The Kyote #11: A ¥600m Robbery & The Decline of the Yakuza
The News, This Week in Japanese History, & Much More
Dear Readers, Happy Mother’s Day!
(And, to mums in the UK, who already had their Mother’s Day on March 10th, here’s your chance to double-dip!)
Incidentally, Mother’s Day in Japanese in one of those phrases that sound wonderfully euphonious in English: “haha no he”.
Now let’s get on with this week’s edition:
The Quiz
A picture question any Japanese person will answer instantly. Can you?
Question: What does this guy do for a living?
Answer at the foot of the mail.
The Hashtags
What are Japanese netizens discussing? A selection of top trending hashtags on Japanese X/Twitter this week.
Wednesday May 8th: #こどもの頃怖かったもの
ENGLISH: “What I Was Scared of as a Child”
X shares the boogiemen that haunted their childhoods, thus creating a wonderful compendium of scary Japanese cultural moments.
Our favorite? The user who was told by their parents that the giant statue of Kūkai in Niigata City would come to life and crush them if they misbehaved.
The founder of Shingon Buddhism, as invoked by fed-up parents. Image: X
You can see the entire thread here.
Thursday May 9th: #ポケモンタイプ診断
ENGLISH: “Pokemon Type Test”
Personality tests are crack cocaine for online people with too much time on their hands —a way to categorize oneself as part of a tribe and (just as importantly) tell the world about it.
(Some might argue that, say, being unique would be more valuable territory to stake out, but that would probably make too much sense. We’re sorry we mentioned it.)
Well, today a new personality test was trending: which kind of pokémon are you? Land? Sea? Air? Fire? Water? Are these actual categories? We don’t care to find out.
Or maybe it’s all just a bit of harmless fun! Anyone who wants to take the test, reply to this newsletter with the word “free time”.
Friday May 10th: #メイドの日
ENGLISH: “Maid Day”
In Japanese, numbers possess multiple readings/pronunciations, giving rise to goroawasé, a system of digit-based puns often applied to dates of the year.
For May 10th, Kyodo Dairy had the bright idea of combining “May” and one particular reading for 10 - “to”, in order to promote their Meito brandname. Forevermore, this day would be free advertising for Meito’s Al Choco Brothers (chocolate), Stick Mate (tea) and PukaPuka Tai (a chocolate-filled wafer in the shape of a sea bream, obviously).
Unfortunately for Meito, popular culture intervened and the alternative reading of Meido (“Maid”) prevailed, so now the tenth day of May has become a day to wallpaper social media with pictures of perky females in outfits from Victorian England.
Short history of maid costumes in Japan here. (Japanese)
The Changes
The Kyote is changing.
After next week’s edition (the 12th), we’re going to become either:
a weekly romp through the news in Japan, digestible in <10 minutes
True Crime Japan
The History
This week in Japanese history the following event occurred…
A ¥600m Robbery & the Decline of the Yakuza
The unlocked window (center). Image: TOKYO MX
This week in 2011 the largest robbery in Japanese history occurred at the office of a security company in Tachikawa, Tokyo.
A former temporary employee at the company, now working as a hairdresser, had told a customer of theirs between snips of the scissors about the large amount of cash the facility processed, plus a generally lax approach to security that included an armored window whose lock had been broken and never repaired.
The information percolated the underworld for 2 full years until it found someone ruthless enough to take action; at 3am on May 12th 2011 two men parked a car outside the office and sneaked in through the broken window, which had not been repaired in the intervening period.
The single guard on duty was woken from a nap by a knife at his throat.
After being stabbed in the arms and legs he gave up the code to the safe, which contained the equivalent of $7.5m cash at then-exchange rates, largely dispersions belonging to Japan Post Insurance.
The two robbers got away clean with the money – but only for a few months. Based on security camera footage from a convenience store in the area, Hideaki Ueki (31) was eventually arrested.
(Tip to all budding criminals: keep a few rolls of duct tape at home so you don’t have to hit the nearest retailer when you’re looking for supplies to restrain a security guard).
Two days later the second suspect, Yutaka Watanabe (41), turned himself in to police, carrying with him a plastic bag with a change of clothes (sensible), along with ¥6m in cash (misguided at best).
The security company that had not bothered to repair the window and kept a single narcoleptic on duty was sanctioned and ended up leaving the business altogether, a decision some might consider overdue, in light of the fact that they also had armored cars knocked over in 2004 and 2008, losing more than ¥200m combined.
22 other people were arrested for hiding the criminals from the authorities, with much made of their status as former associates of yakuza groups.
Ueki got 20 years in prison.
Around half of the robbery proceeds were never found, although police did trace a ¥10,000,000 (~$125,000) payment to a Chinese gang, presumably a protection payoff.
The tale of the ¥600m robbery, the former yakuza members and the Chinese connection marks the beginning of a change in Japanese crime, a tale of gang wars, police crackdowns, and evolutions of criminal behavior that has seen the underworld landscape change and the number of yakuza fall by 75% in the years since the two criminals leaped through that never-repaired window.
* * *
Traditionally, the yakuza have enjoyed a semi-legitimate place in society incomprehensible to most Western people, who are used to secret society-style mafias of the Italians.
Yakuza gangs have official offices, emblems, events at temples where monks pray for their good health, as well as — most surprisingly — official membership lists, lodged with local police forces.
Why would members of a criminal organization make it so easy for law enforcement to track them? And do they have police incompetence or connivance to thank for their continued existence?
Essentially the Japanese underworld has long existed under a long-established gentleman’s agreement, a version of the Great Game, with formalized rules and niceties, rather than the dog-eat-dog Manhattan world of Italian gangsters and ruthlessly ambitious prosecutors.
A decent informal guide to how and why the yakuza and the legitimate world became intertwined post WW2 is director Kinji Fukasaku’s seminal film series Jingi naki Tatakai (Eng: “Battles Without Honor or Humanity”; soundtrack plundered by Quentin Tarantino for Kill Bill), based upon the real-life underworld goings-on in Kuré City, Hiroshima Prefecture.
The first film literally begins with the nuclear mushroom cloud, then immediately throws us into the ruthless ground zero world of the defeated nation’s black markets, where scammers sell rat meat as pork, amputee veterans starve to death in the mud and parents sell their daughters for a sackful of rice.
The bombed ruins are also patrolled by gangs of so-called Third Nation People, Chinese or Koreans who, under the protection of the US military authorities, had begun to lord it over the Japanese who had trafficked them from their home countries as forced war labor.
The Japanese police, in the film, take the side of their countrymen in the street brawls that follow, and co-operation increases as the yakuza provide workers to fulfill contracts for the Korean War (1950), and, especially, when the US authorities make sure that nascent communist parties are not successful in the first post-war elections — and who better for the police to turn to in order to get out the (correct) vote than the gangs, dug in like ticks in their neighborhoods.
* * *
In 1955, the Liberal Party and the Japan Democratic Party merged to create the Liberal Democratic Party, which has been in power almost continuously ever since, a de facto one party state that froze the corruption in place and ensured crackdowns on the yakuza would only take place when particularly outré crimes aroused public anger.
Gang involvement in the legitimate world of business spiked during the Bubble Years of the 1980s, where the asset inflation was so absurd, and everyone making so much money, that organized crime was bound to insist on their slice of the pie, and the loan departments of large banks became hopelessly corrupted.
The apogee of the bizarre distortions in society caused by the gangs was the 1992 fall of a mildly reformist LDP Prime Minister named Morihiro Hosokawa, known as the Tokyo Sagawa Kyūbin Affair.
Imagine if you will the following scenario (and we realize the personae date us):
What if notorious gangster John Gotti had a front political party…
Whose members went around making speeches sarcastically praising Bill Clinton…
Who became so stressed by the whole ordeal that his aides decided to pay Gotti off to the tune of millions of dollars…
And who, looking for a go-between, immediately thought of the board of Fedex, because of their well-known underworld connections.
That’s essentially what happened, with executives of Japan’s ubiquitous delivery company Tokyo Sagawa Kyūbin ferrying cash to Takamasa Ishii, head of the Inagawa-kai gang, to get him to stop his party from broadcasting sarcastic praise for the Prime Minister from loudspeaker trucks.
And just to emphasize how this wasn’t a one-off, the Sagawa board got on so well with boss Ishii during this piece of business they subsequently lent him and his front companies no less than ¥4,395bn (a cool $4bn or so).
* * *
The Bubble burst.
The banks restructured, closing their “no loss” trading accounts for favored politicians and gang leaders.
The era of free money was over.
Crackdowns followed, arrests of previously-untouchable gang executives.
The numbers on the official yakuza membership lists began to decline.
Then, in 2015, Japan’s largest gang, the Yamaguchi-gumi — nicknamed “the McDonald’s of the underworld” for its franchised sub-gang structure — split into three.
In a proof-reader’s nightmare, the Yamaguchi-gumi split into the 6th Generation (original) Yamaguchi-gumi, the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi, and the Ninkyo Yamaguchi-gumi. Prominent amongst the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi contingent was the Yamaken-gumi, which subsequently returned to the 6th Generation Yamaguchi-gumi, becoming its umbrella group. Meanwhile, the Ninkyo Yamaguchi-gumi renamed itself the Kizuna-kai. Clear?
In any case, the upheaval resulted in a blizzard of shootings, beatings, and (another favored attack vector of the yakuza) trucks being rammed into the official offices of rival gangs.
A major crackdown followed, which lead to a hemorrhaging of members of all the various Yamaguchi-gumis.
* * *
Abandoned former HQ of the Aizukotetsu-kai, circa 2021. Image: The Kyote
We were considering the fate of the yakuza recently while walking the streets just south of Gojo bridge in central Kyoto.
Many moons ago, when we had just arrived in the city, we used to take a private Japanese class in the same area. The teacher’s house was a pile of timber oozing into an alley with an outside squat toilet shared by the whole block, and the route there passed the headquarters of the Aizukotetsu-kai, Kyoto’s resident yakuza gang.
Every morning (not too early), a healthy crew of head-breakers lined up in the street to greet the boss as he stepped out of his Toyota Century limousine, with the special bow unique to gangsters, performed with hands on the knees.
The Aizukotetsu-kai HQ is gone now, demolished, replaced by an overpriced cash-in tourist hotel.
With the split of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the underworld were forced to pick sides and prepare for war. In the malignant atmosphere Kyoto Prefectural Police first placed a constant guard outside the building, then a court order was sought, evicting the gang from the district.
Once one of the most prominent gangs in Western Japan, and an early designate of the legal status of a “Violence Group”, 1600 members strong, the Aizukotetsu-kai is now estimated to consist of just 40 remaining soldiers.
(Just to show the latent disparity between Japanese and secretive foreign gangs, you can find the relocated Aizukotetsu-kai HQ by simply plugging their name into Google Maps, where it is officially listed as an “Association / Organization”).
* * *
In 2011, the year of the ¥600m robbery, Yakuza gangs had a total of 78,600 members (including associates) on the books. In 2023, that number fell to a new low of 20,800.
The crackdown included changes in the law that have made it illegal for legitimate businesses to provide services of any kind to registered gang members, to the extent that it has become impossible for them to even get a cellphone in their own name, let alone a car, house or business.
This repressive environment, alien to the old-time gangsters, has seen many of them abandon their gangs for a belated attempt at a straight life, and recruitment of new members has essentially come to a halt.
So, has organized crime disappeared in Japan with the decline of the yakuza?
Not a chance.
While it would be silly to feel nostalgic for an age where the gangs ruled whole neighborhoods, law enforcement scrutiny has led more and more young criminals to eschew the formalities of yakuza life and strike out on their own, like the self-motivated scammers and gang members of overseas nations — and that petri dish accelerates the evolution of more and more cunning crimes.
The National Police Agency has dubbed these new generation racketeers Anonymous Flexible Groups (匿名・流動型犯罪グループ).
* * *
Luffy Gang
Monkey D. Luffy is the name of the fictional protagonist of the Japanese manga series One Piece.
Luffy is also the pseudonym of the leader of one of these new generation gangs, who communicated anonymously with his subordinates via encrypted chat applications.
The crimes of Luffy Gang encompass telephone extortion scams run from call centers in the Philippines, and 50 other cases in 14 Prefectures across Japan, including a ¥70m broad daylight jewelry robbery in Kyoto City.
Despite having almost broken the power of the yakuza gangs, the National Police Agency devoted most of its 2023 report on organized crime to the old guard, including extensive narratives of their crimes dating back years, but only a short 2-page column to the new Anonymous Flexible Groups. By focusing so much attention on the venerable old Yamaguchi-gumi and its rivals, is the NPA falling into the same trap as the FBI, who obsessed over the broken remains of the Italian mafia in the pre-911 years rather than the looming threat of the Islamists?
Time will tell if the splintering of the underworld results in an avalanche of crime.
LINKS
Youtube report on the ¥600m robbery arrests (Japanese)
Tokyo Sagawa Kyūbin Affair Wikipedia page (Japanese)
National Police Agency’s 2023 Organized Crime Report (Japanese)
Wikipedia article on the Luffy Gang.
Enryaku-ji, a prominent Kyoto temple, hosted a ceremony for the Yamaguchi-gumi despite police warnings.
¥-$ conversions are based on the May 12th 2011 interbank rate of ¥80-$1. The current rate is almost double.
The Answer
Question: What does this guy do for a living?
Answer: he’s one of the so-called “intelligentsia yakuza”
The intelligent yakuza was the bad guy in many a late-1990s/2000s straight-to-video flick, a conniving, calculator-loving financial engineer manipulating the yakuza from within, as opposed to the good old fashioned strongarm type heroes.
Nowadays, these are the people forgoing formal gang membership to set up their own scam orgs, just like the mysterious leader of Luffy Gang.
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Until next week,
The Kyote
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The Kyote is published in Kyoto, Japan every Sunday at 19:00 JST