Japan Aims to Squelch Organized Crime

Yakuza gangsters--the tattooed toughs who swagger through all levels of Japanese society from brothels to boardrooms--are beginning to worry.

Starting this month, they will face a new law that police believe will allow them to hit hard at the gangsters.

Police say the first target of the Anti-Organized Crime Law, designed to close legal loopholes that gangsters have exploited, will be the seven biggest crime syndicates.

The seven, headed by the 26,000-member Yamaguchi-gumi based in the western port of Kobe, account for more than half the nation’s yakuza .

Police say there are now 3,300 gangster organizations in Japan, with a total of nearly 90,000 members, who built a multibillion-dollar realm in the 1980s by sponging on the thriving “bubble economy.”

“We expect the law to be of great use in containing the yakuza ,” said an official at the National Police Agency, or NPA.

Although critics say the new legislation could force gangsters underground, where they would be even harder to control, it does seem to have alarmed the thugs themselves.

Yamaguchi and three of its biggest rivals held an unprecedented summit meeting last year to plot how to cope with the new law.

Little is known of what they decided, but it is believed they at least managed to agree to put a halt to intergang warfare in the face of the more serious threat.

The yakuza , long involved in illegal gambling, prostitution, drugs and protection rackets, are now increasingly to be found as shareholders in legitimate businesses, as well as “enforcers” in debt collection and evictions for land development.

Last year, it was revealed that subsidiaries of Nomura and Nikko, two of Japan’s biggest brokerages, had loaned a former gang boss a total of $288 million, which was then used to buy a stake in a railway and department store group.

“Nomura and Nikko are not isolated cases at all,” said one police officer. “There are such links between companies and organized crime everywhere.”

Yakuza groups are not illegal in Japan. For years they have existed openly, hanging signboards over their offices and providing members with visiting cards.

This picture is changing, however. Signboards are coming down, and group lapel badges and visiting cards are being hidden away.

According to newspaper reports, the yakuza are hurriedly trying to transform themselves into legitimate businesses or into political, cooperative or even religious organizations.

The typical yakuza wears a cheap-looking suit, a haughty attitude, dark glasses and short permed hair, all often enhanced by tattoos or the stubs of fingers cut off as proof of loyalty.

With their long record of violence and intimidation, the gangs are adept at scaring people into accepting their demands, an NPA officer said.

In the mid-1980s, when land and share prices soared, the gangs diversified from traditional underworld activities into business and started taking big profits from stocks, finance, construction and real estate.

They also offered big-muscle intervention in civil disputes by collecting bad debts, settling disputes over traffic accidents or forcing reluctant people from their homes to speed development projects.

In 1990, police recorded 22,844 cases of yakuza intervention in civil disputes, up from 18,707 in 1986 and 9,665 in 1981.

In 1989, the NPA publicly estimated annual mobster income from old-style crime at $10.4 billion.

Privately, though, many police and experts put the figure at between $16 billion and $24 billion.

By comparison, Japan’s largest firm NTT, with 258,000 employees, had 1990 sales of $49.6 billion.