やくざYakuza

(The news media and officialdom refer to the gangs as “暴力団/boryoku dan” [violent organizations].)

We were driving across the mountains of Kyūshu when I had my first close encounter with the Yakuza, the traditional gangsters of Japan. That was during my first summer in Japan, when I had a week’s holiday from my teaching job at the Kumamoto YMCA. I was driving more slowly even than my normal cautious pace, as I was still getting used to Japanese traffic mores, and the ‘Yamanami’ Highway across the centre of Kyūshu is a winding challenge at the best of times.

A car overtook us and its horn gave a sustained, reproachful honk as it surged past. Y leaned across and gave an answering blast on our horn, before realizing that the car that had passed us was a long, white, American limo with darkened windows. Only Yakuza drive cars like that in Japan. Before we had time to regret our response, the limo stopped right in front of us.

I slammed on the brakes. The car ahead was motionless for what seemed an eternity. Then it slowly started to move forward… and stopped again. After another interminable period, it slowly eased away in the direction of Oita, leaving us thanking our lucky stars.

We might have been helped by my obvious foreignness, with the Yakuza being unsure how to deal with someone who couldn’t understand their choice argot.

In my sixteen years of living in Kumamoto, I have never spoken directly with an active yakuza. I have played cricket with a retired Yakuza, but that is another story. I would never risk emulating my friend Alan who has rebuked a yakuza for tossing a can from his Mercedes… and lived to tell the tale.

They are always there, in the shadows of one’s daily life, rather like the “love hotels”--physically present but socially absent; often seen but never referred to, unless absolutely necessary.

Other foreigners, rather than Japanese friends, have been my main informants about the Yakuza. Georges, the owner/chef of a small French restaurant near the centre of the city, was one who was not forgiven because of his foreignness. We were dining at his restaurant Le Papillon one night around 1990 when I saw that he had a black eye. He explained he had been beaten after refusing to subsidise his local gang with protection money.

More recently, I heard another similar story involving a Japanese friend called Yuri (not her real name). A solo mother of three teen-age children, Yuri had, with help from her parents, started a small, restaurant on the fringes of the main shopping area. Soon after opening, she had been visited by Yakuza who were interested in offering her protection, and in sampling her selection of Awamori, the powerful Okinawan alcohol. . She coolly explained that she was running a restaurant, not a bar, and that she hoped her ex-policeman father would ensure that the police gave her whatever protection she needed. A couple of nights later, one of her clients, an American teacher, who was parking in one of Yuri’s parking places, found that all of his tyres had been punctured.

She didn’t give in though, as far as I know, and I don’t think that there have been other incidents since then. One never knows, of course. The people who pay quietly are never going to tell you about it.

There is a temptation to compare the Yakuza with the Mafia in Italy. There are similarities. The conviction (later reversed on appeal) of the former Italian Prime Minister, Gulio Andreotti, for a Mafia-related murder certainly has no parallel in Japanese politics, but there is no doubt about the pervasive links between the political establishment, particularly the LDP, and the Yakuza.[1]

The conservative forces of the Japanese power structure can rely, not only on soft and hard cops, but also on the “violent organizations” when things get tough. When demonstrations against the U.S. Japan Security Treaty were at their height around 1960, the Japanese P.M. is reported to have asked for help from the Godfathers to ensure the safety of Eisenhower on his planned visit. In the end, Eisenhower did not come but the “義理/giri”, the debt created by that request, ensured that the gangs were not challenged by the state for decades after that.

In the late 1980s, I soon realized that the parallels between the Mafia and the Yakuza were far from complete. Even in Sicily, the Italian Mafia is a shadowy organization, lurking behind respectable facades and dubious businesses. In Japan, the gangs make little attempt to stay in the shadows. Cycling to work each day, I passed the chapter headquarters of one of the local gangs, complete with gang insignia over the building. Kaplan reported that most big gangs had their own magazines, complete with haiku corners.

One of the first things my Japanese family told me was to be extra careful not to go near a Yakuza car. The slightest contact would mean having to pay thousands of dollars in “compensation”. There seemed to be an acceptance that the police would not be much help if you got into trouble with Yakuza.

In the newspaper I would read about attempts by various citizens’ groups to prevent gangs from setting up headquarters in their neighbourhood. In our own neighbourhood, the presence of a gang headquarters was passively accepted, and I never heard of any dissatisfaction being expressed at their presence. They do not have gang insignia on their six story building. It’s only when you see twenty or so of the gang lined up outside the building to facilitate the entry or exit of one of the bosses that you know who the occupants are. They exude male menace, even though nowadays they are more likely to be dressed in T-shirts and trainers than the sharp suits of the previous generation. They spill out across the road and stop traffic with a peremptory wave of a four-fingered hand, until the operation is complete.

These days there are no gang-insignia on the building. There was a Boryokudan Countermeasures Law passed in 1992 which seems to have forced the Yakuza to be more discreet. Even if you did not see them gathered outside the building, the gold-lettered message on the window would give pause: “何でも買います/Nandemo kaimasu” [We deal in anything] is one of the phrases I remember. Needless to say, the “shop” is never open.

Unless a grand entry or exit is in progress, there is seldom any sign of life in the building; only the Mercedes parked in the ground-floor garage, and the occasional light.

I don’t know which gang they belong to, but their ambience extends to the surrounding buildings. The little “stand-bar” called “Yuki”, with the old military flag of Japan for decoration is not the kind of place you would drop in for a casual drink.

Across the railway line from the gang building, a large, twelve storey block lay abandoned for most of the post-bubble nineties. It seemed to be the embodiment of the reluctance of banks to foreclose on yakuza-connected mortgages. During the early nineties, the murder of four bank executives in quick succession dampened the enthusiasm of the financial community for chasing up such loans. In late 2002, however, there was a burst of activity: the old building was demolished; a new apartment block was put up on half of the land, and parking machines installed on the rest. Somehow, and I don’t know how, the Gordian knot had been cut.

As with the Italian Mafia, there is a fine gradation between obviously criminal activities like protection rackets and the well-laundered building investments which provide a bridge to respectability for the children of gang members.

Kaplan and Dubro’s book about the Yakuza was never widely distributed in Japan, even in its English version, and was never published in Japanese. One does not trifle with the Yakuza. The fate of the film director Itami Juzo provides a salutary lesson for those brave enough to try and tell the truth. After dissecting various aspects of Japanese films in a series of funny satires, Itami turned his attention to the Yakuza in Mimbo no Onna [The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion]. Soon after it was made, he was attacked and badly injured by a knife-wielding gangster. He was never the same again and his enigmatic, “suicide” in Dec. 1997 provided a chilling coda to his courageous career. (For an article voicing suspicions that Itami may have been murdered see: http://vikingphoenix.com/news/stn/1998/stn98001.htm)

They may be gangsters whose prime occupation appears to be business but they see themselves as the inheritors of samurai tradition and their values are as much the result of the feudal relations between 親oya (parent or gang boss) and kobun (child or follower) as of any purely commercial calculations. Yakuza must be prepared to suffer and even die for their boss, and they routinely accept long-prison sentences and even physical mutilation as the price of gang affiliation.

One of the reasons the gangs continue to thrive in Japan is their ability to keep their activities within tolerable bounds. For most people they are a potential rather than an actual threat. When violence does occur it is more likely to be between gangs than directed against the public.

One inter-gang killing occurred within a hundred yards of our house in the late eighties.

A car was stopped at the traffic lights outside our local Higo Bank when a motorcyclist drew up alongside and shot him dead through the window. I read about it in the Kumamoto paper. Several weeks later, I was stopped at the same lights. Someone had put a bunch of flowers on the side of the road in memory of the murder victim. A burly man was standing over the flowers, urinating on them, glancing over his shoulder from time to time.

There have been no further such incidents, and the Yakuza are likely to continue to occupy their time-honoured niche beside the railway line for some time to come.

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[1] “Yakuza” by David Kaplan and Alec Dubro ( David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: The Explosive Account of Japan's Criminal Underworld. (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1986), provides a potted history of the gangs and of their political links.