The Yakuza - An Excerpt
Background
In Japan, organized crime and criminals come under the general heading of Yakuza. According to tradition, the name is derived from the worst possible score in a Japanese card game. It comes from Japan's counterpart to Black Jack, Oicho- Kabu. The general difference between the cardgames is that in Oicho- Kabu is that a winning total of the cards is 19 instead of 21. As you see, the sum of 8, 9 and 3, is 20, which is over in Oicho-Kabu. In a hand resulting in a score of 20, the worst possible score, a player's final score would be zero. Among the losing combinations, the phonetic sound of an 8-9-3 sequence is ya - ku - sa. It's from there the name, yakuza is derived... without worth to society. This doesn't mean that they have no use for the society, it means that the members are people that somehow do not fit in the society, in other words societies misfits.
The Yakuza were itinerant gamblers, peddlers, renegade warriors and roving bandits. They served shoguns and municipalities and their legend includes a distinct Robin Hood quality that recently emerged during the recent Kobe Earthquake. The Yamaguchi-gumi Yakuza clan quickly mobilized providing on the scene assistance to Kobe's earthquake victims long before the national government resolved to act. Yakuza form a central theme in Japan's popular culture and trace their origins to at least the 17th century. Therefore, among the world's criminal organizations the Yakuza are older than the Sicilian Mafia.
Yakuza strength rises and falls according to the tides of Japanese society, with estimates of core membership ranging from 80,000 to more than 110,000 in the years from 1945 to 1996. Some authorities believe Japan's National Police routinely undercount the Yakuza, numbering only those names found in confiscated membership rolls, or recorded from routine police intelligence reports. Like the Sicilian Mafia and other underworld organizations, the Yakuza are formed into families, but in Japan other distinctions emerge including that of the oyabun - kobun (father role - child role) relationship, between Yakuza chiefs and their underlings.
The Yakuza evolved into their current form late in the 19th-century under figures like Toyama Mitsuru. This son of a Samurai founded the Genyosha (Dark Ocean) Society, and later Toyama's top aide Ryohei Uchida founded the Amur River Society (Black Dragons). Like organized crime in other cultures, the Yakuza began to control construction labor and dockside labor, adding to traditional areas of enterprise in the vices, prostitution, gambling, liquor distribution, and entertainment. In the late 1960s or early 1970s the Yakuza moved into the lucrative narcotics trade and in recent years have stepped up their trade in firearms and other contraband. According to various sources, Yakuza have formed alliances and working relationships with Chinese Triads, Sicilian and American Mafia, Columbian drug cartels, Jamaican Posses, and assorted other criminal organizations throughout the world.
Because of their unique role in Japan's history and popular culture, and their usefulness in providing muscle to control labor unions, and providing anonymous services to the public for a variety of typical underworld products in vice and contraband accommodations between Yakuza, police, ultranationalists, government, political parties, and secret societies seems to be an accepted fact of life in Japan. Yakuza are active worldwide, wherever criminal enterprises flourish. The Yakuza have been very skillful in the employment of intermediaries and the absence of Japanese within a community does not mean an absence of Yakuza.
Kabuki-Mono
Yakuzas origin can be followed far back as to the year 1612, when men known as kabuki-mono (the crazy ones). Their odd clothing style, the distinct haircuts and bad behavior, longswords quickly got everybody's attention. They were known as masterless samurais, ronin, and several of them began to wander around in Japan as a band of robbers, plundering villages and small cities.
Machi-Yakko
Yakuza however not see kabuki-mono as their "ancestors" instead they feel that they are machi-yakko(City servant), Machi-yakko became the people's heroes, praised by the citizens for their help against kabuki-mono. The Machi-yakko were often weaker, far less trained and equipped than kabuki- mono. Therfore they were compared with England's Robin Hood. Kabuki-mono were known for their ruthless behavior and terrorizing all the surrounding areas. They were well known for stabbing people for pleasure. Kabukimono were gave their groups scary names and spoke in vulgar slang. The current yakuza did not evolve until about the middle of the 17th century. Its members were bakuto (gamblers) and tekiya (street vendors). Something that was remarkable were their loyalty to each other. They protected each other regardless even if it meant going against their own family.
Kabuki-mono generally came from shoguns or samurais whom during long peaceful times were forced into unemployment. Almost all yakuza have the same type of background poor, criminals and misfits. The Yakuza became a family for them. They got help with problems, got attention and could feel a certain saftey.
The Industrialization of Japan
When Japan began to industrialize, the yakuza followed Japan's deploying society. They began to recruit employees within the construction business and people working at the docksides. They began to check the rickshaw business. The gambling side of the Yakuza was at this time sorta put to the side, because the police were cracking down roughly on the bakuto- gangs. Tekiya on the contrary flowered and expanded since most of their activities were not considered illegal but more importantly not on the surface of society. Yakuza began to develop an interest for policy and started affiliations with certain political officials. They began to cooperate with the authorities in order to get certain contributions and to ease the harassment from the authorities. About up until the year 1925 Japan had an Emperor. But the course of events in the world was proving that a democratic rule was better than aristocratic, therefore Japan initiated a public vote for all men 1925. Within a few years the communist and socialist parties were found. Around then the prince, that became emperor 1926, existed however his staff of military and some other officials did not agreed with democracy. The economical depression at the end of 20th century created suspicion against the western worlds liberalism. They took advantage of this and different secret organizations were created that trained its members in warfare, languages, assassination, blackmail etc. The ultranationalism terror lasted on into the 1930s. They murdered two prime ministers, two finance ministers, attacked several politicians, and industrialist. The Yakuza supplied them with the muscles and men in order to help and train these underworld organization. This type of yakuza is called the unyoke (political right).
The Occupation Years
After WWII when the American troops occupied Japan they saw the yakuza as the biggest threat against their forces. They began to watch the yakuza's activities. The American troops rationed out food and as a result the black market flowered and made the gangs rich and powerful. It were during the occupations that a new sort of yakuza began to grow, gurentai (street hustler). They were for the most part involved in robbery and black market. Yakuza became influenced by the American gangster movies and began to dress in black suits with white shirts, black sunglasses and cropped hair. They became tougher and more violent, the sword became history, now it was firearms. It was about this time that not just gamblers and storekeepers became exposed to violence but also the ordinary person was becoming more of a victim. Between about the years of 1958 and 1963 the number of yakuza- members increased with over 150%, to 184,000 members, now are they well below that. There are an estimated 5,200 different gangs in Japan. Also during that time they began to mark out their territories and wars started between the gangs. It is believed that the wars between the gangs were settled by a man named Yoshio Kodama. Kodama was Japan's underworld counterpart to America's Al Capone.
The Yakuza Organization
For the yakuza it doesn't matter were you came from, which country or from which class of society you belonged to, you can become a member anyway. Yakuza takes care of the misfits in the society. Yakuza members can be youth that been abandoned by their parents, youths seeking refuge from the high pressures of school, refugees from Korea, China etc. The boss becomes their father and their comrades as brothers. The Yakuza offers not only companionship but also money, status, and authority. A part of a group were you feel useful and needed. There are no thresholds or requirements in order to become a member. But when you are inside strict obedience to the superiors is demanded. The yakuza sees himself, as Machi-yakko, the people's rescuer and helper. Far before any working courts existed in Japan the yakuza existed. If your clans chief couldn't or wouldn't help resolve a dispute you could turn to the local yakuza for help. They solved the problem in return for money. The solution however was more brutal than if you had turned to the police. The yakuza structure exists in two types of yakuza, clan yakuza and freelance yakuza.
Freelance Yakuza
Freelancing yakuza are generally wanna be's yakuza that don't commit serious crimes and they are usually little more than a group of hustlers. They have however some difficulties surviving since the clan yakuza do not afford them any protection or assistance and generally doesn't allow them to operate within their territories. Clan yakuza can tip the police about crimes that the freelance yakuza commit. If the freelance yakuza earns to much money, the clan yakuza kills the freelancing yakuza or makes him disappear without a trace. The clan yakuza however have certain uses for a freelance yakuza. If the clan yakuza needs something done that they not want the clan to be associate with, they can turn to a freelancing yakuza that, for a sum of money, does the job for them. A freelance yakuza can also be used as a scapegoat for crimes. A freelancer is truly a genius if he can manage to begin his own clan and stay alive. Usually a freelance yakuza becomes a clan member unless he gets killed.
Clan Yakuza
The clan have been compared to the Sicilian mafias "family". The clan is structured much like a common family in traditional Japan. The clan has a hierarchy structure. The clans head chief is called Oyabun, that means Father. Beneath him he has his children(Wakashu) and brothers(Kyodai). These are not his real children and brothers, only designations of rank and position they have within the clan. All the members in the clan obey the Oyabun and in return he protects them against all dangers. Oyabun is almighty within the clan and his words is the law. All obey him without hesitation or concern for their own life. Beneath him, oyabun has an adviser that is called Saiko-komon and he has a staff of advocates, accountants, secretaries and advisers. The children's (Wakashu) boss called Waka gashira. He is number two in the clan after Oyabun, not in rank but in authority. He acts as a middleman to see that the oyabun's orders are being accomplished.
The children leaders over their own (sub) gangs and over time can move up in the structure. In that way the clan becomes a ramification with several sub families. The oyabun's "brothers" or Kyodai, boss is called Shatei gashira. Shatei gashira is of higher rank than Waka gashira but doesn't have more authority. "The Brothers" have their own "children" or "younger brothers"(Shatei). Shatei, has its own sub gangs etc. Everyone obeys its gangleader, but it's always the oyabun's word that counts.
Tattoos
It's usual within yakuza circuits to tattoo themselves, usually is it their clan's badges that they have all over their body. The origin of the yakuza tattoo comes from the Bakuto. They usually tattooed a black ring around the arm for each crime they committed. Finally it became a symbol of strength. It can take over 100 hours to do an entire back tattoo. The tattoo was to illustrate you were unwilling to accommodate yourself to societies rules and norms. Now is it to illustrate your clan affiliations.
Yubitsume
The manner comes originally from the Bakuto. If a gambler couldn't pay back a debt or something like that the persons tip of the little finger got cut off, which damage the hand and the person could not hold his sword as well as before. Also that way other people could see if a person haven't paid a debt, which could bring certain problems, since gambling always been prohibited in Japan. Yubitsume is when you cut of one of your fingers and send it to the Kumicho. This is done as an apology for disobedience. It can be done to atone for a wrongdoing but can also be done to spare one of your "children". When you have done something that your Kumicho dislikes you take a sharp item, cut off a fingertip, wrap it in paper and send it to the Kumicho and beg for his forgiveness. If it's the first time you cut off the little fingertip there after it becomes the next little finger and so on. Because of that you may see yakuza members that are without several of his fingers. This helps often at wrongdoings, but if you've done something all to seriously, as e.g betray the entire clan, there´s nothing that can help you from becoming a statistic.
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YAKUZA BOSS RETIRES
By Holland (regular poster at the Mobbed Up Forum)
Sources; The Japan times, Kyodo News, Mainichi Daily News and webpage THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN JAPAN.
The Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan's largest underworld gang has been thrown into chaos and uncertainty following leader Yoshinori Watanabe's announcement late 2004 that he would "take a break" from his responsibilities. On Nov. 12, the Supreme Court ruled that Watanabe was legally responsible for the actions of Yamaguchi-gumi mobsters. The lawsuit had been filed by the family of police sergeant Takeshi Fujitake who had been fatally shot by a mobster in 1995. Fujitake had been posted at a gang office in Kyoto to watch over a gang warfare that was heating up during August 1995. Two members of the Yamaguchi-gumi mistook Fujitake as a member of a yakuza gang connected to Aizu Kotetsu-kai and gunned him down in cold blood. The two are currently serving time for killing the 44-year-old officer. The Supreme Court ruling was a great surprise to gang members, some of whom got angry at Watanabe for not doing more to defend the syndicate.
Under the leadership of Yoshinori Watanabe Yamaguchi-gumi has grown into one of the world's most powerful criminal enterprises. In 1961, during a war with a rival gang, Watanabe was charged with weapons possession and served just over a year in prison. During the so-called Osaka gang wars in the mid-1970s, he was arrested once again for weapons possession. After his release, he continued to gain more power, becoming leader of Yamaken-gumi in 1982 and moving up the ranks within Yamaguchi-gumi. The Kobe-based Yamaken-gumi, a 7,000-member section, is the strongest and most influential among the gangs. The enactment of a law to crack down on organized crime in 1993 took a big bite out of the Yamaguchi-gumi's activities. But Watanabe worked on expanding traditional yakuza businesses like gambling, sex and drugs. He invested in the stock market and has expanded the empire to legitimate businesses as hospitals and chemical companies. The structure of the Yamaguchi-gumi is complex. Police estimated the total number of official members at about 18,000, with an unknown number of unofficial members. Watanabe is flanked by two advisers, Kazuo Nakanishi and Otomatsu Konishi, both of whom once challenged him for the leadership role. Below Watanabe are a group of 11 "Council" members. These are senior bosses, based mostly in the Kansai region, who set policy for Yamaguchi-gumi as a whole. The Council is headed by Saizou Kishimoto, head of Kishimoto-gumi and Yamaguchi-gumi's de facto second in command. A typical Japanese crime organization operates via a pyramid structure. Numerous groups exist under the umbrella of major crime syndicates, with each of the groups also having a number of subgroups. The 2004 Yamaguchi-gumi telephone directory, issued by the syndicate itself, lists 101 gangs. Monthly meetings bring together the gang bosses from around Japan who gather to hear the Council's decisions. Watanabe does not attend these meetings, sending his message through Kishimoto. While Kishimoto's announcement might focus on general matters, much of the concern the gang bosses have is related to practical matters like money.
Although the assassination of gangboss Masaru Takumi in August 1997 and subsequent shootings around the nation have kept the gangs in the headlines, compared with 15 or 20 years ago the yakuza in general are less visible. Masaru Takumi, considered by many to be Watanabe's heir apparent, was gunned down at a popular Kobe hotel during a gang war. Harutoshi Zaitsu, member of the Osaka-based Nakano-kai, one of the most notorious gangs, ordered the assassination. Two of the four shooters have given themselves up and expressed remorse for murdering an innocent dentist who was sitting nearby, but Harutoshi Zaitsu and the two other killers, Kiyoteru Toriyabara and Kouji Ishihara have been on the run. As a result of the assasination of Takumi many Nakano-kai members were arrested. Not only are Zaitsu, Toriyabara and Ishihara being hunted by the police, but members of the Takumi-gumi are also said to be seeking revenge for the killing. On the afternoon of April 20, 2002, a man rode his motorcycle up alongside the car in which gang boss Kenji Hirota was traveling. He pulled out a gun and shot several times into the front passenger side of the car, where the mobster was seated. The female driver of the car tried to speed away, but the the hitman kept up until he could pump one more shot into him before fleeing. The 54-year-old Hirota died of his wounds shortly after. Police believe the killing was part of the continued warfare between the Nakano-kai and its former parent organization Yamaguchi Gumi. Hirota, the reputed number two of the Nakano-kai, has been on the wanted list for some time in connection of an alleged golf-course development fraud. A mobster is arrested in July and he admits the assassination. In 2004 during a yakuza trial in Osaka, prosecutors said 66-year-old Takashi Takizawa, a senior boss of the Yamaguchi-gumi, knew his bodyguards were armed to protect themselves from attack by members of the Nakano-kai. Takizawa was grilled after he left a hotel in Osaka on Sept. 20, 1997, and the five mobsters with him were arrested. Takizawa and 62-year-old Kenichi Shinoda, another boss who was with Takizawa at the hotel, managed to flee and were placed on a wanted list. Shinoda surrendered himself to police in June 1998, while Takizawa, head of the Horyo-kai, was arrested in July 2001 after almost four years on the lam. Prosecutors had demanded a 10-year prison term, but the Osaka District Court dismissed the prosecutors claim. In a separate trial, Shinoda, head of the Kodo-kai, was sentenced to six years imprisonment in a Osaka High Court ruling that overturned a district court decision. The Kodo-kai is a Nagoya-based gang with about 2,000 members, Shinoda knew that his bodyguards were armed.
Those familiar with the gang says the Yamaguchi-gumi is placing more of a focus on Tokyo it has been since about 1991. Before, there was an unspoken agreement that the Yamaguchi-gumi would not open offices in the Metropolitan area, it now has some 750 members in 35 organizations. About 200 of these members belong to the Yamaken-gumi. It's March 15, 2003 and a group of tough-looking men in dark suits, are gathering for a Kanto-district meeting of the Yamaken-gumi. The meetings are a symbol of the Yamaguchi-gumi's increasing presence in Japan's capital as the gang shifts from its traditional Kansai-area base. Police estimate that over the past six years the gang's numbers have tripled in the Metropolitan area. The Yamaken-gumi and its leader, Kaneyoshi Kuwata, will play a large role in selecting an eventual successor to Watanabe. Kuwata, a 65-year-old boss was arrested in December 1997 on suspicion of violating weapons control laws. He was traveling in a convoy of cars from a bar in Tokyo's Roppongi red light district. Tokyo police searched all six cars in which the boss and 19 other mobsters were riding and found five handguns. Kuwata was sentenced to seven years imprisonment. Police statistics also support an increasing Yamaguchi-gumi presence in Tokyo. In November 2002 a Tokyo member of the Yamaken-gumi was shot dead outside a hotel near JR Tokyo Station. Although the background to the incident remains unclear, the person who replaced the victim was a higher-ranking member. At least 100 black-market moneylenders that can be traced back to the Yamaguchi-gumi have been uncovered.
The Osaka-based Hanabusa-gumi and its boss, Goro Hanabusa, are expected to play an influential role in the selection of a new don, watchers say. Hanabusa is considered a good friend of Watanabe. "The problem of the successor is serious," says one investigation official. It is not an orderly, formal transfer of authority that worries police and residents, but violent street battles between rival gangs fighting for power in the absence of a strong leader -- the same kind of strife that killed Masahisa Takenaka in 1985. The bosses of the Yamaguchi-gumi are getting old, and the younger members might see this as a good opportunity to challenge their elders.
On Friday June 29th, 2005 police said that Yamaguchi-gumi boss Yoshinori Watanabe stepped down and was replaced by his second-in-command Kenichi Shinoda. A source familiar with the Japanese underworld said Mr Watanabe was thought to be in poor health.
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GANGSTERISM IN ASIA
Yakuza
Japan's Criminal Underworld
David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro
CHAPTER TEN
OLD MARKETS AND NEW
At the height of the bubble economy, police in Chiba Prefecture, home to Tokyo's Narita International Airport, finally started keeping tabs on just how many yakuza were heading overseas. The officials identified 2,916 yakuza traveling abroad in 1988, and 3,696 during the first nine months of 1989. Those numbers are likely conservative, given the yakuza who undoubtedly slipped through uncounted. The newspaper Asahi reported that of some 87,000 yakuza in 1989, an estimated 10,000 went abroad. Half of the gangsters identified by Chiba police were headed to South Korea, followed by the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Saipan, and Guam. Only thirty-five said they were going to the United States, a likely response to tougher screening by U.S. Customs and Immigration officials. Asked why they were traveling abroad, most said they were tourists, traveling for golf, sex, gambling, and gun-firing practice. Chiba officials duly notified Japanese Customs to target the gangsters on their return home, yet oddly no notice went out to law enforcement overseas. The insular Japanese police opted not to alert foreign officials that several thousand gangsters were heading their way.
With scant help from Japanese authorities, the U.S. Customs Yakuza Documentation Center embarked on its own attempt to document the extent of yakuza travel overseas. During the early 1990s, working with Customs and Immigration agents in Australia and other nations, the YDC compiled a record of yakuza forays by copying passport pages of suspected gangsters and entering their visits into a database. The results were eye-opening. The team inspected passport stamps from nearly two hundred yakuza and associates largely between 1986 to 1993. The agents found hundreds of entries into twenty-one nations, ranging from Pacific Island nations to such distant locales as Turkey and India. The most popular ports of entry were, unsurprisingly, in East Asia, but many ventured to Australia, Western Europe, and North America. Some evidently had business in the Bahamas, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, and Mexico City; others, in Macao and Shanghai. At least eight U.S. cities were visited; not just the likely targets in Hawaii and the West Coast, but also New York, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, and Washington, D.C.
After years of denying that the yakuza had gone international, by 1990 the NPA had changed its tune. That year, an NPA official would tell an international police conference that the yakuza "are considered to be traveling abroad as an everyday affair." Three years later, the agency's annual White Paper acknowledged that yakuza were expanding overseas through arms and drug trafficking, real estate investment, and the sex trade. An NPA survey that year found that thirty-five Japanese companies in twelve nations were victims of harassment and shakedowns by yakuza and sokaiya, mostly in Southeast Asia but also in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Activities included demands for money, business cooperation, and hotel accommodations. Other intelligence reports placed the yakuza in the Northeast Asian fishing industry, in Southeast Asian development projects, and in golf course resorts in North America. Police found that the gangs were even expanding abroad through restaurants, moving into the training of Japanese chefs and directing their employment overseas. Yet another report placed them in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, extorting a pack of Korean businessmen. Backed by a strong yen and their gangs' ample resources, the yakuza's impact would be felt worldwide. But it was Japan's neighbors in East Asia that would feel the full brunt of their push overseas.
The Philippines: A Second Home
Since arriving with the sex tours of the 1970s, the yakuza have found the Philippines their home away from home in the tropics. Indeed, the islands have become a center of the Japanese mob's international operations, second only to South Korea. It is an exciting place for the younger, more aggressive yakuza. A former American colony, the Philippines is a hazy, humid, sweat-soaked archipelago of 7,000 islands centered around the more than 10 million residents of Metro Manila. English is widely spoken, and, with a developing economy and widespread corruption, it is a land where the dollar and the yen will go very far indeed.
Employing some well-honed techniques from Japan, the yakuza have made important political connections among those who rule over the Philippines' 80 million people. The gangs have bribed their way into a lucrative, long-term relationship with both local businessmen and bureaucrats. Through well-placed "gifts," the more enterprising yakuza have avoided jail as well as extradition, maintained dubious business ventures, and repeatedly cleared Customs with no questions asked.
By the mid-1980s, senior members of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Inagawakai, and Sumiyoshi-kai had opened luxurious offices in Makati, the so-called Wall Street of Manila, according to a confidential U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration report. Makati's complex of skyscrapers, malls, and international hotels, set alongside some of the city's worst slums, makes an ideal home to the import-export firms and travel agencies the yakuza prefer using as fronts. Other yakuza gangs have taken root as well. The Korean syndicate of Hisayuki Machii, according to press reports, acquired "coral reef exploration rights" in the country. But the gangs' biggest early investments were made in the city's Ermita district, the sleazy center of the Philippine sex trade. In 1982, the Times-Journal, a leading Manila daily, cited police officials as saying that at least thirty clubs and restaurants in the area were yakuza-owned. The businesses, with Filipino dummy owners, were said to serve as fronts for gunrunning, drug smuggling, and trafficking in women.
By the early 1980s, Manila newspapers were abuzz with sensational reports of yakuza activity. One daily even ran a huge box on "Spotting a Yakuza," complete with photos of a tattooed back and a hand sans pinkie. Another paper ran banner headlines, yakuza slave traders hunted. Manila police, meanwhile, drew a confession out of one resident yakuza who claimed that up to several hundred of his ilk were active in the Philippines at any given time. In 1988, a top Philippine official estimated that one hundred yakuza were active in the country, mostly around Manila.
Working with the increasingly sophisticated Filipino gangs, the yakuza expanded into gambling, fraud, and money laundering. But next to the sex trade, the Japanese gangs have prized the Philippines most as a base for smuggling operations. With thousands of islands, most of them undeveloped, the Philippines offers convenient locales for the yakuza's foul-smelling meth factories. Of even greater interest are handguns, which are illegal in Japan but abundant in the Philippines. The country became a major source of firepower for the yakuza, supplying thousands of handguns to Japan. Yakuza money even helped spark development of a cottage gunsmith industry around the seaside town of Danao, on the central island of Cebu. As many as 5,000 artisans worked in the region, making cheap knock-offs of Magnums, Uzis, Colts, and Berettas. The biggest market was domestic, with clients ranging from Communist and Muslim rebels to local warlords and crooks of various persuasions. But the yakuza were also frequent buyers. In 1988, Kyoto's Aizu Kotetsu syndicate even recruited five of the Filipino gunsmiths, who set up an underground factory in Japan. The operation lasted only two years before being raided by Japanese police. By then, though, the group had produced some 160 guns and earned the syndicate some $600,000.
A glimpse of the arms market came into world view in October 1986, when an explosion rocked the rear of a Thai Airways jet heading from Manila to Osaka. The blast sent the plane reeling into a steep dive, plummeting four miles in minutes and catapulting passengers about the cabin. More than one hundred people were injured before the plane made an emergency landing. Behind the blast, investigators found, was a Yamaguchigumi member returning from the Philippines with a smuggled hand grenade aboard. The yakuza had retreated to the toilet to wrap the U.S.-made grenade to smuggle it past Customs, police said, but he accidentally pulled the pin as the aircraft lunged through a pocket of turbulence.
Hand grenades and other assorted weaponry are available from crooked soldiers or on the black market in the Philippines. When Manila police raided the headquarters of one gunrunning ring, dubbed the "Manila Connection," they reportedly discovered machine guns, automatic rifles, fifty pistols, enough ammunition for a small siege, and various drugs. The mastermind of the gang, one Hiroaki Kumitomo, a thirty-one-year-old yakuza, had earlier been found dead in a parked car in suburban Manila. Police believed the murder was linked to an abortive drug deal. Several other yakuza have been found floating in the murky rivers of Manila following disputes with their own groups or Filipino partners. Indeed, many Filipinos on both sides of the law deeply resent the entry of Japanese gangsters into their homeland. At one point, yakuza were even targeted for execution by Philippine guerilla groups.
Sometimes the victims are innocent Japanese who got in the way of ill-fated scams. For years, the Philippines hosted a series of contract killings arranged by Japanese. During one spate from 1978 to 1981, police tied at least four Japanese homicides to murder-for-insurance schemes there. First, the gangs would intimidate businessmen in Japan into taking out huge insurance policies, listing the gang members as beneficiaries. Then, after somehow luring their victims to Manila, the yakuza hired Filipino assassins for as little as $2,500. After the fourth homicide of a visiting Japanese, authorities finally got wind of the scam, and in 1981 police and soldiers raided a training camp for the assassins in a town south of Manila. Officials seized eight suspects, targets, shells, and a small arsenal of handguns.
There is no shortage of rackets for yakuza in the Philippines. One alleged gangster, Kikyoki Ouki of Kobe, reportedly used his fluent Tagalog and a .38 caliber revolver to pose as a Philippine immigration agent while shaking down Japanese investors in Manila. Counterfeiters are another attraction of the Philippine underworld. Police in Japan have seized fake international driver's licenses, certification stamps used by the government, and Japanese 100-yen notes made in the Philippines. Still other attractions can be found in Cebu, with its resorts and direct flights to Japan. There, the yakuza can shop for guns and women and get needed rest and relaxation, too. In the early '90s, so many Japanese mobsters were frequenting the place that it prompted charges the gangs were bringing back the sex tours.
Philippine authorities have staged crackdowns over the years, giving an idea of the scope of yakuza activity there. Smuggling boats have been seized, fugitives tracked down, contraband seized, and mobsters deported. Between 1975 and 1983, according to press reports, police arrested and deported eighty-three yakuza suspects. Another crackdown in 1990–91 resulted in dozens of yakuza being arrested or deported. Among the crimes: drug dealing, illegal weapons possession, overstaying visas, traffic in women. Concerned by the influx of shady characters from Japan, in 1991 authorities established a yakuza profile, alerting immigration agents to look for flashy clothes, expensive jewelry, punch-perm haircuts, arrogant manners, severed pinkies, and striking tattoos. That year, more than one hundred yakuza were turned away. In one day, airport authorities refused entry to a visiting group of sixteen Japanese with missing fingers and tattoos. But pressure to allow in the Japanese was soon applied. A new immigration commissioner claimed the practice interfered with the civil rights of the visiting Japanese. But too many officials seemed more concerned with easy payoffs than civil liberties. "Corruption is rampant," explained one top immigration official, frustrated by the job. "Inspectors and top officials take bribes, while the airport police run a side business ‘escorting' visitors through the airport." The escorts conveniently bypass immigration inspectors.
Thailand: A Tropical Wild West
From Manila, it is a short plane ride to Bangkok, the teeming capital city and marketplace of Thailand. Like elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the yakuza were originally attracted to Bangkok by the sex trade. But Thailand is a bit like the Wild West set in the tropics, and, like the Philippines, it exerts a strong pull on the more adventurous Japanese gangsters. Since the 1950s, Thailand has been surrounded by armed conflict. With guerilla movements still in neighboring Burma, opium barons to the north, and rampant corruption throughout the nation, it is a land of opportunity for enterprising mobsters. Indeed, with its vast prostitution industry, lucrative arms traffic, and thriving drug trade, there seems no criminal need that Thailand cannot fill. A 1998 study by economists at Thailand's respected Chulalongkorn University estimated that six illegal activities—all tied to organized crime—earned between $8 and $13 billion annually, equivalent to 8 to 13 percent of the entire Thai gross national product. By far the largest was illegal gambling, followed by prostitution and drug trafficking, and then, roughly, arms trading, diesel oil smuggling, and trafficking in people. If other rackets are thrown in—illicit logging, trading in protected species, other smuggling—the amount could reach 20 percent of GNP, the scholars estimated.
By the early 1980s, the yakuza already were well ensconced in Bangkok. Operating out of first-class hotels, the gangsters moved into nightclubs, jewelry shops, and import-export firms, using them as fronts for smuggling guns and drugs. Some gang members showed interest in the heroin trade pouring out of the Golden Triangle, that no-man's land of opium barons and warlords that borders Burma, Laos, and Thailand. Far more attractive to the yakuza, it turned out, is the region's booming meth industry, also centered along the Thai-Burma border. But the yakuza find Thailand intriguing for much more than drugs. One operation, for example, involved a Saitama gang boss who ran a construction business and exported tractors to his Chinese customers in Thailand. The yakuza businessmen received his payment in guns, gold bars, jewels, and wristwatches. Others have moved so-kaiya-style operations to Bangkok, targeting Japanese firms. Stolen cars are another big scam, with Japanese crooks running stolen luxury vehicles to Thailand, selling them off or breaking them down in Thai "chop shops"— and then selling the parts back home. In 1994–95, police traced the export of as many as 130 stolen vehicles worth more than $5 million to a single gang in the Tokyo area. Other reports claim the gangs are moving stolen construction equipment—including earthmovers—out of Japan for sale in the region.
Another racket is smuggling endangered species and exotic animals. One ring shipped 110 lemurs, which the yakuza hoped to sell for some $2,000 each. One gun smuggler shipped handguns crammed into seven boxes of seventy poisonous snakes, including fifteen cobras and thirty chain vipers. Somehow the shipment cleared Japanese Customs, but police soon panicked the entire city of Hakone when they disclosed that the gangsters had dumped the snakes into a local river.
By 1990, at the height of the Bubble Economy, more than two hundred yakuza and associates were believed active in Thailand. Every major syndicate from Japan was represented, as was nearly every crime: kidnapping, drugs, extortion, prostitution. The gangs not only expanded in Bangkok, but moved to Chiang Mai and other cities. So influential were the yakuza that in 1993, when Japanese police held a seminar for their countrymen in Bangkok on how to deal with the gangs, more than 140 companies sent people.
Cracking down on the Japanese mob is not a high priority for Thai law enforcement, who have enough trouble policing themselves. Corruption reaches extraordinary levels among the police, who make as little as $200 per month. Many have come to count on payoffs and sexual favors from brothels, but often their criminal involvement is far more serious. High-ranking police have been implicated in big-time gambling, the drug trade, and human trafficking. Over a dozen top cops were implicated in the theft or cover-up of the theft of $20 million in Saudi royal jewels in 1989. Seven Thai cops were implicated in the murders of seven Asian visitors in the early 1990s, including a Japanese executive. The reason the yakuza presence is not larger in Thailand, quipped one scholar, is that they met a bigger mafia: the Bangkok police.
The Chinese Triads
In the mid-1970s, reports began filtering in to Japanese police of gang activity not just in Thailand and the Philippines, but throughout Southeast Asia. Yakuza members were sighted in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In most places, they have practiced a familiar pattern: the procurement of guns, drugs, and women; the investment and laundering of cash from Japan. As they have expanded, though, the yakuza have also had to learn a kind of underworld diplomacy, for their travels have introduced them to another, equally powerful set of criminal organizations: Chinese triad societies.
Triads are not the strict, hierarchical kind of crime families one sees in the yakuza or the Italian Mafia. At the street level, smaller triad gangs do tend toward a more close-knit structure, centered around a single leader, but the big triads are more like criminal brotherhoods—fraternal associations through which one receives support and protection. The differences were spelled out in hearings before the U.S. Congress in 1992, by a triad member whose past included heroin smuggling and work as a Hong Kong policeman:
"I was not required to pay any percentage of my profits to our leadership. The rules for the triads are that we do favors for each other, we protect each other, we assist each other and make introductions and engage in criminal activities together. But triads are not strict discipline organizations like the Italian mafia."
Indeed, the world of Chinese organized crime is a complex one. Not all triad members are gangsters, nor are all Chinese gangsters triad members. There are tongs, street gangs, drug rings, and alien smugglers, among others, which may involve crooks from more than one triad, or from none at all. But it is the big triad societies, based largely in Hong Kong, but also in Taiwan, China, and overseas, that are the most sophisticated and influential criminal organizations in the region.
The linkup of the Japanese mob with Chinese triads ranks among the more ominous results of the yakuza's move into East Asia. Bound by ethnicity and codes of silence, the triads exist in various forms in Hong Kong and Thailand—where they finance much of the world's heroin trade—and wherever most of the world's 30 million overseas Chinese have settled. The triads, in fact, comprise one of the key links in global organized crime today, with connections ranging from Sydney, Singapore, and San Francisco to Amsterdam, Yokohama, and New York. Their range of criminal activity rivals that of the yakuza: gambling, drugs, prostitution, counterfeiting, fraud, extortion, loan sharking, and smuggling of all sorts, as well as major interests in finance, construction, and the film and entertainment industries. As such, it is of no small importance that alliances have been struck, and business begun, between the yakuza and the triads—the largest criminal organizations of the world's largest continent.
The danger here is not of a monolithic Asian Mafia invading the West. Such ideas are at best misinformed. Differences in language, custom, and history ensure that no great mergers will occur within the Asian underworld; indeed, the varied groups are as likely to be fighting among themselves as cooperating. Nevertheless, alliances do occur between powerful crime syndicates, particularly in narcotics and human trafficking. More important, informal networks are created that become the basis for much of the criminal activity that crosses borders.
To understand the significance of the triads and their relationship to the yakuza, some history is in order. The Chinese gangs exhibit many of the same traits as their Japanese counterparts: ancient rituals, loyalty and secrecy, and a history dating back some three hundred years. The triads similarly have carried a Robin Hood image through the years and are romanticized in movies and television series. And, like the yakuza, the triads have a history of heavy political involvement. Some Chinese scholars trace Chinese secret societies, from which the triads arose, to as far back as 21 a.d. Most accounts, though, cite the year 1674 as the legendary beginning of the first triad society, when a group of Buddhist monks at a monastery in Fujian province became a rallying point against that nation's oppressive Manchu rulers. The monks refined a highly effective form of self-defense that came to be called kung fu, and though their cause was a lost one, they founded a set of secret societies that would endure for generations. Years later, when Sun Yat-sen established the Chinese Republic in 1911, the triads were there to help him. In his bid to control China, Sun's successor, Chiang Kai-shek, repeatedly turned to the triads, which by then had become largely a criminal force with a heavy involvement in the opium trade. Chiang, in fact, was himself a triad member, and relied so heavily on his underworld allies that they served as generals, soldiers, spies, businessmen, and hired thugs in his Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Nationalist Army.
Mao's 1949 victory spelled death for the triads in mainland China. Smugglers, dealers, and hardened crooks of all sorts were summarily rounded up and imprisoned; many were simply shot. The Communist takeover of China, it is generally agreed, ended the nation's long ordeal with opium addiction. It did not, however, end the triads. Wherever Chiang's Nationalist Army fled, the triads went along—to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and from the south of China into Burma, where they built up the Golden Triangle heroin trade.
Hong Kong already had a serious problem with triad societies, thanks in part to the Japanese. After Hong Kong fell to Japan during the war, the colony's new masters formed the cooperative triads into the Hing Ah Kee Kwa, the "Aid Asia Flourishing Association," and used them to help keep order. The Japanese shared with their collaborators the profits from prostitution and gambling, and allowed the gangs to control the opium trade in the colony. The occupying Japanese, like the British before them, relied heavily on opium addiction to keep the population docile.
After the war, the triads sank their roots deeper into Hong Kong (again in British hands), aided by the mass exodus of fellow members from the mainland. The British then banned opium in the colony, which immediately gave rise to a thriving black market and a steady source of income for postwar gangs. Soon the local triads were playing a central role in the world's narcotics trade and were expanding rapidly. By the 1980s, despite three decades of police crackdowns, Hong Kong's syndicates stood at 80,000 strong, with a solid core of professional criminals estimated at 12,000. By the late 1990s, Sun Yee On, the largest triad, claimed at least 30,000 members, rivaling the Yamaguchi-gumi.
Considering Hong Kong covers only 403 square miles and has a population of 6.7 million, the colony must have among the highest per capita number of gangsters on the face of the earth. With its heavy presence of Japanese business, trade, and tourism, Hong Kong is a natural for the yakuza. The tiny colony is at the same time one of the world's busiest ports, a leading financial center, and a magnet for visitors. While the tourists are, as always, a favorite target for vice, the companies have become a target for the sokaiya, who, unsatisfied with returns at home, have moved their unique brand of extortion abroad. More important to the gangs, though, is Hong Kong's central role in exporting meth from southern China and women from across Southeast Asia. As early as the mid-1970s, police say, the Inagawa-kai, Sumiyoshi-kai, and other syndicates had set up nightclubs and travel services in Hong Kong to facilitate their varied smuggling operations.
By 1980, police in Hong Kong were asking questions about the yakuza. A confidential report that year by the Royal Hong Kong Police's Interpol Bureau concluded that the Sumiyoshi-kai was most active in the colony, but warned of a serious lack of knowledge of yakuza activity. Citing the flood of Japanese visitors and money pouring into the colony, officials wrote: "It would be naive and shortsighted to assume that they are not active here.. . . We have seen the ubiquitous line of Japanese tourists being led dutifully to a particular shop. One wonders—just who is doing the leading?"
The yakuza may not have been leading the tours, but they found much in Hong Kong to keep them busy. Beginning in the early 1980s, the territory became a key trans-shipment point for methamphetamine, which by decade's end was available by the ton from southern China. Their key suppliers appear to be members of Hong Kong's infamous 14K triad, whose reach stretches from street gangs in San Francisco to drug kingpins in Amsterdam. The big triad is a favorite of the yakuza, supplying drugs, women, and whatever else their criminal brothers from Japan may desire. Another attraction for the Japanese mob is nearby Macao, the seedy gambling center plagued by bloody triad turf wars. Although crime is strictly a triad affair on Macao, police there report yakuza involvement in laundering money through the casinos, and in loan sharking and extortion.
The Taiwan Connection
After the Communist victory in China, the triads fled not only to Hong Kong and the Golden Triangle but also to Taiwan, although here they did not set up overtly criminal associations. By the 1970s, homegrown gangs had built themselves into formidable crime syndicates and had taken on the mantle of triad societies.
Taiwan, like Korea a Japanese colony for forty years, lies only seven hundred miles from the southern tip of Japan and holds a great attraction for the yakuza. This vibrant, modernized island of 22 million people served as one of the original sex tour destinations for Japan's male travelers, and continues to lure Japanese mobsters for various rackets. Taiwan became a favorite base for smuggling drugs, guns, and illegal aliens, and as a convenient hideout for fugitives. The gangs, meanwhile, invested heavily in real estate and various import-export companies, moving everything from carrots and bananas to folk art.
Unlike their counterparts in Thailand and Hong Kong, Taiwanese gang members handle only small amounts of heroin, but they moved heavily into meth production during the 1980s. Police believe the "Taiwan Connection" first began in 1975. Officials got an idea of the scope of the operation when in 1984 they uncovered a ring of smugglers that in a five-month period moved an estimated 163 kilograms from Taiwan into Japan, an amount worth $135 million. The gang's leading courier was alleged to be one Tan-credo Duluc, the ambassador to Taiwan from the Dominican Republic. The diplomat, according to Taiwanese officials, had made more than forty-eight trips out of Taiwan in the past year.
To engage in such large-scale smuggling, strong crime syndicates are needed, and these Taiwan has in abundance—with hundreds of different gangs, most of them grouped under a half-dozen major syndicates. The na-tion's leading triad is the powerful United Bamboo Gang, which counts some 10,000 members and associates. Along with the next-largest group, the Four Seas Gang, they control much of the nation's prostitution, gambling, and protection rackets. During their long rule over Taiwan, the Nationalist Chinese Party used the gangs for political purposes, much as they had in China. Through the 1970s, the gangs were employed to spy on and disrupt political opponents of Chiang Kai-shek and his son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo. Then, in 1984, the Taiwan Defense Ministry's Intelligence Bureau recruited leading Bamboo Gang members to silence Chinese American journalist Henry Liu, whom they murdered in his suburban garage outside San Francisco. Such official sponsorship backfired badly, discrediting the government and allowing the gangs to gain deep footholds in the entertainment and construction industries. As Taiwan democratized, the organized crime only grew worse. By the 1990s, the Taiwan mob had grown so powerful that a handful of anti-gang legislators required police protection. In 1996, Taiwan's justice minister alleged that the underworld had ties to many as 10 percent of the national legislature and 30 percent of local elected officials. Among the lawmakers allegedly mobbed up: Lo Fu-chu, the self-proclaimed "spiritual leader" of Taiwan's third-largest triad, the Heavenly Justice Alliance, who ironically won a seat on the national as-sembly's Justice Committee.
Such conditions were like putting out the welcome mat to the yakuza. So close did relations grow between Japanese and Taiwanese crime syndicates that the different gangs entered into formal alliances. United Bamboo members, for example, admit to having formed an important pact with the Yamaguchi-gumi. The May 1988 funeral of an underworld boss attracted not only members of Taiwan's United Bamboo Gang and other local gangs, but also representatives of the Yamaguchi-gumi and Sumiyoshi-kai. One Japanese syndicate sent twenty yakuza decked out in black suits. Again, in April 1993, some five hundred underworld figures from Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan gathered in Taipei to attend the lavish funeral of Liu Huanjung, a ranking Bamboo Gang member dubbed the "Cold-Faced Assassin." Liu had been executed by the state for his murder of five rival gangsters.
The Bamboo Gang is something of a pioneer in setting up overseas ventures. It has long had affiliated members in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, and in the early 1980s the syndicate hosted a lavish reception in Hong Kong to clinch a peace pact with the local triads. Using as a front its Churan United Sports Association, the Bamboo hierarchy sent out engraved dinner invitations proclaiming, "We are all members of a big family." Details are sketchy about this meeting of the mobs, but varied reports assert that in attendance were some 350 well-heeled triad leaders representing virtually every major Hong Kong group. Such gang parleys worry law enforcement officials, who see in them the possibility for endless sources of trouble. Growing international activity on the part of both Chinese and Japanese crime syndicates, coupled with the increasing sophistication of the gangs, means that new avenues of cooperation will emerge—new types of crimes, new investment scams, new smuggling routes. Some experienced lawmen, however, are cautious about how far-reaching the changes might be. "The alliances are mostly personal relationships," said a ranking Hong Kong police inspector with many years experience in combating the triads. "The links between organized crime groups in Asia depend on initiative— by the criminals, and by the police to stop them. It's not a static situation."
Initiative, unfortunately, is not lacking among Asia's great crime syndicates. And by the late 1980s, a great new opportunity appeared on radar screens of the region's mob bosses: the People's Republic of China was open for business. Both the triads and the yakuza responded in force.
China and the Yakuza
China's opening to the world in the 1980s brought more than just trade and industry; it ushered in levels of corruption and organized crime not seen since the pre-revolution days of Shanghai's infamous Green Gang. Payoffs, shakedowns, counterfeit goods, prostitution, and gambling all became part of urban China as the gates to development and crime were thrown wide open.
As China moved to recover its lost territories of Hong Kong and Macao, concern grew that triad members from the colonies would flee to the West. While some criminal migration did indeed occur, the concern was largely misplaced—the triads found opportunity aplenty in the homeland and flocked into rackets across southern China. Hong Kong gangs spread through nearby Guangdong province, while gangs from Taiwan pushed into Fujian province, where they share common dialects. China's Communist leaders even made it clear that some triads would be considered "patriotic," prompting some analysts to warn of a budding alliance between organized crime and the Communist Party. Such fears proved well founded. By the late 1990s, the People's Liberation Army jointly owned a string of nightclubs with the Sun Yee On triad, while the Public Security Bureau—which includes China's police force—ran several high-class brothels. One of Hong Kong's most notorious businessmen, an alleged triad member, counts China's Ministry of Justice among his top stockholders.
The impact for Japan, and the rest of East Asia, was considerable. During the postwar era, China had figured hardly at all as an element in Japan's criminal troubles. But by the 1990s, China was altering the criminal balance of East Asia much as it was shifting the region's military and economic balance. By the early '90s, Japan had become China's chief trading partner, its largest foreign aid donor, and one of its top investors. China, meanwhile, had become Japan's biggest source of criminal headaches from abroad.
Movements of illegal drugs, arms, and aliens streamed out of the PRC, heading across Asia but in particular to lucrative markets in Japan. In 1991, police began seizing large numbers of Chinese-made Tokarev pistols, used by the PRC military. Through most of the decade, Japanese officials confiscated more Tokarevs than any other handgun model. Just one gang, a Matsuba-kai affiliate, smuggled in 2,300 Tokarevs between 1988 and 1991. So many Tokarevs spilled into Japan that the price plunged from some $2,000 to as little as $700. Other seized weapons included Chinese-made machine guns and at least one bazooka. China's southern Yunnan province, meanwhile, joined Burma, Laos, and Thailand as the fourth leg of what had become a Golden Quadrangle, with tons of heroin being trans-shipped for export abroad. Of greater impact for Japan was the meth trade, as Chinese drug lords set up factories in the south and northeast to feed underground markets in Tokyo and Osaka. "Snakeheads"—local agents and recruiters along the southern coast—also set up lucrative rackets in people smuggling.
All this offered the yakuza golden opportunities. Flush with money from the Bubble years, the gangs began building bases in China to augment their smuggling rackets. Japanese mobsters made investments in joint ventures, karaoke bars, and hotels. A study by Professor Su Zhiliang of Shanghai Normal University reportedly found large-scale yakuza investment along the Yangtze River, centering on Shanghai, but stretching into the cities of Zhenjiang, Nanjing, and Wuhan. Su found dozens of yakuza active in the region, providing the capital for businesses like nightclubs and karaoke pubs, working with local gangsters and triad members from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The booming Chinese market also attracted Japan's top sokaiya gang, Ron-dan Doyukai, which donated two eight-hundred-book "libraries" on Japanese business to Beijing University. Analysts believe the move was a ploy to recruit people to dig up dirt on Japanese corporations in China.
China was not the only emerging market attracting yakuza interest. As borders fell and markets opened in the post–Cold War world, opportunities abounded for enterprising gangsters. The yakuza had worked with Southeast Asian triads since the '70s, and the growing underworld in China was indeed enticing. Another criminal force, however, had entered the world stage. Russian crooks were knocking on Japan's door, and the yakuza were curious.
Russian Mob Ties
Perhaps no development has changed the face of global organized crime more than the rise of the Russian Mafia. From the rubble of the Soviet empire has sprung a far-reaching criminal class comprised of several thousand gangs, whose influence extends from major banks and businesses to the ruling councils of former Soviet republics. They have played key roles in stripping those countries of billions of dollars in currency, precious metal, natural resources, and more. While less organized than Italian or Japanese crime syndicates, Russian mobsters have shown an enterprise and a ruthlessness that has enabled them to expand worldwide at alarming speed. And it is not only the Russians at work, but a panoply of violent ethnic gangs: Georgians, Chechens, Ukrainians, and more. Former KGB and police agents are behind many of the gangs, and they have blazed a multinational trail that has brought them into contact with the world's top crime syndicates—including the yakuza.
Russia and Japan remain distant neighbors, due largely to the dispute over Soviet seizure of Japan's northern islands at the end of World War II. Trade between the Russian Far East and Japan has nonetheless increased rapidly, so it was no surprise that eventually the Russian and Japanese mafias would meet up. The ties remain tentative, but the future offers great opportunity for Russo-Japanese criminal activity. The early signs already are clear, with stolen cars and consumer goods heading to Russia, while arms, women, and pilfered seafood head to Japan.
At Japan's northernmost ports, Russian sailors have offered various arms—including automatic weapons and hand grenades—in exchange for cash, cars, or consumer goods. Others bring illegal shipments of marine products to port, or trade them at sea. Much of the rackets is apparently based out of Vladivostok, which serves as portal to the Russian Far East. It is also one of Russia's most mobbed-up cities. In one 1997 case, Japanese cops busted a car theft ring so well organized that a Russian broker in Vladivostok gave orders for the model and color of each vehicle to be stolen. Run by a former yakuza boss, the gang shipped over $20 million worth of cars before authorities caught up with them. By the end of the '90s, Japanese prosecutors believed more than 17,000 cars had left Japan in questionable deals.
Russian women have now joined Southeast Asians in the international sex trade. Tens of thousands of Russian women from the former Soviet Union are being sent overseas each year, to Macao, Dubai, Germany, the U.S.— and Japan, where they are seen as exotic and command high fees. The scope of the trade can be seen in the number of visas for "entertainers" (long a euphemism for bar girls or prostitutes) granted to Russians by Japanese officials—nearly 5,000 in 1995, accounting for one in five of all Russian visas. As they have with Southeast Asian women, Japanese police have shown little inclination to interfere with the trade, and it is left to churches and nonprofit organizations to offer what little assistance there is.
Working with the Russians can be hazardous, as a Sumiyoshi-kai boss learned in 1994. The owner of a seafood trading firm, he was murdered while on a business trip to Sakhalin, the big Russian island northeast of Japan. But that hasn't deterred other business-minded yakuza. One Yamaguchi-gumi boss all but announced his intention to work with the Russian mob, telling Mainichi reporters that he planned to spend six months in Russia learning the language and meeting his criminal brethren. "As a nation is in trouble, there must be sources of income," he explained. "We would like to research the market."
La Yakuza Latina
Researching the market was something the yakuza appeared keen to do worldwide. By the mid-1980s, the yakuza's travels already had taken them far beyond East Asia—to South America, Western Europe, and the countries on the farther reaches of the Pacific Rim. Indeed, the gangs have shown an eagerness to make connections in virtually every nation where an opportunity has presented itself. Little is known about the yakuza's activities in many of these places. Few of the crimes get reported, and local police seldom know what to look for. Missing fingers and body tattoos are not regularly on the minds of Customs inspectors in Sydney and Sao Paulo.
Like Chinese mobsters, though, the yakuza tend to congregate mostly where large ethnic communities tied to the homeland reside. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of Brazil. Japanese have been migrating in large numbers to Brazil since the 1930s, when many went to work as agricultural laborers. After the end of World War II, a huge wave of immigrants arrived, many of them former soldiers who, once repatriated to Japan, left their wartorn homeland to seek a new life abroad. As a result, today there are over 1 million ethnic Japanese living in South America. More than three-quarters of them live in Brazil, making it the largest Japanese settlement outside of Japan. Another 80,000 reside in Peru, 30,000 in Argentina, and 10,000 in Bolivia. The enormous number living in Brazil has helped make that country one of Japan's top centers of foreign investment. It has also helped nurture a Japanese underworld, both imported and homegrown.
Brazil has its share of organized crime problems without the yakuza: a rising cocaine trade spilling over from nearby Bolivia and Peru, active associates of the Italian Mafiosi, and down-and-out members of the country's varied ethnic groups. The yakuza have found their niche in the heart of Brazil's Japanese community, the Liberdade (Liberty) district of the huge city of Sao Paulo. Some 250,000 Japanese live there, squashed into twenty square blocks of that city of more than 17 million.
The yakuza apparently first caught the attention of the Brazilian media in the late 1970s, when violence erupted between Japanese and Korean gangs in Liberdade. Those involved have rightly been called gurentai, or hoodlums, by the Japanese community there. These young gangsters don't cut off their fingers or go in for tattooing. But many have kept up ties with yakuza in Japan, and much of their criminal activity sounds surprisingly familiar. In tandem with yakuza from abroad, they have set up commercial businesses as fronts, with a preference for restaurants, bars, import-export companies, and floral shops. They are heavily into smuggling—Brazilian goods out of the country, and Japanese goods (mostly electronic items, on which Brazil has strict quotas) into the country. Within the Liberdade area they control gambling, drugs, prostitution, and protection rackets. Other reports suggest that the Brazilian yakuza have moved into vending and slot machines and construction.
The yakuza made another media splash in Brazil in 1979, when police cornered two gangsters involved in a murder-for-insurance scheme strikingly similar to those occurring in the Philippines at about the same time. After fleeing to Taiwan, Paraguay, and Sao Paulo, the yakuza eventually made their way to the town of Araguaia outside Brasilia, where they died in a shootout with federal agents. But it was not until the 1980s that ties between the yakuza and their Brazilian cousins mushroomed, when Japan imported more than 100,000 Brazilians to help ease a labor shortage. Some seventy recruitment agencies sprang up in Japanese cities, many of them targeting Japanese Brazilian men and Brazilian women of all kinds. The sex trade took off, as did gun and drug smuggling. In 1994, Brazilian police were stunned to find a genuine yakuza boss from the Yamaguchi-gumi hiding out in the southern state of Parana. The oyabun, complete with missing finger and full-body tattoos, was believed to be running cocaine, prostitutes, and laborers to Japan, as well as laundering money through real estate transactions.
The yakuza have caused troubles elsewhere in Latin America, notably in the sex trade. Recruiters of prostitutes and hostesses have conned women from Mexico to Brazil into trips to Japan. In 1996, when Mexican authorities announced they had uncovered a decade-long sex trafficking operation, the ring sounded all too familiar. In typical fashion, Japanese agents set up offices to recruit "entertainers" and sent as many as 3,000 women to Japan under the guise of hostesses in nightclubs. One recruiter, when caught by Mexican police, had a list of 1,200 women with him. Another group operated in the early 1990s out of San JosÈ, Costa Rica, recruiting more than one hundred women not only from across Latin America but also from Canada and Germany.
The region is a source of guns as well. Yakuza gunrunning operations have been tied to Argentina, Bolivia, Panama, and, most of all, to Brazil. Brazilian-made handguns were the source of one of Japan's largest-ever smuggling cases, stretching from Yokohama to Capetown, South Africa. During the early 1990s, yakuza associates smuggled more than 1,000 of the Brazilian guns and over 10,000 rounds of ammunition into Japanese ports aboard tuna boats from Capetown. Most of the guns were sold to major crime syndicates; several ended up being used in some of Japan's most notorious crimes, including the attempted robbery of an armored truck in 1992, a rightist assassination attempt that year against LDP vice president Shin Kanemaru, and various yakuza shooting incidents.
It remains unclear what other activities Japan's shadier businessmen are up to in Latin America. The yakuza have forged ties with Colombia's cocaine cartels, although, as noted earlier, this has yet to result in a flood of coke reaching Japanese shores. Police suspect considerable yakuza money has found its way to the region, but little is known about the precise investments. The gangs, though, may find Latin America ripe for expansion someday. Perhaps that's what the Bubble Era's top yakuza, Susumu Ishii, had in mind when he reportedly doled out $360,000 in cash to then-president Noriega in 1989. One of the Inagawa-kai godfather's backers, Aoki Construction, allegedly made $4 million in payoffs of its own to Noriega. Ishii and Aoki had plans for a huge golf and gambling resort in Macao, and perhaps similar plans were under way in Panama.
"Yakuza en Paris"
It is not surprising, perhaps, that if the yakuza made their way to Colombia and Paraguay, they would turn up in Western Europe. The Old World's many attractions have not escaped Japanese crooks. Shaking down their countrymen, smuggling guns and hard-core porn, stealing art, buying up real estate, and touring the Continent all have brought Japan's mafia to Europe. Intelligence gathered by U.S. Customs reveals that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, yakuza and their associates visited at least eight cities across the region: Barcelona, Berlin, Bologna, Dusseldorf, Helsinki, London, Nice, and Paris.
While not as plentiful as in the United States or parts of Asia, Western Eu-rope's gun dealers have long attracted the yakuza. As early as 1965, an Air France pilot was caught smuggling guns to the yakuza. Italian guns later proved popular among the gangs. In 1982, Japanese police stopped a twenty-eight-year-old member of the Kyosei-kai and charged him with smuggling three hundred .25-caliber Garesi handguns and 20,000 bullets he had picked up in Milan. A year later a second smuggler was nabbed with thirty-seven of the guns. More recent seizures have been traced not only to Italy but to Germany, Spain, and Belgium. In one 1995 case, police seized 1,300 miniature pistols imported from Austria.
The gangs have turned to Europe for drugs as well. Germany has been a source of meth and France of ecstasy (MDMA) for the gangs. Germany has also attracted yakuza-owned trading companies specializing in the export of expensive cars to Japan. Cases of slave trading are suspected as well, on the basis of the yakuza's central role as broker for the Southeast Asian women so popular among Dutch and German men. Sometimes European cities are used merely as a back door for the sex trade. In one particularly heinous case, Italian authorities in 1997 uncovered an international pedophilia racket tied to Japanese and Chinese mobsters. Customs police nabbed a Japanese man and Chinese woman coming in from Bangkok after a twelve-year old girl with them pleaded for help. The girl claimed she had been taken from her parents in China and forced to work as a prostitute in Thailand. The couple claimed to be the girl's relatives, but officials found they had false passports and had made multiple trips through Italy bound for the United States. Europe's huge pornography industry also holds an attraction for the Japanese gangs. Back in 1980, Sumiyoshi-kai associates were smuggling out of Northern Europe hard-core porno films, which were then banned in Japan.
Investigators are convinced the yakuza have made substantial investments in Europe, particularly during the Bubble, but hard intelligence is tough to find. Unconfirmed reports allege that yakuza invested in a French castle; one reliable source claims a top yakuza syndicate invested along with the now-defunct Heiwa Sogo Bank in Vatican holdings.
Unsurprisingly, the yakuza have found Europe attractive for what is perhaps their favorite scam: fleecing Japanese corporations. Pushed by the crackdown on sokaiya in Japan, a handful of these professional extortionists have explored Europe as a new hunting ground. Japanese companies, always conscious about their public image, have proved easy targets for sokaiya clever enough to relocate abroad. Seiji Hamamoto, a notorious practitioner of the trade, opened a "foreign correspondent office" in London in the fall of 1981. Police in Tokyo lost little time in labeling it a front for blackmailing subsidiaries of Japanese companies. Other sokaiya also found London a convenient haunt, with its bustling financial markets and plentiful numbers of Japanese bankers and brokers. Authorities suspected Japanese mobsters had set up shop at several nightclubs and restaurants, and were engaged in not only extortion but also insider trading.
One leading sokaiya group, Rondan Doyukai, seems partial to the Continent. During the early 1980s, the gang invested thousands of dollars in the stock of at least three large European firms: Rotterdamsch Beleggings Consortium, Compagnie FranÁaise des Petroles, and Compagnie Financiere de Paris et des Pays Bas (PARIBAS). The group followed up its investments in 1984, when, fresh from shaking down the Isetan department store in Japan, it sent eleven of its members on a whirlwind tour of Europe, taking in the sights of London, Paris, Geneva, and Rome.
France holds a special place in Japanese hearts, and the yakuza are no exception. French food and fashion are prized in Tokyo, and Paris is a popular destination for Japanese heading abroad. Still, it was a shock to a Japanese police commissioner visiting Paris for a seminar when he bumped into several leading members of the Yamaguchi-gumi. That was back in the 1970s, but the yakuza have kept up their affinity for things French. In 1988, a French television show even invited top yakuza from two Yamaguchi-gumi gangs to appear on national TV. Before 3.5 million viewers, the pinkieless gangsters spoke confidently of their work as sokaiya, rightists, and investors in a top corporation. "We try to teach the Japanese spirit to the Japanese," explained Masaru Fujii of the Fujii-gumi. "We break up labor strikes and we march to demonstrate opposition to the leftists." The event prompted coverage by one Japanese weekly, under the title "Yakuza en Paris."
So popular has Paris been with the Japanese mob that Masaru Takumi, the notorious number two boss of the Yamaguchi-gumi, tried to enter the city in 1992. Out on bail for breaking currency exchange laws, Takumi got an Osaka court to grant a one-month reprieve to visit France for treatment of diabetes and a liver ailment. But Takumi apparently had more on his mind than the high state of French medicine. Japanese police learned he had planned to meet in Paris the Yamaguchi-gumi godfather himself, Yoshinori Watanabe, and two of his top deputies. The group, police said, had planned a European junket that would take them to Milan, Venice, Geneva, and London, where they would check into "business opportunities."
French authorities had other ideas, however. On learning of Takumi's visit, officials turned away the yakuza boss at Orly airport, sending him back to Tokyo that same day. With word of their visit in the press, the other yakuza bosses quietly canceled their European tour.
The French had good reason to keep Takumi and his pals out of their country. The few Japanese crooks hanging around were already causing them headaches, ranging from art theft to money laundering. By the mid1980s, Japan had become a popular market for stolen art; not only did the Japanese have money and a taste for French paintings, but Japanese law made it almost impossible to recover them once they were stolen. Police traced one 1984 theft back to two French nationals and a Japanese ex-con who had done time in French prison. The gang had stolen four paintings by Camille Corot from a museum in eastern France, but these were recovered in Japan three years later. While in Japan to recover the paintings, investigators from the French police's Office for the Repression of Art Theft found the yakuza actually helpful regarding the fate of another famous theft. These yakuza had been approached by sellers hoping to unload nine paintings stolen at gunpoint from France's Mermotten Museum in 1985, including the Monet masterpiece Impression—Sunrise. The painting, which gave impressionism its name, depicts dawn over the French port of Le Havre. Tipped off by the yakuza, French cops eventually tracked down the stolen art in a Corsican villa.
Fine art is not the only French product that has attracted Japan's gangsters. In April 1992, authorities shut down what they claimed was a sophisticated money-laundering ring run by the yakuza in Paris. Over six years, the group washed some $75 million in cash by smuggling and wiring gang profits to France, which they used to buy French designer luxury goods. Each day, the gang sent Japanese students, and sometimes Chinese or Vietnamese as well, to shops in posh neighborhoods to buy handbags and clothing made by Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Lancel. The students reportedly held bankrolls of 500-franc notes the gang had withdrawn from banks in Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the Channel Islands. Working through a front company, the group then exported the goods to Japan and sold them at a small loss—leaving the yakuza with plentiful cash that was now "clean." French police arrested four Japanese and three accomplices, including a corrupt French Customs official, and seized 2,500 luxury items worth $2.3 million.
The Gold Coast
Australia, too, has proved an attractive destination for the yakuza, as it has for Japanese generally. The flight there takes eight hours, but one arrives in eastern Australia from Japan without crossing any time zones and in the opposite season. It's a big country with plenty of space and low prices. Maybe that's why half a million Japanese make the trip each year. And among those half-million legitimate tourists are a number of yakuza. In fact, the yakuza have taken an interest in Australia since the early 1980s. They have invested millions of dollars in real estate, set up various front companies, and continued to visit. Sometimes it's just to play, and sometimes it's all business.
The yakuza have shown a particular fondness for Queensland's Gold Coast. The southern coast of Queensland is tropical and warm, with a laissez-faire attitude. Moreover, Queensland cops have had a nagging problem with corruption, illegal gambling, drugs, and prostitution. So it's not surprising that yakuza have shown up in police intelligence reports. For instance, in the tourist mecca of Surfers Paradise, yakuza have attempted to extort money from Japanese tourists. And in 1988 the NPA reported that about thirty Yamaguchi-gumi members entered Australia on tourist visas and were surveilled as they frolicked on the Gold Coast beach. In 1990, a group of fourteen others gambled away $1 million in four days. Later, the Yamaguchi-gumi bought and maintained at least three corporate beachfront holiday villas in Queensland.
But it has been the money the yakuza bring with them that's excited the interest of Australian authorities. Police have observed yakuza with huge amounts of cash—in the million-dollar range—visiting casinos and hobnobbing with casino management. At first, officials thought the Japanese mob was using couriers to launder money in casinos. But there was more. Police noticed that top yakuza bosses had gambled away millions at casinos across Australia: Diamond Beach in Darwin; Jupiter's at the Gold Coast; Bertwood in Perth.
By the late 1980s, this yakuza activity was squarely on the radar screen, and by 1989, it had stirred an ugly debate. Aussies, already nervous over billions of dollars in foreign investment streaming into their land, needed little encouragement to get overly excited over the yakuza. One Liberal MP called for a ban on tattooed Japanese with severed fingers. While the reaction was tinged with racism and certainly overblown, local concern was legitimate. By 1995, Japanese had bought nearly $4 billion of land comprising over 166,000 hectares, including hotels, golf courses, and resorts— and many Australians deeply resented it. But whether the yakuza represented a significant proportion of those purchases was open to question.
In the mid-1990s, there was a major debate within the law enforcement community over the degree of threat posed by Japanese organized crime. By 1994, Australian police had launched five major investigations into yakuza activity, from corporate investment and moves to enter the nation's construction industry to extortion and defrauding of local Japanese companies, as well as luring Australian women into the sex racket in Japan. But no major cases were made, and a 1995 parliamentary report was cautious, concluding that "there appears to be no hard direct evidence of illegal activity by yakuza gangs in Australia."
On the other hand, Australian officials found that at least two hundred known yakuza had entered the country during the decade from 1986 to 1996. Other intelligence reports revealed that at least twenty-eight yakuza and associates from seven major gangs traveled to Australia on at least sixty-five occasions between 1986 and 1993. Most had gone to Sydney and Brisbane, but others had ventured to Cairns, Melbourne, Perth, and Townsville, as well as to Auckland, New Zealand. And then there remained the question of high-ranking yakuza hanging around.
In May 1990, Chun Yong I, a boss of the ethnic Korean gang Toa Yuai, entered Australia with nearly $100,000 in cash. Police noticed that he was short a couple of fingers, but they did not catch the fact that Chun neglected to check off his twenty-seven legal offenses and thirteen years in jail on his visa application. Nor was Chun the only one. A top Sumiyoshi-kai boss, head of the Shino-gumi, visited Australia six times, three of them as a guest of the Conrad Jupiters Casino. Each time he was accompanied by bodyguards and arrived holding a leather bag with a reputed $1 million in cash stuffed inside. He was observed making various investments in land and Australian companies.
Or take Masaru Takumi, the notorious number two man in the Yamaguchi-gumi, one of the most successful keizai yakuza, nicknamed "the man who never sleeps." Takumi made a considerable effort to insinuate himself into Australia. In 1987, he was granted a four-year multipleentry visa to the country. He purchased, through Takumi Enterprises Pty Ltd., a penthouse at Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast worth A$880,500. According to law enforcement, Takumi's next-door neighbor in Surfers Paradise was Suemitsu Ito, who would later be indicted for his alleged role in the mob-looting of Itoman and Company. Ito and Takumi were apparently more than neighbors; Takumi flew to Guam on Ito's private jet, according to law enforcement sources. All told, Takumi visited Queensland five times: twice in 1987, twice in 1988, once in 1992. In 1991, Australian authorities even approved his request for a new visa, despite his record of having been jailed five times in Japan.
But Takumi's reputation finally caught up with him. After hard questions were raised in parliament in 1993, Australia's immigration minister revoked Takumi's visa. His pal Ito fared just as badly. Ito had purchased a vacant block in the center of Surfers Paradise where he intended to erect a grand hotel. Ito was big-time, and worked with Minoru Isutani, a major shareholder in the Gold Coast's biggest development, the massive Hope Island project. But Ito was charged with fraud and embezzlement in the Itoman scandal, and his ambitious plans for Australia crashed along with Itoman.
So, too, ended Mitsuhiro Kotani, the notorious stock speculator who worked with the Inagawa-kai's Ishii during the Bubble. Kotani bought a huge Gold Coast golf course resort—five-star hotel, condos, the works. He also bought apartment buildings, vacant lots, and land in the nearby countryside. But again, the properties were never developed after Kotani fell into trouble back home.
Others were keen on entering Australia's gambling industry. In 1991, a yakuza front company nearly obtained a casino license in the capital city of Canberra. After investigating the yakuza's Bubble-era investments, authorities suspected the yakuza held a significant share of the nearly $8 billion believed laundered through Australia each year. Not all were top-dollar investments, of course, but most of them were lavish. One yakuza boss paid twice the going rate for a run-down sheep farm, which he hoped to turn into a kind of yakuza retreat for his men. In the end, he was deported for concealing his criminal record.
There were indications that the yakuza might be committing more than financial crimes, though. In 1992 and again in 1994, Japanese couriers were nabbed with Southeast Asian heroin. Both times, the couriers had ties to Yamaguchi-gumi; one was a Tokyo yakuza member, another a retired cop. They were not small-time: the 1994 case involved a yakuza coming into Melbourne from Kuala Lumpur with thirteen kilograms of heroin. Others committed crimes more bizarre. Consider the case of Akiko Kitayama, who with her sixty-two-year-old ex-yakuza husband retired on the Gold Coast. The Kitayamas had done well enough to post a $530,000 bond to secure residency, but hubby had been hobbled by a severe stroke. Apparently anxious to move on, Mrs. Kitayama allegedly murdered her husband, chopped up his body with an electric saw in the bathroom, and left his remains for the garbagemen to collect.
But perhaps the strangest link between Australia and the yakuza was the case of John Joseph Hills. The twenty-one-year-old native of Sydney was raised in Japan, attended a Japanese school, and called himself Jo Kodama. In Japan, he fell into bad company and followed a route many homegrown yakuza had tread: sniffing and selling glue ingredients and being sent to a reform center for stealing. Eventually, he joined the Sumiyoshi-kai, becoming a driver and front man for a gang company until being charged with the forced detention and sexual abuse of a seventeen-year-old Japanese girl.
No one thinks Jo Kodama set a pattern for the Australians. Few Aussie crooks are likely keen on becoming members of the Japanese mob. There was money to be made with the yakuza, though, and hundreds of foreigners were ready to try their luck, not only overseas but, like Jo, within Japan itself.
A Foreign Crime Wave Hits Japan
In a fitting bit of irony, while the yakuza were exploring criminal opportunities overseas, foreign crooks were returning the favor. The same forces of globalization that were drawing the yakuza abroad—new markets, a strong yen, cheap travel—also were attracting waves of outsiders to insular Japan. Some found Japan, with its safe streets and trusting ways, ripe for a crime wave.
The trouble began in the mid-1980s, when those in the sex trade were joined by waves of other foreign workers, attracted by the strong yen and the promise of plentiful jobs. Japanese found themselves with a powerhouse economy, a labor shortage, and young people unwilling to do work involving the three K's: kitanai, kitsui, kiken (dirty, demanding, dangerous). More than 200,000 Latin Americans of Japanese descent poured into Japan during the 1990s. Other visitors came from Southeast Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, and Iran. From 1990 to 1993, the number of foreigners overstaying their visas nearly tripled to some 300,000, according to Justice Ministry statistics. By 2000, the number had reached a half-million.
The influx of foreign workers—many of them illegal—sharply expanded the underground networks of human trafficking to Japan. The varied smuggling rings boosted an underground economy of false papers, money-making scams, and other crime that lent itself to yakuza control and influence. Passports could be had for some $2,000, a bogus marriage to a Japanese man for $5,000. Once in Japan, foreign workers from poorer nations often found themselves at the mercy of yakuza-run employment agencies, which raked off as much as half of an immigrant's wages as commission. One gang running a group of Thai construction laborers took $70 from their daily wage of $170. The yakuza had pocketed some $200,000 by the time police began asking questions.
By the mid-1990s, the traffic in human cargo had turned heavily Chinese. Again, the yakuza were heavily involved, working with notorious Chinese brokers dubbed "snakeheads." Yakuza helped arranged boats, booked passage within Japan, and secured the aliens in safe houses. With the collapse of the Bubble Economy, human trafficking proved a lucrative and reliable source of income. One Hong Kong gang boasted an 80 percent success rate in smuggling people into Japan. The supply of Chinese hoping to book passage, moreover, was huge. Japan ranks close behind the United States as a favored destination for Chinese illegal migrants, and the sea journey to Japan is far shorter and cheaper than heading to the New World. The boat trip from China's Fujian province to southern Japan takes about a week, and the cost to would-be immigrants is some $25,000 to $30,000, compared with as much as $45,000 to the U.S. As with the traffic in sex workers, the migrants typically enter a kind of indentured servitude, paying back the fees at painfully slow rates once they arrive in Japan. Horror stories abound of those who fail to pay: the chopping off of ears and fingers, women forced into prostitution, kidnappings until family back in China comes up with the money.
Along with the growth in illegal immigration came the spread of foreign crime gangs. For the Japanese, who like to think of their society as homogenous, it came as a shock that organized crime in Japan was no longer the exclusive domain of the yakuza. In a sign of the times, Tokyo police in 1991 found over 1,000 foreigners active as members or associates of the city's yakuza gangs. Most were Korean, followed by Chinese, but the survey also noted a number of Filipinos and Thais, seven Americans, a Russian, a Turk, and an Australian.
By the mid-1990s, it was clear that crime in Japan's biggest cities had gone international. The South Koreans were involved in everything from pickpocket gangs to the meth trade. Thai gangsters were smuggling drugs and, working with yakuza, running gambling dens for illegal Thai workers. Police had tied Vietnamese crooks to stolen jewelry, vehicle theft, and heroin traffic. Iranian hustlers were doing a brisk business in counterfeit phone cards. Nigerian con artists were busy at work fleecing unwitting Japanese. Small-time Israeli racketeers began arriving in the mid-1980s, and gained a tough reputation. Soon they were involved with yakuza in drugs, arms, counterfeit goods, and stolen property. Even the French were taking part. In 1987, while the yakuza were dealing in stolen French art and laundering money through Paris, a French gang apparently returned the favor by pulling off Japan's largest bank robbery.
It was the Chinese, though, that posed the biggest headache for Japanese law enforcement. The first wave arrived in the 1980s from Taiwan. Gangsters from the island's top two syndicates, United Bamboo and Four Seas, opened restaurants in Tokyo, using them as fronts for drug deals, prostitution, and gambling. Hong Kong's top triad societies soon followed: by the late 1990s, the Sun Yee On and 14K had established strong bases in Japan's big cities, relying on alliances with major yakuza syndicates. The more sophisticated gangs flew in members from Hong Kong and mainland China to commit crimes and then flee. But it was the influx of often desperately poor immigrants from China itself that filled the ranks of the most troublesome gangs. Hundreds of thugs from Shanghai, Beijing, and Fuzhou set up rackets in Japan, with turf wars erupting at times into bloody conflict. The Chinese gangs spun a growing web of organized crime. Their widespread theft of jewelry, watches, and designer clothes led to a thriving industry for fenced goods, stretching from Shanghai's boutiques to corner discount stores in Tokyo. Other crimes included credit card fraud, pachinko fraud, software piracy, armed robbery, kidnapping, murder, and the smuggling of drugs and illegal aliens. "The mainland Chinese are learning from the Hong Kong gangsters," observed Mo Bang-fu, a Chinese crime expert in Japan.
Between 1992 and 1996, crimes by foreigners jumped nearly fivefold in Japan. Police were arresting record numbers of them—and nearly half were Chinese. The foreign crime wave fed a growing backlash to the presence of so many immigrants among the insular Japanese, prompting alarmist calls for crackdowns on illegal aliens and foreign crooks. In 1993, rightists in Tokyo plastered the city with swastika-marked posters, calling for the expulsion of all immigrants. One flier warned that foreign workers were "threatening our culture, history and lifestyle" and vowed to "take action" against them. Sensational media reports told of how ruthless Chinese thugs had pushed the yakuza out of their old haunt of Kabukicho, a sleazy nightlife district in Tokyo. "Kabukicho," asserted one breathless tabloid, "is no longer part of Japan." Added the weekly Sunday Mainichi: "The day when Japan is run by the world's gangsters may not be far off." One 1992 Japanese movie, Heavenly Sin, featured Iranians setting fire to police cars, leering Filipinas and Africans, and gangs of foreign laborers pillaging the streets of Tokyo under a local Chinese gang ruled by an Arab. Adding to the alarm was none other than Tokyo mayor Shintaro Ishihara, who in 2000 publicly warned of riots by foreigners should an earthquake strike the city. Police, too, have played on Japan's well-worn xenophobia, with report after report warning of an invasion of criminals from abroad. After seizures of Chinese illegal aliens doubled in 1997, the NPA told a Diet committee the trade was becoming "a threat to national security."
Such fears, however, are overblown. While foreign gangs are making their mark in Japan, organized crime there remains very much a yakuza affair. Indeed, the various bands of foreign crooks serve largely at the Japanese mob's pleasure. They are far smaller, less organized, and relatively unsophisticated. As one streetwise Iranian gangster told the Japan Times, "Over here, we Iranians can't do anything without help from the yakuza." They are a success because the yakuza allow them to be. The Japanese mob continues to be Japan's tried and true equal opportunity employer, working with Chinese snakeheads, Israeli drug dealers, or Iranian fraud artists. The vast majority of racketeering, extortion, and organized vice crime remains very much in the hands of the yakuza. What the foreign gangs have done, however, is add a dangerous new element to the mix. With yakuza operating overseas in significant numbers, and foreign gangsters now based in Japan, the opportunities for cooperation have never been greater. Moreover, the advent of foreign gangs within the country poses new challenges to Japanese police, who were never noted for their international outlook. The cops' lack of language skills and informants is worrisome enough, but the foreign crooks have proved frustrating for another reason: unlike yakuza, few foreign suspects ever confess.
As police played catch-up to the new crooks in Japan, the yakuza continued to explore opportunities overseas. Despite their attractions, South America and Europe are still somewhat far afield for the Japanese mob. China and Australia beckon, and Southeast Asia remains a favorite haunt. But like other Japanese businessmen, the more ambitious yakuza and their front men long ago set their sights on the United States. It should not have come as a surprise, then, when tattooed men from Japan began showing up on the beaches of Hawaii and Guam, and on the U.S. mainland itself. By the early 1970s, the yakuza were already setting up bases in the United States, embarking on a sometimes sloppy campaign of crime that would take them first to America's Pacific islands, and then on to Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and nationwide.
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