The April 12, 2007, assassination of Nagasaki mayor, Kazunaga Ito, by a gunman linked to Japan’s largest organized crime syndicate underscores the increasingly violent gangster (yakuza) environment in Japan that has been cultivated by the interplay of recent economic, political, and organized crime developments and dynamics in Japan. The drivers influencing the outlaw environment include:
• the growing ranks of yakuza across Japan,
• the aggressive expansion of Japan’s largest yakuza syndicate—the Yamaguchi-gumi—to challenge and absorb other established yakuza groups, particularly in Tokyo
• this growth of yakuza groups within an organized crime landscape in Japan—in terms of economic and political turf—offering fewer economic profit and political power aggrandizement opportunities for yakuza due to:
o an overall tougher economic climate, and
o Japanese companies and governments becoming more resistant to yakuza racketeering
These fundamental drivers will continue to create an increasingly crowded, combative, and publicly threatening yakuza underworld in Japan. Yakuza groups will likely continue to battle each other in gangland skirmishes, and become more aggressive in their strong-armed racketeering and victimization of Japanese companies, politicians, governments, and Japanese civilians, as these groups vie for and consolidate increasingly sparse and coveted economic profits, political power, and turf to maximize their control.
Growth of Yakuza
Despite the imposition of anti-gang laws and police crackdowns, the number of yakuza in Japan has increased in the past decade to 84,700 according to Japan’s National Police Agency (see related Intelligence Report).
Most yakuza gangs operate in traditional organized crime activities: money lending, money laundering, extortion, gambling, and gun running. The yakuza have a virtual monopoly in Japan on drug trafficking, particularly from North Korea and China, and also prostitution. Yakuza gangs are among the wealthiest organized crime groupings in the world, bringing in billions of dollars.
In addition to classic organized crime operations, yakuza activities and influence have steadily moved into the legitimate business sector and politics. Yakuza run a number of legitimate businesses in the real estate sector—after having made large-scale purchases of land and shares throughout the 1980s and 1990s—and in construction, pachinko game parlors, and talent agencies. More sophisticated yakuza gangs have extended their ventures and influence to the stock market, major Japanese corporations, and politics. In addition to playing the stock market, “sokaiya” yakuza are major shareholding mobsters who extort large companies by threatening to disrupt shareholders’ meetings by revealing company secrets. Many major Japanese corporations have been caught paying off sokaiya in recent years. In addition to maintaining powerful influence at the local level, yakuza have also had major dealings with top politicians and business leaders. Experts believe that legitimate business ventures account for roughly half of yakuza total profits.
The Yamaguchi-gumi syndicate, consisting of 99 affiliated gangs, and believed to number some 40,000, is the largest and strongest of the yakuza organized crime groupings. The Yamaguchi-gumi has in recent years expanded into Tokyo from the syndicate’s base in Kobe, challenging for supremacy and attempting to seize turf from the Tokyo-based Sumiyoshi-kai gang. The Yamaguchi-gumi’s expansion into Tokyo and its recent clashes with the Sumiyoshi-kai have stoked a gangland turf war between these powerful rivals in Tokyo. This rivalry has in recent years killed or injured scores of mobsters and bystanders, including the high profile deaths of two Tokyo mob bosses earlier this year.
The Assassination of Kazunaga Ito
The police have said that Ito was gunned down by a member of the Suishinkai, a subordinate local gang of the Yamaguchi-gumi. The motives for the attack remain opaque, possibly involving personal grievances of the gunman against the city, as well as yakuza connections to right-wing political opposition to Ito. A key unknown is if the assassination was directed or sanctioned by Yamaguchi-gumi or the local Suishinkai leadership as an intentional and dramatic retaliation against or intimidation of local governments, or if it was a rogue personal operation by the gunman, Tetsuya Shiroo.
The emerging details of the attack, when placed within the context of an increasingly crowded, combative, and aggressively expanding yakuza underworld in search of profits and power—with the Yamaguchi-gumi leading the way—suggests the assassination was likely a flexing of Yamaguchi-gumi muscle against a Nagasaki city government that had resisted yakuza influence in business areas. Japanese companies and local governments have stepped up efforts to disassociate and distance themselves from yakuza, and Nagasaki has passed laws requiring companies to report all dealings with organized crime groups or be barred from bidding on public works contracts—a primary source of revenue for yakuza-linked construction companies. The New York Times reported that “A letter signed by Mr. Shiroo and sent to a Tokyo-based broadcaster just before the shooting reportedly expressed anger at Nagasaki for denying a contract to a construction company with links to him.”
Yakuza racketeering tactics against Japanese businesses and local governments have assumed a more aggressive posture as their existing business interests have been less profitable in the current economic climate. As an indicator of this growing aggressiveness the National Police Agency reports that it was contacted 2,391 times last year on issues related to violence against local government employees—an increase of 27 percent over the past six years.
Forecast: Growing Gangland Violence
These more competitive, violent, and publicly threatening organized crime dynamics will likely mutually energize each other, intensify, and serve as fundamental drivers of continued gangland conflict in the near to mid-term. Increasing yakuza violence will continue to spill over into Japanese city streets as it has in recent weeks with high-profile yakuza assassinations and related violence in Tokyo and Nagasaki.
Of particular note, Yamaguchi-gumi’s expansionism will likely continue and pose a persistent serious and provocative threat to established gangs across Japan, particularly those based in Tokyo such as the powerful Sumiyoshi-kai, and compel defensive and retaliatory violence and turf wars.
Though yakuza activities have not in the past focused on foreign business, the overall yakuza groupings growth, crowding, and jostling for organized crime opportunities and targets throughout Japan, coupled with the more aggressive posture among some yakuza in racketeering and intimidation of Japanese companies and local governments, may increase the potential that yakuza are pushed to target foreign firms for extortion or other organized crime rackets.
