Recent Trends in Organized Crime in Japan: Yakuza vs the Police, & Foreign Crime Gangs
The popular status of outlaws logically relates to the integrity of the legal system outside which they operate. Putting it simply, for villains to look bad, the police need to look good. Tamura Eitarō has shown how the chivalrous image enjoyed by nineteenth-century yakuza stemmed in part from public disgust for corruption and violence by the police squads who hunted them. A similar problem confronts the NPA today. Since the early 2000s police corruption has been the subject of increasingly numerous academic articles and media reports. Ichikawa Hiro, a lawyer who gave testimony on police corruption in the Diet, says, ‘There is an institutionalized culture of illicit money-making in the NPA, and since it has gone on for so long it is now very deep-rooted’ (Akahata 2004:116). In 2009 a veteran police officer named Senba Toshirō, while still serving on the force, published a lengthy exposé of police corruption: financial scams, fabricated evidence, forced confessions, beatings of suspects, drug abuse by police officers, embezzlement from police slush funds, and much else. Senba’s sensational conclusion: ‘The largest organized crime gang in Japan today is the National Police Agency’ (Senba 2009:73).
Though the word yakuza today denotes a gangster, its original meaning was ‘useless’: the yakuza are the useless garbage at the bottom of society. The men who, in the early 1900s, banded together to form the first yakuza gangs were mostly day-laborers and migrant workers. Yakuza historians assume that these early gangs would have included large numbers of so-called Burakumin, socially stigmatized Japanese who are said to be descended from feudal outcastes. A century later, the connection between yakuza and Burakumin remains strong in the public consciousness. In Japanese libraries, books on the yakuza are invariably stacked alongside books on the Burakumin, as if they address the same fundamental issue. The yakuza themselves exploit the situation by posing as Burakumin rights groups and pressuring businesses to pay them compensation or hush money.
Another minority group commonly linked to the yakuza is Japan’s Korean community. This link is more recent: before the war, anti-Korean sentiment was so intense that Koreans did not even have the freedom to join the yakuza. In the postwar black market economy Koreans in Japan took advantage of their overseas connections to secure lucrative smuggling routes, and many of these Korean smuggling gangs were eventually subsumed into the big yakuza syndicates. For much of the postwar period Burakumin and Koreans suffered similar forms of social discrimination, being kept at the bottom of the work pile and often living together in impoverished areas where gambling, smuggling, and gang activity were common.
Today, it is very difficult to quantify the ethnic or genealogic composition of the yakuza. The Burakumin population is known to be particularly dense in Hyōgo prefecture, home of the Yamaguchi-gumi. On the other hand, the second largest yakuza syndicate, the Sumiyoshi-kai, has for decades been based in central Tokyo and operates heavily in Ginza, an area not known for Burakumin slums. The importance of Korea as a transshipment point for Japan’s drugs will naturally have created opportunities for Koreans resident in Japan. Kiyota Jirō, who became fifth godfather of the Inagawa-kai in April 2010, is a Japan-born Korean national; he is, however, the first Korean to lead the syndicate in its 60-year history. ..read more
February 20, 2012, 11:54am
