Good stuff and someone to keep an eye on here. This is written for the Washington Post by Jake Adelstein, who used to be a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper. According to the story he moved to Japan in 1988 at age 19, spent most of college living in a Zen Buddhist temple, and then became the first U.S. citizen hired as a regular staff writer for a Japanese newspaper in Japanese.
I loved my job. The cops fighting organized crime are hard-drinking iconoclasts — many look like their mobster foes, with their black suits and slicked-back hair. They’re outsiders in Japanese society, and perhaps because I was an outsider too, we got along well. The yakuza’s tribal features are also compelling, like those of an alien life form: the full-body tattoos, missing digits and pseudo-family structure. I became so fascinated that, like someone staring at a wild animal, I got too close and now am worried for my life.
The story skips around and gives an overview of Adelstien’s experiences, serving as a nice teaser for Adelstein’s forthcoming book “Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.”
The Japanese National Police Agency (NPA) estimates that the yakuza have almost 80,000 members. The most powerful faction, the Yamaguchi-gumi, is known as “the Wal-Mart of the yakuza” and reportedly has close to 40,000 members. In Tokyo alone, the police have identified more than 800 yakuza front companies: investment and auditing firms, construction companies and pastry shops. The mobsters even set up their own bank in California, according to underworld sources.
Over the last seven years, the yakuza have moved into finance. Japan’s Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission has an index of more than 50 listed companies with ties to organized crime. The market is so infested that Osaka Securities Exchange officials decided in March that they would review all listed companies and expel those found to have links with the yakuza. If you think this has nothing to do with the United States, think again. Americans have billions of dollars in the Japanese stock market. So U.S. investors could be funding the Japanese mob.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Korea Beat // May 21, 2008 at 11:42 am
It took the US 70 years to get the mafia down to the point where it ceased to be relevant. Japan likely has an even longer and harder road ahead of it, assuming they are even interested in getting rid of the yakuza, which I don’t think they really are. In my experience most average people regard with them some curiousity but don’t see them as a problem. I’m not sure why that is.
2 Teddy // May 21, 2008 at 3:35 pm
It’s funny you linked to this story. I actually just learned my apartment in Osaka rests above what is (or at least, was) very likely a Yakuza hangout…so I’m told.
Lovely.
3 Jake Adelstein // May 22, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Thanks for the posting and the comments. Korea Beat-san is correct–Japan is light years away from dismantling the mafia. Part of the reason is that a lot of bureaucrats consider them “a necessary evil”. The National Police Agency inflates statistics of crimes committed by “foreigners” and thus helps perpetuate a myth that the only thing that keeps Japan from being ravaged by foreign invaders—is the noble hand of the generally law-abiding yakuza.
The OC cops do amazing work when you consider they have very little on their side. No wiretapping, no plea-bargaining, not witness relocation program–very few means to collect evidence via wiretaps or getting lower members to rat out higher members.
Japanese politicans with yakuza links are well-known and I don’t think there will be any major movements to get rid of these guys for a while. However, if the huge amount of yakuza investment in the Japanese stock market and the details of how the yakuza use front companies to manipulate the financial markets–I think it would destroy investor confidence in Japan.
The market would plummet and people would lose a lot of money. Losing money–that would motivate the Japanese goverment to get serious about dealing with organized crime.
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