Dameyo

The world of Japanese gangsters

// March 5th, 2009 // General

The yakuza are among the largest crime organization in the world. In Japan, as of 2005, there are some 86,300 known members. In Japan, yakuza organizations are referred to as “boryokudan” (violence group).

Who are the yakuza?: How the mob rose to power in Japan?
Japanese mobsters came to prominence after the Second World War, running the black markets that sprang up in the devastated country. At their peak, they mixed with prime ministers, celebrities and Japan’s richest businessmen, and were romanticized in popular movies and books as protectors of traditions and the true inheritors of the Bushido code of honor.

The introduction of an anti-mob law in 1992 and a decade of economic slump has taken its toll–in the law’s immediate aftermath, several smaller groups went bust or merged, and the number of full and associate members fell from a high of more than 90,000 to 79,300.

Yet, they are still many times more numerous than the US mafia at its peak and the biggest yakuza group, the Yamaguchi-gumi (the biggest yakuza family with more than 39,000 members divided into 750 clans, thus making up 45% of all yakuza in Japan) is bigger and more powerful than ever.

The group’s bosses have their HQ in a large compound in an upper-class neighborhood of Kobe City, where they host a monthly gathering of crime bosses from across the country, under the noses of the police.

Yakuza income has shrunk along with the rest of the economy, but some groups have moved out of traditional business such as prostitution and loan-sharking into real estate.

A government-funded study in the late-1990s found that as much as 42 per cent of bad loans from banks involved organized crime. Most mobsters avoid stirring up trouble with the law, but occasionally violence flares.

In the days of the Shogun, Japan’s authorities would mark criminals with tattoos to distinguish them from the rest of the population. Worn proudly as symbols of status and dedication. Yakuza tattoos have evolved into magnificent, multicolored full-body masterpieces.

Women are also integral parts of Japan’s gangland society. Wives, mistresses and girlfriends of top yakuza figures often undergo extensive tattooing. These women use tattoos to demonstrate their affiliation with the gang lifestyle. It’s done to show loyalty and obedience to the yakuza member they are involved with.

Like Shoko Tendo, author of the best-selling book “Yakuza Moon: Memoirs of a Gangster’s Daughter”, she had herself tattooed in traditional Yakuza style, a tattoo that winds its way to her chest and across her back, culminating, on her left shoulder, in the face of a Muromachi-era courtesan with breast exposed and a knife clenched between her teeth. She’s a daughter of a yakuza boss. She grew up in the house of a crime boss, spent her teens in a fog of hard drugs and sex, then careened from one doomed relationship to another with a succession of violent petty gangsters. Her life has been scarred by beatings, addiction and several attempted rapes and suicides.

Her battle scars make her sound like a casualty from a war zone– broken bones and teeth, perforated eardrums, a hernia, bald patches from having her hair pulled out and hepatitis, probably from drug use. Plastic surgery has helped reconstruct her face.

She does not believe she is alone among yakuza offspring in having had a turbulent childhood. She said “Japanese society looks very calm on the surface, but underneath it is in turmoil, discrimination is rife”. “There is a big difference between becoming a single mother after a divorce and because you choose to be one.” But she is adamant that she would not change her past. “I had a hard time as the daughter of a gangster, but looking back I wouldn’t have lived my life any other way. I am proud that my father was a yakuza. I know this is a world that has no proper place for women. But I have his DNA.”, she added.

Tendo turned her life around before writing her biography. The book offers a rare woman’s view of Japan’s criminal underbelly, a cruel world ruled by “chinpira” (young yakuza punks), many of whom seem to have beaten the daylights out of her.