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Doing the splits; Japan's yakuza: a rare break-up in the world of Japan's criminal gangs
The Economist. 416.8955 (Sept. 12, 2015): p39(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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Full Text:

A rare break-up in the world of Japan's criminal gangs

IN THE demi-monde of Kabukicho, a warren of striptease bars, cabaret clubs and brothel fronts
that makes up Tokyo's main red-light district, the night manager of the Parisienne Cafe frets
about the yakuza. Japan's biggest organised-crime group, the Yamaguchi-gumi, with 23,400
members, split last month. On September 5th more than a dozen of its factions gelled into a
new, rival outfit. A yakuza shoot-out with Chinese mobsters in the Parisienne once killed one
gang member and injured more. The cafe's manager now fears the risk of renewed warfare.

The police are bracing themselves for violence up and down Japan. They are out in force in
Kabukicho and Ginza, the capital's best-known shopping district, as well as in the cities of Kobe,
Osaka and Nagoya, all big yakuza strongholds. At the time of the last yakuza split, in 1984, two
dozen gang members died in territorial battles--an orgy of bloodshed by the country's ultra-safe
standards. In the past few years fire-bombings, death threats and murders by gangs in Kyushu,
the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, have eroded the public's tolerance of the gangs.

For all that, the yakuza remain largely legal. Membership is no crime. Mobsters commute to
official headquarters, proffer business cards and enjoy pension plans. The Yamaguchi-gumi
recently launched an in-house newspaper with articles on board games and fishing. Its boss,
Shinobu Tsukasa, portrays the group as a refuge for the weak and marginalised; it helps keep
order at the bottom rungs of society.

The split has partly to do with the economy. Two decades of Japan's flirting with deflation has
made it harder to extort money from businesses, yet the Yamaguchi-gumi kept its membership
dues high (the new gang has promised to lower them). Criticism over Mr Tsukasa's leadership
was a factor too. Other factions have long resented the dominant position of his Kodo-kai, the
most go-ahead yakuza group that has tried to expand beyond its base in Nagoya into
gleamingly prosperous Tokyo and the rest of the Kanto region of eastern Japan. Mobsters in the
port cities of Kobe and Osaka were left with slimmer pickings as industry declined.

Kodo-kai also fell out with the police. Rather than co-operating with the cops, as other factions
do, it started intimidating them. The gang has many ethnic Koreans as members. That makes it
harder for it to rub along with a xenophobic police, says Jake Adelstein, an American expert on
the yakuza. The police appear even to be helping the breakaway group, which will call itself the
Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi.

Many Japanese dare to hope that the split is a sign that the yakuza are diminishing in power
and influence. They are a source of a certain embarrassment, and America, in particular, has
been critical of their semi-tolerated status. A national anti-mob law passed in 1992 achieved
little until it was tightened recently. And since 2009 local governments have enacted organised-
crime exclusion ordinances, making it illegal for businesses to pay extortion money to the
yakuza or do business with them. These ordinances are having an effect.

Still, signs of strong yakuza presence throughout the economy surface regularly. Tokyo's
Olympic games in 2020--with construction projects and pleasure-seeking visitors--is a tempting
honeypot. In the Diet there have been questions about a possible link between Mr Tsukasa and
the vice-president of Japan's Olympic Committee. In October 2013 the financial watchdog
caught a part of Mizuho, a huge banking group, lending generously to yakuza. Mobsters have

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long been involved in finding lowly workers for nuclear-power plants, including for the clean-up
at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, the site of the 2011 nuclear disaster.

Curiously, yakuza see themselves as victims. They complain of growing social discrimination
against their members and bemoan the bullying of their children at school. Perhaps to garner
popularity, they are even trying to take advantage of growing sentiment against the prime
minister, Shinzo Abe. The Yamaguchi-gumi's website warns that under Mr Abe, a right-winger
with revisionist views of Japan's militarist aggression, the country risks heading back to pre-
second world war thinking. It is a new line from a force that used to help Mr Abe's Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP) quash unions and left-wing demonstrators in the 1950s and 1960s.

Back then the LDP used openly to get money from yakuza bosses. The ties are no longer overt,
says Kenji Ino, an author on the gangs, but there are behind-the-scenes connections. Many a
politician, he says, still attends monthly dinners in honour of the local yakuza boss in some
discreet, high-class ryotei restaurant. It is not clear whether such time-honoured rituals will now
suffer a brief period of disruption.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

"Doing the splits; Japan's yakuza: a rare break-up in the world of Japan's criminal gangs." The
Economist, 12 Sept. 2015, p. 39(US). Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com
/apps/doc/A450834155/AONE?u=fub&sid=AONE&xid=5a81aafc. Accessed 5 Dec. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A450834155

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