⛩️ #35 SPECIAL: JAPAN'S MOST WANTED (Part 2)
Outré Crimes Of Wanted Men
Original image: National Police Agency
Crime in Japan is rarely cinematic.
The pornographic murders, car-jackings, bank robberies and street muggings of the typical American bloodbath-artist, committed with one eye on the future movie version, are rare even on Tokyo’s meanest streets.
But there are always exceptions.
In the last edition of The Kyote we delved into the crimes of three denizens of Japan’s most wanted list, who we called The Gambler, The Ripper and The Biker.
This time we’re examining four more of their peers, collectively responsible for some of the most outré crimes in modern Japanese history: The Gangster, The Cop Killer, The Home Invader and The Escapee.
Let’s dive into it:
ROGUES’ GALLERY
“THE GANGSTER”
Name: Tatsumi Hishikawa
DOB: February 15, 1976 (48 years old as of 2024)
Height: 158cm
Wanted for: MURDER
BROAD DAYLIGHT EXECUTION
It’s 10am, Tuesday, September 12th 2017.
You’re in Nagata Ward, the wedge of central Kobe City that got hit hardest by the 1995 Hanshin earthquake — where whole blocks slowly knelt like dying elephants and collapsed, trapping thousands in the rubble.
It’s quiet. Two decades post-quake it’s mainly sleepy suburb. Now: here’s a guy bounding down the station steps towards you — he’s short, stocky, skin-headed, a neat little bulldozer of people.
He passes you and he leaves a wake. He goes right, crosses the road against the lights. A bellowing taxi almost takes him out, but the guy doesn’t care — he’s on his way to a very hot date.
Half an hour later. The same guy, posted up on a quiet suburban street corner. He gets one last cough out of his cigarette then unfolds a special smoker’s pouch and deposits the used butt inside.
The pouch goes back in his jacket pocket.
Then his hand gets tucked back into the inside jacket pocket — and he stands there like Napoleon, eyes dialled in on the mouth of a narrow alley.
Within minutes he gets what he’s waiting for: the alley releases a car…a second car…a blacked-out a motorcade of three.
Our guy brings out the hand from the inside pocket. Say hello to the gun — the motorcade has slowed to a crawl for the awkward alley-to-main-road turn, just like our guy planned it.
The gun leads the way as he strides up to car number three…
The guy’s name is Tatsumi Hishikawa. He’s a gangster. He’s about to do murder.*
* allegedly
* * *
Japan’s largest yakuza gang is called the Yamaguchi-gumi. For those not familiar with the underworld — and lucky you — the Yamaguchi-gumi’s place in society differs wildly from your average Western criminal organization.
For one thing, the Yamaguchi-gumi has an official headquarters, in Kobe, which is where they hold their press conferences — yes, really — it’s a decent-sized mansion in a posh area, handily identified by their official crest…which you might’ve spotted emblazoned on their other branches around the country.
You may also have seen them in yakuza fan magazines, or officially-sanctioned history books, or movies that praise their moral rectitude. They even, for a time, distributed a cheery monthly newsletter of their own publishing. Key editorial content: tips on angling from the gang’s leader, Kenichi Shinoda.
You see, for various complicated societal reasons, yakuza gangs are not the kind of secret societies you know from the Mob, the Outfit, Hellbanianz and all those other nice chaps who control your local criminal activity. In Japan, the yakuza even have membership rolls that are registered at their local police headquarters — and make leadership reshuffles official by lodging paperwork with those same police forces.
In other words, yakuza gangs at least gesture towards an air of semi-legitimacy.
The Yamaguchi-gumi, nickname: the McDonald’s of the underworld, whose membership including all their various sub-gangs and franchisees at one time swelled to the tens of thousands, also enjoyed one of the all-time great criminal PR coups when, in the chaotic aftermath of 1995’s Hanshin earthquake (death toll circa 5,000), they organized distribution of rice and other essentials while the government was still mired in chaos and incompetence.
Cut to 2015: things are no longer looking so rosy. The pressure of various belated police crackdowns causes the Yamaguchi-gumi’s extensive membership to fracture, leading to a core sub-group deciding to split from the gang and hang their own shingle.
The newly-independent group didn’t spend a tremendous amount of time brainstorming a name, instead going with the prosaic Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi, retaining the original gang’s name plus sliding in their home location/power base.
This, the split, was bad news. For all the ways the yakuza push their claims for legitimacy, breaks ups have a way of getting nasty — and this was no exception.
Tension was high. Shoots were being winged off in the streets.
Then, just to add to the confusion — and give sub-editors a nightmare, the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi had their own internal disagreements, leading to a further factional split — and yet another Yamaguchi-gumi.
Within 18 months, three similarly-named rivals are struggling for control of the underworld:
The original Yamaguchi-gumi, shorn of many of its best moneymakers
Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi
Ninkyō Yamaguchi-gumi, the sub-split of the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi
Got that?
And just to lend a real sense of farce to the proceedings, the Ninkyō Yamaguchi-gumi had to change their name for PR reasons, because the press kept botching the spelling by using the more common 侠 variation of kyō instead of the gang’s preferred 俠 (spot the difference).
* * *
Our guy on the street corner is, allegedly, Tatsumi Hishikawa, a muscle guy for a Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi sub-gang.
He moves into the street, gun extended towards the third, rearmost limo in the motorcade — which is carrying Makoto Oda, head of the Ninkyō Yamaguchi-gumi.
Before he can throw shots, the cars screech to a halt. Doors fly open and bodyguards pile out. Someone grabs for the gun. It’s a zoo. Everything goes topsy-turvy. Somewhere in the melee: the gunman, bodyguards…and there’s the boss in the back seat of his limo his face a perfect O of shock…
BAM — the gun goes off.
Someone gets hit right in the kisser. Sunglasses shrapnel off. A woman screams. Blood hits on the sidewalk. The limos start up again and screech away, leaving bodyguards behind — they scramble to catch up, screaming at the drivers to stop for them.
The boss, screaming at his driver to go-go-go! isn’t hit.
One goon is dead on the asphalt — Oda’s personal bodyguard.
The gunman gets away clean.
The alarm goes up. Cops flood the area — and find a bag containing two guns, including the one responsible for the bodyguard, dumped 10 minutes walk from the murder scene.
They say the killer was Tatsumi Hishikawa.
He disappeared.
Six months later, Hyogo Police grab up Hishikawa’s 29 year old girlfriend on suspicion of harboring a criminal.
As of 2024, Hishikawa is still in the wind.
“THE HOME INVADER”
Name: Li Kai AKA Tatuso Yamakawa AKA Li Fui
DOB: December 26, 1963 (61 years old as of 2024)
Height: 165cm
Distinguishing Characteristics: burn scars on hand
Wanted for: MURDER, HOME INVASION
THE CHINESE HOME INVASION KING
For a while there Japan had quite a problem with Chinese home invasion gangs.
December 2000. Six masked men break into the home of a dentist in Katsushika Ward, Tokyo, tied up two women while they were sleeping, smacked them around a bit, and stole cash, a rifle, a shotgun, and a bunch of gold.
This was one of a pattern of home invasions in which the victims were tied up (leading to some very strange English-language write-ups due to the Japanese term 緊縛強盗 translating as “bondage robberies”)1
5 members of the gang responsible, who turned out to be Chinese nationals, were arrested and imprisoned, but the presumed leader Li Kai AKA Tatuso Yamakawa has never been found, and is suspected to have fled back to China.
(A strange afterlife of the Li Kai gang can be found in Fuminori Nakamura’s novel “The Thief”, where Japanese criminals try to throw police off the scent by performing their home invasions disguised as members of a Chinese home invasion crew who have themselves been murdered. “The Thief” is recommended for Japanese learners for its extremely hard boiled style, making it exceptionally easy to read. If nothing else, you’ll never forgot the phrase タバコに火をつける).
“THE ESCAPER”
Name: Yūdai Miyauchi
DOB: February 15, 1976 (48 years old as of 2024)
Height: 177cm
Wanted for: ROBBERY WITH VIOLENCE
ROBBER EMBARRASSES POLICE
Yūdai Miyauchi was a simple man. His M.O. was walk into a someone’s house, punch the guy/girl in the face and take their money.*
* allegedly
In other words, be was a strongarm guy.
A reprehensible character in other words, a parasite — but not perhaps a natural fit for a starring position in Japan’s Most Wanted.
The reason Miyauchi is up there is the way he embarrassed the Yamanachi Prefectural Police.
4:00am, February 23, 2013, Yudai Miyauchi (then 37 years old), was arrested for robbery. Three officers from the Kusaka Police Station took Miyauchi into custody, and he was placed in the back seat of a patrol car with two officers on either side of him. However, as soon as he arrived at the Kusaka Police Station and simply got out of the car and ran.
And got away.
He was seen at a convenience store in Nagano Prefecture the following day, but has never been seen since.
Since 2018 there has been a standing reward of 1m yen for information leading to Miyauchi’s arrest
“THE COP KILLER”
Name: Takeo Matayoshi
DOB: October 13, 1949 (75 years old)
Height: 172cm
Wanted for: 2x MURDER OF POLICE
EXECUTES TWO COPS IN TROPICAL PARADISE; APPEARS IN KYOTO WITH BAD BACK
They’d been stuck in the car all day.
The Sergeant and his partner are pulling a bullshit duty, sitting on a building in Okinawa City where the local Kyokuryu-kai gangsters are holed up amid an escalating gang tiff.
The Sergeant yawns, pushes the button to illuminate his watch — 11pm.
Shit. 14 hours of pissing in cups and farting and sharing complaints about the precise degree their lower backs are killing them.
The partner pipes up. “Look!”
At what?
Partner head-gestures at a figure in the distance. At least someone’s alive at this time of night: check out that person alternately appearing in the pools of orange slung by the streetlights then disappearing into the darkness between them.
The Sergeant sees it’s a woman, plus dog.
It’s your local housewife giving the canine its exercise, armed with her tissues and plastic bags and a bottle of water to clean up when the dog lays one out in the street.
The Sergeant relaxes, embarking on the inevitable next mental process of the human male: a silent begging to the sky, the universe, to God, to please just make her attractive. Or if the face isn’t up to snuff, let there at least be a body on her.
She’s getting closer, her pace ebbing and flowing with the dog’s curbside scent-mapping. They enter darkness again but the next streetlight is closest to the car and now Sergeant and Partner both are ready for a prime view when they return to view (And if she is attractive, please let her look this way, just a glance is fine, an acknowledgement, and they sit up a little straighter now despite their lumbar ruin because they may be in plain clothes but they’re cops, ma’am, hard-working men of rectitude):
The partner drills Sergeant with a whisper: “She’s lost, ‘one who gives directions is me.”
She isn’t lost, this is her neighborhood, anyone can tell and it’s the dog who emerges from darkness first — f*ck the dog — then the light begins to paint the woman’s face and the partner opens his mouth again, gets out “It’s a poodle—” and the Sergeant’s thinking, you moron, and then the partner’s head atomizes and comes down as pink champagne.
Sergeant just has time to register the wet feeling of his partner’s brains splattered on his face when he belatedly hears the shot that put them there.
Shot #2 hits Sergeant in the back.
Shot #3 and his throat is gone.
Shot #4 and he’s over too.
They’re both dead within a second.
It was two guys who took them out, sneaked up from cops’ blind side and let off their shots at less than a meter’s range — and now they run.
And the housewife with the dog doesn’t know what happened except she was upright and now she’s on the ground and her leg is on fire and her ears are ringing and she and the poodle, who’s going bezerk, crawl away and it’ll turn out later she took a ricochet in the thigh.
* * *
An hour later Okinawan Police find them: two of their own, executed point blank.
Combine the brazen public violence of The Gangster and the police humiliation of The Escapee, and you get The Cop Killer.
Okinawan Police: highly motivated.
They look hard, obviously, at the Kyokuryu-kai.
What happened was dumb, petty, fodder for a thousand gang flicks:
Kyokuryu-kai is beefing with other gangs.
They head for a safehouse and await developments.
The cops are watching.
Kyokuryu-kai lookouts see the cops, plain-clothed, unmarked car, night, and figure them for advance scouts from an opposition hit squad.
Kyokuryu-kai decide to get their retaliation in first.
The shooters were members Hideo Zamami (definitely) and Takeo Matayoshi (allegedly, but definitely).
A month after the cops got croaked, Zamami is arrested.
Co-suspect Matayoshi agrees to appear for an interview, but stonewalls the questions, total brass balls.
Then he runs, heads for the Japanese mainland where he has ties with other gangs.
This, by the way, is 1990.
Zamami gets charged, gets life, but escapes the death penalty.
He appeals. Yes I sneaked up on the cops with less than friendly intentions, but blowing their heads off? Your honor, that was all my man Matayoshi.
Appeal denied.
As of this writing, Zamami is still in prison.
And Takeo Matayoshi has been doing the fugitive thing for 34 years and counting.
Or he’s dead.
He’s probably dead.
October 2000. 10 years post-murders.
Kyoto. A local gangster brings another guy in to a hospital in Fushimi Ward. The other guy’s back is killing him.
The docs shoot some x-rays. Results? Atrocious. A metastatic tumor camped out in the out-of-towner’s spinal cord. Instant hospitalization required to discover the precise extent to which cancer has riddled him.
Nope — the guy gets the results and never returns. The hospital wakes up and calls the cops. They figure out the guy with the spine is Cop Killer Matayoshi. The local gangster is arrested for concealing a criminal, but gives them no leads to work on.
Since then, nothing. With zero sightings for more than two decades, the chances that a 75 year old Takeo Matayoshi has escaped a shallow grave are slim — but even presumed dead, he remains on those Most Wanted posters.
After all, the cops have avenge their guys. Plus they also have to do the paperwork: complete that Japanese legal farce of referring criminals to prosecutors even if they happen to be dead.
Postscript
March 2002, the families of two police officers who were shot to death sued the gang members who carried out the crime and four of their top gang bosses. The Naha District Court ordered the defendants to pay 320 million yen compensation.2
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We’ll see each other again next week,
The Kyote
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