David E. Kaplan is an investigative journalist based in Washington. He is former director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and served as chief investigative correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. He is the author of Fires of the Dragon and coauthor of The Cult at the End of the World, on the doomsday sect that released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway. Alec Dubro lives and works in Washington, DC where he writes, edits, and blogs for the labor movement. He is the creator of the satirical website, The Washington Pox (www.dcpox.com) and is past president of The National Writers Union.

YAKUZA

Japan's Criminal Underworld

By David E. Kaplan, Alec Dubro

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 the Center for Investigative Reporting and David E. Kaplan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27490-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii,
About the Authors, xi,
Preface to the 2012 Edition, xiii,
Prologue: Enter the Yakuza, xvii,
PART I: EARLY HISTORY,
1. The Honorable Outlaws, 3,
PART II: THE KODAAAA YEARS,
2. Occupied Japan, 31,
3. Nexus on the Right, 56,
4. The Black Mist, 83,
PART III: THE MODERN YAKUZA,
5. The Syndicates, 111,
6. Corruption, Japanese-Style, 144,
7. The Keizai Yakuza, 175,
8. The Collapsing Bubble, 196,
PART IV: THE MOVE ABROAD,
9. Meth, Money, and the Sex Trade, 223,
10. Old Markets and New, 251,
11. Across the Pacific, 277,
12. To America, 293,
Epilogue: A New Yakuza, 325,
A Note on Research, 335,
Notes, 339,
Glossary, 373,
Bibliography, 377,
Index, 387,

CHAPTER 1

THE HONORABLE OUTLAWS

ONE MIGHT CALL GORO FUJITA THE BARD OF THE YAKUZA AND HE WOULD NOT object. His business card, ornate even by Japanese standards, introduces the man by asking for forgiveness, explaining in humble terms that he drinks too much but is devoted to his work. He is a short, round fellow whose bushy hair hangs around a face that might belong to either a comedian or a thug, depending on his mood. He is, in fact, a former gangster, a veteran of the Tosei-kai, the largely ethnic Korean gang known for its ruthless control of nightclubs in Tokyo's famous Ginza district. But Goro Fujita no longer patrols the night streets for the "Ginza Police," as they once were called. He is now something of a celebrity among the yakuza, as novelist, historian, and storyteller of Japan's underworld.

Fujita is the proud author of some thirty novels about the yakuza, romantic works that dwell on a particularly Japanese brand of virility, bravery, and fatalism, of noble values that can be traced back to the samurai warriors of feudal Japan. They are books with names like Big Gambler, Cemetery of Chivalry, Poetry of the Outlaw, and I Don't Need My Grave. He is master of the sword fight scene, interpreter of arcane custom, and archivist of criminal history. He beams while presenting, alongside his many novels, three encyclopedic tomes that comprise the core of his lifework: the first, a massive genealogical dictionary of the complex kinships among the yakuza; the others, two volumes of a treatise on right-wing politics and organized crime in Japan. It is a history, says the author, that dates back over three hundred years.

At his comfortable home on the outskirts of Tokyo, Fujita carries on a rare seminar for special guests on the history of the yakuza. He lovingly pulls out old photos of early bosses, pressed between the pages of a dozen hardbound volumes stored on his fine wooden shelves. His office library bulges with a unique Japanese literary collection—books on swords, guns, martial arts, general history, regional history, war, and the right wing.

Fujita is a man who spins a good yarn, tells long-winded jokes, and can hold even the demanding attention of a yakuza boss. He writes fiction because he doesn't like to use real names. "Too many demands would be placed upon me," he explains. Fujita's characters, nonetheless, manage to convey his profound feelings for the yakuza world, sentiments that have found a welcome audience among the Japanese reading public. His work belongs to a genre of Japanese literature that has long extolled the image of the romantic gangster. The yakuza, in fact, form a central theme of popular culture in Japan, with heroes and anti-heroes enshrined in countless movies, books, ballads, and short stories.

For Fujita and his colleagues, the history of organized crime in Japan is an honorable one, filled with tales of yakuza Robin Hoods coming to the aid of the common people. The heroes of these stories are society's victims who made good, losers who finally won, men who lived the life of the outlaw with dignity. These tales stand at the heart of the yakuza's self-image—and of public perception as well. Yakuza experts challenge the accuracy of these portrayals, as do most scholars of Japanese history, but the feeling persists among Japanese—including many police—that organized crime in their country bears a noble past. To understand this romantic image of the gangster, one must go back nearly four centuries to the country's Middle Ages, the source of countless modern legends that in Japan take the place of the frontier West in American culture—where the sword replaces the six-shooter and the cowboy is a samurai.

Samurai Bandits and Chivalrous Commoners

To the commoners of feudal Japan they were known as kabuki-mono, the crazy ones, and as early as 1612 they began attracting the attention of local officials. Like rebels of a more recent era, they wore outlandish costumes and strange haircuts; their behavior was often equally bizarre. At their sides hung remarkably long swords that nearly trailed along the ground as the outlaws swaggered through the streets of old Japan. Terrorizing the defenseless townspeople almost at will, these outlaws were not above using them to practice tsuji-giri, a hideous rite in which a samurai would waylay a passerby to test a new blade.

The kabuki-mono comprised the legendary crime gangs of medieval Japan, eccentric samurai warriors known also as the hatamoto-yakko, or, loosely, the servants of the shogun. They made heavy use of slang and adopted outrageous names, such as Taisho Jingi-gumi, or the All-Gods Gang. They displayed an unusual loyalty among themselves, swearing to protect one another under any circumstance, even against their own parents.

It was the Tokugawa era, the time of the shogunate. Centuries of civil war had come to a historic end when Ieyasu Tokugawa unified the island country in 1604, thereby becoming the first great shogun. But Japan was not yet stable. Peace in the nation meant that as many as 500,000 samurai were suddenly unemployed, workers whose best skills lay largely in soldiering and the martial arts. Eventually, most samurai joined the growing merchant class, as large villages like Osaka and castle towns like Tokyo and Nagoya were transformed into bustling urban centers. Others found jobs in the expanding civil bureaucracy, or as scholars and philosophers. But not all were success stories. The kabuki-mono—nearly all of them samurai of good standing—found themselves caught within a rigid medieval society about to enter a two-hundred-year period of self-imposed isolation, with few opportunities beyond those offered by street fighting, robbery, and terror.

Such a life was not a new one for the ronin, or masterless samurai. In earlier times, many had turned to banditry when their lords were defeated in battle, looting the towns and countryside as they meandered across Japan. Traditionally, these renegade warriors were taken into the armies of the feudal lords then warring over Japan, but now, in the relative peace of Tokugawa society, these new groups of outlaw samurai began to take on a life of their own. (The gangs of roving bandits from this era would later be brought to life in the Japanese movie Seven Samurai, which in turn inspired the American Western The Magnificent Seven.)

While these criminal servants of the shogun—the hatamoto-yakko—might appear to be the true forebears of the Japanese underworld, today's yakuza identify not with them but with their historic enemies, the machiyakko, or servants of the town. These were bands of young townsmen who, as fear and resentment grew, formed to fend off the increasing attacks by hatamoto-yakko. At times they sported the same odd habits as their opponents, but their leaders were often of different stock—clerks, shopkeepers, innkeepers, artisans. Others were laborers rounded up by local construction bosses, including a good many homeless wanderers and stray samurai. Like the gangs of today, the machi-yakko were adept at gambling and developed a close relationship with their leaders that may well have been a precedent for the tightly organized yakuza.

The townspeople naturally cheered on the machi-yakko, elated to watch fellow commoners stand up to the murderous samurai. Indeed, among the citizens of Edo, as Tokyo was then called, the town servants quickly became folk heroes. It is understandable, then, that the yakuza—who see themselves as honorable outlaws—have chosen to look upon the machi-yakko as their spiritual ancestors. But a direct connection is difficult to make. Kanehiro Hoshino, a criminologist with Japan's Police Science Research Institute, points out that both yakko groups disappeared by the late seventeenth century after repeated crackdowns by an alarmed shogunate. Tokyo's All-Gods Gang, for example, met its fate in 1686 when officials rounded up three hundred of its members and executed the ringleaders. Although occasionally the gangs no doubt performed honorable acts, they seem largely to have been what one scholar called "disorderly rogues."

Like most Robin Hoods throughout history, the machi-yakko owe their reputation not to deed but to legend, in this case the numerous eighteenthcentury plays in which they are invariably portrayed as heroes and champions of the weak. So popular were these dramas that the Japanese theater itself owes much of its early development to the depiction of these marauding bands of eccentrics. They were further heralded in assorted folktales and songs that remain among the most popular of Japan's past. In these stories and plays they are billed as the otokodate, or chivalrous commoners. There is the tale, for example, of Ude no Kisaburo, or One-armed Kisaburo, immortalized in a kabuki play. Kisaburo, a skilled swordsman who protects the townspeople, is excommunicated by his fencing teacher after having an affair with a woman. Seeking his teacher's forgiveness, he severs his right arm in an act of remorse and then goes on to battle the thugs of Tokyo.

The most celebrated tale of the machi-yakko is that of Chobei Banzuiin. Born into a ronin family in southern Japan, Chobei journeyed to Tokyo around 1640, where he joined his brother, who was the chief priest of a Buddhist temple. Chobei became a labor broker, recruiting workers to build the roads surrounding Tokyo and to repair the stone walls around the shogun's palace. Using a ploy that would become a yakuza mainstay, Chobei opened a gambling den. The betting not only served to attract workers, but also enabled him to retrieve a portion of the salaries he paid them.

According to the stories and kabuki plays about his life, Chobei became the leader of Tokyo's machi-yakko. The tales are filled with his great deeds—a town girl rescued from assault, the marriage of two lovers once unable to wed because of their different social classes. Whenever thanked by those he helped, he would answer: "We have made it our principle to live with a chivalrous spirit. When put to the sword, we'll lose our lives. That's our fate. I just ask you to pray for the repose of my soul when my turn comes." As his words predicted, he was put to the sword, slain by his archenemy Jurozaemon Mizuno, the leader of Tokyo's hatamoto-yakko. Although the circumstances leading to Chobei's death are uncertain, one kabuki play offers the following finish:

One day, Mizuno invites Chobei through his messenger to come to his residence and have a drink together in a token of reconciliation. Chobei and his many followers immediately determine that the invitation is a trap. Not listening to his followers, who ask him not to go, Chobei goes to Mizuno's house alone.

Mizuno receives Chobei respectfully at his home, and before long, a banquet begins. At the banquet, one of Mizuno's followers spills sake from a large cup on Chobei's kimono under pretense of a slip of his hand. As planned, another of Mizuno's followers takes Chobei to a bathroom, suggesting he have a quick bath and change his kimono. When Chobei becomes defenseless in the bathroom, four or five samurai, all Mizuno's followers, attack him. But being proud of his physical strength, he defeats them without any difficulty. Holding a spear in his hand, Mizuno himself then appears in the bathroom. Looking into the eyes of Mizuno, Chobei says calmly, "Certainly, I offer my life to you. I'm ready to throw away my life, otherwise I'd never have accepted your invitation and come here alone; I'd have listened to my followers who worried about my life. Whether one lives to be a hundred or dies as a baby depends on his fate. You are a person of sufficient status to take my life because you are a noted hatamoto.... I offer my life to you with good grace. I knew I would be killed if I came here; but, if it was rumored that Chobei, who had built up a reputation as a machi-yakko, held his life so dearly, it would be an everlasting disgrace upon my name. You shall have my life for nothing. I have iron nerves, so lance me to the heart without the slightest reluctance!"

Though tough, Mizuno shrinks from these words and hesitates to spear him. His followers urge him. Finally, he makes up his mind and stabs Chobei through the heart with his long spike. The curtain falls with Mizuno's line: "He was too great to be killed."

Another play climaxes with the gallant Chobei being sliced to death "like a carp on a chopping block." Whatever the hero's final fate, his story has made quite an impression on today's yakuza, who claim him as one of their own.

The Yakuza Emerge

The legends and traditions of the machi-yakko were inherited by a later generation of "chivalrous commoners." Among them were Japan's old firemen—gutsy, quick-tempered fellows who usually did construction work but also served as the community's volunteer fire department. Other common heroes included police detectives, leaders of labor gangs, sumo wrestlers, and the members of Japan's eighteenth-century crime syndicates.

These early yakuza would not appear until a hundred years after the death of Chobei Banzuiin, in a society still bound by the feudal laws of the shogun. They were the enterprising members of a medieval underworld who today are widely seen as the true ancestors of the modern yakuza: the bakuto, or traditional gamblers, and the tekiya, or street peddlers. So distinctive were the habits of the two groups that Japanese police today still often classify yakuza members as either bakuto or tekiya (although the gangs are now diversified into countless rackets). The ranks of both groups were largely filled from the same quarters—the poor, the landless, and the delinquents and misfits found in any large society. Each group, however, stuck closely to its unique area of control to such an extent that different groups could operate within the same small territory without conflict: the bakuto along the busy highways and towns of old Japan, the tekiya amid the nation's growing markets and fairs.

It is to these rustic bands of itinerant traders and roadside gamblers that Goro Fujita traces back yakuza genealogy in his One Hundred Year History. Through his oral histories with yakuza elders, research at Japan's modern libraries, and even field trips to the tombstones of ancient yakuza, Fujita claims to be able to link today's godfathers to a criminal lineage extending back to the mid-1700s. The accuracy of the genealogical charts within Fujita's books, however, is less certain than the degree to which they illustrate the preoccupation with history among the varied yakuza clans. Alongside the pictures of great godfathers that adorn the walls of gang headquarters today are family trees that link the group, however precariously, to these noble outlaws of old. What is unusual is that such ancestral connections are invariably made not by blood, but through adoption.

Like the Italian Mafia, the yakuza began organizing in families, with a godfather at the top and new members adopted into the clan as older brothers, younger brothers, and children. The yakuza, however, added to that structure the unique Japanese relationship known as oyabun-kobun, or, literally, "father role– child role." The oyabun provides advice, protection, and help, and in return receives the unswerving loyalty and service of his kobun whenever needed.

(Continues...)Excerpted from YAKUZA by David E. Kaplan, Alec Dubro. Copyright © 2012 the Center for Investigative Reporting and David E. Kaplan. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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