Yakuza are feeling the pinch...LONG ARTICLE

[B]Yakuza are feeling the pinch[/B]
 
Things aren’t quite so rosy these days for the yakuza. After more than six decades as a core element of Japanese society, they are facing unprecedented challenges to their authority, both from their enemies at home and, increasingly, from foreign rivals.
 
[FONT=Arial]The yakuza have dominated Japanese society for six decades. But now, thanks in part to cheap Chinese criminal labour, the gangsters are feeling the pinch. Misha Glenny reports, in the final extract from his new book McMafia[/FONT] 
 
The Namba is a rather tired arcade of little shops in the Japanese city of Osaka, squeezed in between the pachinko parlours, where row upon row of brightly coloured slot machines splutter, crackle and trill to an army of seemingly brainwashed gamblers. Just a decade ago the teenagers drifting through the arcade with red and blond hair and gothic clothing were both exotic and provocative, a challenge to Japan's carefully calibrated social sensibilities. Now, ubiquitous and mundane, they are a reminder of the changes triggered by globalisation and the financial collapse of the 1990s
 
At the far end of the arcade, the teenagers thin out and the noise from the pachinko halls recedes. In the corner of a bar, a quiet man sits hunched over a beer. He could be an ageing hippy, but in fact Horitsune II is one of the most senior tattooists to the Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest and most powerful organised-crime syndicate in Japan. His breathtaking representations of gods, animals, warriors, mythological creatures and women serve as both physical reminders of the wearers' vows of obedience and a warning to outsiders and competitors. 
 
Horitsune II clearly regards his work not as a profession, but as a higher craft. "I don't tattoo just anyone who walks in here," he tells me. "Taking on a tattoo is a serious business." A full-body tattoo can cost more than $10,000 (£5,000) and take two years to create - or even longer, as Horitsune jokes, if the recipient is in and out of prison. 
Ten to 15 years ago, 90% of Horitsune's clients were gangsters, or "yakuza". Nowadays, he says, the figure is down to 50%. "The bosses would always pay for their soldiers to be tattooed," he sighs, "but frankly it has become too great an expense for many of them." 
Things aren't quite so rosy these days for the yakuza. After more than six decades as a core element of Japanese society, they are facing unprecedented challenges to their authority, both from their enemies at home and, increasingly, from foreign rivals. Like the rest of Japan, they are encountering some difficulty in adapting to competition. 
Through much of the 20th century, the yakuza may not have been as popular as their members like to believe, but they were undoubtedly influential. Contrary to popular assumptions, they did not shoot, extort or bribe their way to the top: they are, bizarrely, a product of Japan's legal system. "Traditionally, of course, the yakuza have always been involved in prostitution and gambling, and that accounted for the bulk of their income," says Yukio Yamanouchi. "But in the 1960s, they started getting involved in civilian affairs and this soon grew to be one of their greatest revenue sources." Yamanouchi knows what he is talking about. After a number of years in the wilderness, he was recently welcomed back as chief lawyer to the Yamaguchi-gumi after his old friend Shinobu Tsukasa was chosen as the syndicate's godfather. It's like meeting a lawyer in the US who introduces himself breezily as adviser to Don Antonio Soprano of the New Jersey Mafia Corporation. 
Yamanouchi explains how failures in the legal system provided the yakuza with their opportunity. "This move into civilian affairs began with the collection of outstanding debts. If anybody went to court in order to get a debt paid, it would take an eternity. The yakuza are able to offer a much quicker solution to the problem." 
 
It was a law passed in 1949 that caused this frustration with the judiciary. In order to discourage the use of litigation, which was felt to be contrary to the spirit of wa (harmony) that underpins Japanese society, the postwar government ruled that only 5,000 lawyers would be permitted to graduate every year. The great majority sought lucrative positions working for big business. Few were interested in representing members of the public, and before long the entire judicial system was clogged up with civil cases that made the deliberations in Dickens's Bleak House look swift. 
"It was only a short step before people realised that they could use the yakuza for resolving a host of things," says Yamanouchi. "They have since developed a close involvement with all manner of transactions in the property business, of course; but they also act as bankruptcy assessors; in anything really where the courts ought to be responsible, like insurance claims after car accidents." By the late 1990s, the consequences of Japan's policy on legal training were jaw-dropping: the country had one lawyer for every 5,995 people, while Britain had one for every 656, and the US one for every 285. The mafia, meanwhile, occupies a huge segment of Japan's de facto legal system. It is not only a privatised police force, but also a self-contained judicial system - criminal syndicates as cops, barristers, judge and jury. 
 
Bizarrely, this quasi-official status has been endorsed by the very legislation that was supposed to bring the yakuza to heel: the 1991 Law Regarding the Prevention of Unjust Acts by Organised Criminal Syndicate Members, which stipulates that crime families must submit their membership lists to the police every year. When I ask the lawyer Yamanouchi whether this confers legal status on members of the syndicates, he leans back in his chair, ponders the question and then avers: "Yes, it does." So the yakuza enjoy the unique status of being a legal and an illegal entity simultaneously. 
 
A trip to the Yamaguchi-gumi's Kobe headquarters soon underlines the organisation's influence and standing. At the top of a quiet residential street in the fashionable Nada-ku district, a wooden sign stands proud: "We will keep organised-crime gangs out of Nada!" A few yards further down, there stands a cutesy grey-and-white hexagonal building: the local police station. "Grrrr!" the mouse roars. Fifty yards down the street from the mousehole, however, there are discreet fortress walls around a garage door of grey corrugated metal. Cameras and security lights are everywhere and, should anyone succeed in scaling the wall, they would also need to contend with a roll of matted barbed wire. 
 
As I walk past the Yamaguchi-gumi's HQ, the metal starts to roll slowly upwards, revealing a line of five men, ramrod-straight in light green uniforms and sunglasses. Behind them is an elegantly manicured lawn and in the distance a passable imitation of a Renaissance Italian courtyard. As I stand gawping, their eyes settle on me and, having no letter of introduction, I move slowly on. 
One Yamaguchi soldier ushers a big man with even bigger sunglasses into the driver's seat of one of several limos parked in the drive and it screeches out before the grey metal drops again, locking away the secrets of the Yamaguchi-gumi once more. 
Good luck, Nada-ku police - you've got your work cut out. 
 
 
Since 1991 there has been a significant consolidation of yakuza power into just three families - the Yamaguchi-gumi, based in Kobe, and two Tokyo groups, the Sumiyoshi-kai and the Inagawa-kai. By 2005, the Yamaguchi-gumi accounted for 45% of Japan's "designated" gangsters, according to the police. But even the biggest players have their challenges. With western Japan, the Yamaguchi-gumi's traditional hunting ground, lagging behind eastern Japan economically, the organisation is attempting to extend its influence in Tokyo. 
 
Yakuza leaders play down the prospect of a war between the Big Three, but in February last year a leading Sumiyoshi-kai man was gunned down by members of a Yamaguchi-gumi affiliate in Tokyo. For several days, Japanese newspapers speculated furiously that the country was on the brink of the mother of all gang wars, until the news leaked that the Yamaguchi affiliate had paid an estimated $1.3m (£647,000) as blood money. 
 
 
Mitsunori Agata, deputy chairman of the Sumiyoshi-kai, has been through a lot in the yakuza world: rebelling against a stern middle-class father in postwar Japan; doing time for a murder he did not commit; using his ruthless streak to become leader of his gang, the Blue Dragons, around Shinjuku station; being recruited by a Sumiyoshi-kai operative; and then building a protection racket around Kabuki-cho, one of the toughest turfs in Tokyo. Now, in his cosy, cluttered room where no more than three people can sit cross-legged, he tells me that his methods have changed - the yakuza now stress the importance of diplomacy, while violence is a final and always undesirable resort. 
"We hold a meeting every month with all the families and associations in eastern Japan and we resolve our differences through dialogue," he continues. "The Sumiyoshi-kai does not seek conflict, but, of course, if anybody attempts to encroach on our territory, then problems will ensue ..." 
 
The key to an effective protection racket, it seems, is less the deployment of violence than the credible threat of it. Too much violence is bad for business - it draws heat from the police, opprobrium from the public and the media, and can lead to retaliation. All these take a heavy toll on the yakuza's raison d'etre: making money.

On the edge of Kabuki-cho, Tokyo's main red-light and gambling district, lies the highest concentration of yakuza offices anywhere in the country. As one of Tokyo's most important bosses, Agata has two offices and he still observes the yakuza's traditional symbolism: he reveals a magnificent dragon tattoo across his chest and proudly shows me the DVD of the ceremony (theoretically illegal) at which he was elevated to deputy chair. These days, however, yakuza bosses are as much harassed senior managers as they are traditional gangsters. When Agata speaks of the recruitment crisis facing the yakuza, we drift surreally into the discourse of human resources wonkery. "Like all organisations," he says, "we are facing problems encouraging young people to join." Japan currently has the lowest birth rate in the world, so the yakuza are competing with all legitimate businesses for members. "For young people there are many more attractive and lucrative trades," he continues, "so we as an organisation are now ageing - too many chiefs, not enough Indians. The most effective way for us to respond to this is to point out that we are a family, and this is very attractive for young lads who maybe don't spend as much time with their own family. This is something that is lacking in society." 
 
 
But for Agata, as for many of the yakuza's management class, the main headache recently has been the police - not in the shape of a crackdown on the families, but because of pachinko, Japan's national sport. The pachinko parlours' annual turnover is estimated at about $300bn - twice the value of the entire Japanese automobile industry. Until the 1991 law, it was not only the yakuza that were making money out of pachinko: traditionally, Korean businessmen and their syndicates controlled large parts of the trade, while Chinese gangs also took a cut. There was so much money that all three groups were able to flourish without getting in each other's way. But after 1991, the police themselves started muscling in on the business - often retired policemen backed by their working colleagues. It's an unorthodox crime-fighting strategy, but an effective one. Yakuza bosses like Agata can barely contain their indignation: "All these retired policemen came in and robbed from our banks, so all this black-market money is now going into their fat pension funds!" 
 
 
As if that wasn't enough, Japan's crime families are feeling the chill wind of international competition. In 2000 the governor of Tokyo, a rightwing rabble-rouser called Shintaro Ishihara, issued a chilling warning to the capital's residents. "Crimes in Tokyo are getting more violent," he thundered. "If you ask who is committing them, they are all sangokujin [a derogatory term for Koreans and Chinese] ... who have entered illegally. Is that not so?" Statistics refuted Ishihara's hysterical claims. But opinion polls suggested that many in the capital agreed with them. And that was the point - he was tapping into a widespread fear of the increasingly powerful China. Visiting Tokyo, one can almost feel the deep pulsing boom of economic growth from across the East China Sea, like the approaching footsteps of a new Godzilla.
 
 
In 2003, a senior official at the National Police Agency in Tokyo told a researcher that clashes between the yakuza and the Chinese gangs were proliferating. He explained this as the consequence of a "conflict over turf and the low price that Chinese assassins charge for the job. A Chinese gangster will do three jobs for the price a yakuza will charge for one." 
One night in 2002 in Kabuki-cho, two heavies from the Sumiyoshi-kai swaggered into the bar of the Parisienne, a restaurant popular with all kinds of mobsters: Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese, north-easterners, Shanghaiese and Japanese. They closed in on a group from the Chinese mainland and demanded money. As the discussion became heated, one of the Chinese pulled a gun and fired. The first yakuza fell dead on the spot; the second was mortally wounded. 
The murders brought swift retribution from the yakuza. "After the two Japanese were killed, Chinese clubs were firebombed," recalls Agata. "Faecal matter was spread all over them and I think some dead Chinese were found lying on the rail tracks. That's the last we heard of them ... Nobody has been arrested yet and we don't know who the Chinese were. Nonetheless, the yakuza sent a clear message that if you mess with the mafia, then this is what you get. I think the message was well communicated." 
 
 
What is less well advertised, however, is the symbiotic relationship between the yakuza and Chinese gangs in cities such as Tokyo, Yokohama and Osaka. Increasingly, the yakuza outsource the punitive deployment of violence to Chinese gangs. "The mainland Chinese don't care about this," a Taiwanese businessman, who travels under the radar as he moves between China, Taiwan and Japan, explained. "If they are caught, they face a short spell in jail and then deportation. Then the snakeheads bring them right back here. And the yakuza will go out and commission them again." 
 
 
The implication of this is extraordinary - the yakuza are combating their recruitment difficulties by subcontracting Chinese groups to carry out the least attractive and riskiest part of their business. When I ask one old yakuza hand whether he thinks Chinese organised crime has come to represent a long-term threat to the yakuza, his smile broadens into a smirk. "Let me put it like this," he says. "If I was a broker, I'd be telling my clients now to move out of yakuza stocks and start investing in the triads". 
 
[B]· [/B]McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers, by Misha Glenny, is published by Bodley Head, price £20. To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p, go to [URL="http://www.guardian.co.uk/bookshop"][U][COLOR=#cc3300]guardian.co.uk/bookshop[/COLOR][/U][/URL] or call 0870 836 0875.

dam thats crazy.

Deep, Great reading.

nice read

Why they all got to copy...
[IMG]http://www.multimediapalace.com/fl/eu-flags-02/it-flags/it-sicily-flag.gif[/IMG]

Haha, sorry, just looking out for the real OG's.