the yakuza is a sheer nonsense. Instead of TEPCO, the national government would indirectly hire the yakuza and that somehow would be OK by him.
I think Tomohiko Suzuki mentioned the faction of the yakuza that dominates supplying the workers, but it was not Sumiyoshi-kai. (I’ll have to finish the post.)
Regarding the yakuza’s involvement in procuring (often “kidnapping” would be a better word) workers for the Fukushima I Nuke Plant “recovery”, NHK made an excellent documentary back in October (I think) that was aired at midnight. For every worker he sent to Fukushima, a pudgy yakuza guy with a fat gold chain was getting 1 million yen from a subcontractor 6th or 7th degrees removed from the original subcontractor to TEPCO. He said “life is good”.
As Adelstein points out as does Suzuki, it’s always been like this in the nuclear power industry in Japan. I wonder how it is in the other countries. How are the nuclear power plants maintained? By whom? Who recruits them?
(H/T John Noah)
http://ex-skf.blogspot.it/2012/01/atlantic-wire-yakuza-and-nuclear-mafia.html
TRIADS AND ORGANIZED CRIME IN CHINA … – Facts and Details
io e il “Il disastro” di Fukushima
http://www.controappuntoblog.org/2012/04/10/io-e-il-il-disastro-di-fukushima/