THE YAKUZA PRINCPLE

All the dealings of the Yakuza can be divided into three parts – dark, light and so-called twilight. The dark side is not that different to any other criminal structure found in the rest of the world – drugs, dens, and extorting money are the most common activities. Burglaries and robberies are much rarer and are forbidden in some groups. Even in the groups where stealing other people’s property is practiced, ordinary people such as members of the general public, and home and shop owners, have no reason to fear them. Mostly Yakuza can burgle a home or business in order to teach someone a lesson, when a resident of the area taken under patronage by Yakuza tries to avoid paying the “security” – a racket often masked as ‘protection’. Sometimes the burglaries are carried out by agreement with the “victim”, for example in order to receive insurance payments or during tax and other checks, at which point one needs to get rid of certain goods or compromising documents. Other things that can be attributed to the “dark” side are getting money owed from troubled debtors and also very rarely contract beatings, kidnappings and even murders. The “twilight” zone is more about bringing illegal workers into the country and controlling them, money lending, legal trade deals, and semi-licit operations often connected with building and docking works. The “light” area of Yakuza’s operations relates to completely legal companies and societies owned and managed by ‘oyabuns’, or leaders of the Yakuza clan. Light business can be anything at all, for example an architectural bureau, a fruit shop or a Japanese language and literature club. It plays the role of a cover up, sometimes as a money laundering business, and sometimes as a business that brings the clan the majority of its profit.

The classic example of an open Yakuza business is pachinko – the only type of gambling game allowed in Japan. Pachinko is a game where metal balls are launched into the playing field by spring-loaded levers and then rolled down the board. The aim of the game is to score the maximum number of points by getting the ball into a specific place. Monetary prises for pachinko winners are forbidden under Japanese law so the players usually win prizes such as animal figurines, designer perfume etc. However, there is always a small shop nearby that would buy the prizes at a fixed price. It is a common belief that all pachinko arcades in Japan are under the control of the Yakuza.

The Yakuza try and sustain the image of a very patriotic and conservative structure. Many clans are named after the Shinto gods temples. Yakuza members never fail to attend traditional city festivals and processions. They generously donate to temples and monasteries, act as patrons of native workmanship workshops and take part in tanka and calligraphy competitions. Their wives and daughters learn ikebana and tea ceremonies, and it is customary to wear national costume at least on special occasions.

The welfare of Japan and the Japanese people is a top priority for the Yakuza, so in the event of any natural disasters or crisis local authorities can fully rely on them. After the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 when the earthquake followed by the fire storm devastated several cities, including Tokyo and Yokohama, Yakuza clans immediately took the place of the incapacitated authorities, clearing rubble, organising medical help for the casualties, burying the dead, chasing away looters and sourcing clothing and food for survivors.

They behaved in exactly the same way in the aftermath of the tsunami of 2011, even though in that case the authorities were not paralysed. During the Covid pandemic Yakuza clans organised the distribution of masks and disinfectant gel on the streets, looked out for the elderly living alone who could need hospitalisation and overall showed themselves to be the ideal community organisation - as usual.

Formally the authorities fight the Yakuza in any way they can, and officials suspected of having dealings with these criminal gangs are punished. Informally the Yakuza are often overlooked and sometimes the authorities ask them for help. For example the Yakuza practically solved the trade union crisis in the mid 20th century, having threatened and possibly murdered some of the most uncompromising trade union members. Right now in Japan trade unions are practically unable to affect the lives of the general public by striking as they do in many other countries around the world, where trains stop running, the streets get filled with rubbish and ambulances can’t get to those that need them due to blocked roads. Yakuza still hold the trump card up their sleeve that can sabotage any strike if it interferes with peoples’ lives too much. Apart from that there is an unspoken social agreement due to which real lowlife are unable to form their own niche in the country. Yakuza will find a drug dealer selling drugs in schools sooner than the police and the punishment will be much more severe. Pickpockets and lone thieves also won’t last long on the streets of Japan. The low crime rate in Japan is largely due to the influence of the Yakuza even though it is not customary to openly admit it. Let us not forget that the open businesses of the Yakuza generates a high tax yield for Japan as they are quite a tight knit group of successful entrepreneurs. The representatives of the law also manage to coexist peacefully with the Yakuza. Many policemen prefer working with them to chasing them, as the Yakuza keep order on the streets as effectively as any special patrol, and sometimes even give the police one of their own, who admits to multiple crimes and humbly heads to prison (knowing that his family would want for nothing and once released he would be promoted within the clan, as well as gaining the respect of his friends). However, the state intermittently launches a strident attack against crime and triumphantly arrests several thousand Yakuza members including the gang bosses. This campaign usually lasts several years and is closely followed by the press. Sometime later it turns out that 90% of those arrested were released after several weeks or months as they were arrested mainly for ‘terrible crimes’ such as using an improperly registered phone. The latest campaign took place in 2015-2020.

One needs to remember that Japan is still a community-orientated state, and this community spirit is supported on the ideological level. From the point of view of the average Japanese person the perfect life is successfully fitting into the communities they find themselves part of. Nursery, school, university, the company one works for, are not just the progression of life, but is also a filtering of people and allocating them to organisations to which they will often be connected for the rest of their lives. Lifelong work contacts are a Japanese reality, and they are determined by which university one studied in. Those universities prefer children from specific schools and one can only get into a good school by attending a nursery associated with it. Those nurseries hold interviews for children and their parents and get recommendations from the tenants and district associations etc. A school child can be forgiven for some discrepancies, although by the time they finish school an average Japanese person can see their life path clearly. If they haven’t been able to fit in, if they don’t have a very supportive family, if they’ve ever been arrested or have had visits to special behaviour correction schools they will have no chance of securing a good job. The HR department would scrutinise their biography with a magnifying glass and would prefer a more reliable candidate. Of course, there are some members of society that those rules do not apply to, such as creatives, actors, artists, designers, farmers, children of business owners going into the family business or apprenticeships, but every year the Japanese society gains a large number of young people who understand that they are outcasts and losers. They are the ones who become the Yakuza recruitment base. The average age of the first contact with the clan is 15-18 years old. The Yakuza is in close contact with quite a few youth gangs, for example bikers, and young Yakuza members organise parties in the clans’ houses for young rebels and choose the most suitable ones among them.

This is why the son of a dock worker or a boy from the family of a wealthy government official can both end up inside Yakuza. The main criteria is for the young man to be smart, brave, having experienced some level of hardship, and feel like an outcast. The word Yakuza itself means “eight nine three” which is the worst possible combination in a popular card game. “Loser”. You’ve been kicked out of your community, your nest, your university and no one needs you. And the Yakuza does need you. They will raise and accept anyone here. What is interesting is that children of Yakuza families do not have to follow in their parents footsteps. Quite the opposite is true, as it is very common for a clan member to marry a girl from a good family and raise his children as law abiding citizens. The Yakuza approves of this. Shoko Tendo, the author of the book “Daughter of the Yakuza” describing her childhood, dedicated many pages to how her father, the boss of one of the Yakuza gangs, used to beat her and her sister every time they got into trouble with the police or were involved in hooliganism. Their brother, however, was his father’s pride and joy, he did well at school, was well behaved and even ended up in a very good company. Shoko’s father preferred not to look for a successor in his own family, as he already had very promising clan members in mind for that.

The various clans have their own terms for accepting new members and their own forms of oaths. However one rule is unchangeable - the clan members must be from the same family. These are Oyabun – the father - and his helpers, the older brothers. Betrayal of a clan brother, thieving from ones’ own, lying to the elders – these are the worst possible crimes punishable at best by exile and sometimes by death.

In the past the standard penalty for an offence was paying with one’s own flesh. The offender would cut off a phalange of their own finger as a sign that they recognise their fault and repent. Older members of Yakuza can boast complete absence of two or three fingers on one of their hands. They wear silicon prosthetics so as to not attract too much public attention. Now the cutting off of fingers is fading away and the offenders are simply beaten and issued fines.

Famous colourful Yakuza tattoos are still applied using bamboo needles that inject the paint deep under the skin. This is a long and painful procedure performed without the use of any kind of anaesthetic. This tests the spirit and resilience of the fighters. All the images are very important as they contain information about the person’s position in the group and their personal qualities. For the young Yakuza who has proven to be useful to the clan the first areas of the body to be tattooed are the shoulders and the last are back and chest, and here the Yakuza status is normally displayed. Only the oyabuns, or in rare cases their deputies, can have tattoos depicting a tiger or a dragon. Carp represents the hardship the person had to encounter in life. A severed head symbolises loyalty to the clan. A figure of a hairy man with a knife in his teeth is the sign of a knife-fighting expert. With flower tattoos, the peony flower symbolises the ability to control one’s emotions, chrysanthemums show patriotic dedication and the lotus shows contempt for wealth and life’s temptations. Yakuza members openly demonstrate their tattoos to the general public only in one place and only once a year – during Sanja religious festival in Tokyo, where the Yakuza clans carry mikoshi palanquins containing sacred relics, wearing only fundoshi undergarments. The tattoos must not be visible at any other time, so the body is carefully tattooed up to certain points. The legs are tattooed to the knees where the kimono ends, the arms to the length of the sleeves and a white stripe is left on chest and back which can be visible in the neck opening of some types of kimonos.

By doing so you will make them feel awkward. This is because the Yakuza is something that one should not talk about at all without a very valid reason even with friends, let alone nosey foreigners. The Japanese have very mixed feelings about the Yakuza which consists of a mixture of fear, respect and shame. Even Seiko, the oyabun’s daughter, told of how teachers would suck up to her but disliked her at the same time, and the children would tease her, were afraid of her and would never socialise with her.

Openly associating with the Yakuza would defame any decent person’s reputation, not to mention civil servants and government officials, however there are not that many families in Japan that are not associated with someone from the Yakuza one way or another through blood relations (let us remember how recruitment works).

Therefore, trying to talk to a barely known Japanese person about Yakuza will inevitably lead to awkwardness.

1. Shoko Tendo. The Daughter of Yakuza. М.: АСТ, 2008

2. K. Kitakata. Ashes. М.: АСТ, 2006

3. R. Whiting. Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan». NY.:Vintage books, 2000.