Japanese Gangs’ Hold on Business Called Deep

It’s about time the Japanese woke up to the persistent hold organized crime has over corporate Japan, said Raisuke Miyawaki, a former police official who has continued his campaign against gangs.

Police revealed this month that the country’s oldest and most prestigious department store, Takashimaya Co., had been paying thugs linked to organized crime for years to keep shareholders’ meetings smooth and short.

“Various relationships between organized crime and corporate Japan remain undisclosed,” Miyawaki said. “And inside that ‘black box’ the gangs already have the upper hand, while those on the other side--the companies and financial institutions--feel constantly threatened.

“I’m concerned about the ‘Mafia’ spreading its influence over the Japanese economy.”

During his nearly 30 years with the police force, Miyawaki was on the forefront of the battle against the gangs, known as “yakuza,” or “boryokudan”--literally, “violent groups.”

Miyawaki said the Japanese, from senior officials in charge of law enforcement to ordinary citizens, had been lax about containing the activities of the boryokudan.

That, in turn, allowed the gangs to extend their reach into the financial and economic life of the nation over the years, and especially during the “bubble” economy era of the 1980s, when speculative investment boomed, he said.

On June 9, police arrested three former Takashimaya executives for their payoffs to gangsters.

The department store operator is suspected of having paid around 80 million yen ($734,000) a year to the gangsters for at least a decade, Japanese media reports said.

More revelations followed. Takashimaya and Osaka-based department store operator Daimaru Inc. said they had each lent 700 million yen to a construction company with gangster links.

Miyawaki wasn’t surprised to hear the news.

“Nearly 20 years ago, when I was head of the criminal investigations department at the Osaka police headquarters, we were already hearing rumors about Takashimaya’s shady connections,” he said.

Long-standing relationships between Japanese firms and organized crime are evidenced by frequent criminal incidents involving some of the country’s major corporations.

In 1984, employees in the president’s office of department store operator Isetan Co. were arrested for allegedly paying 1.05 million yen to gangsters. Sogo Co. was investigated in 1986 on charges of making a 150,000-yen payoff, and in 1988, three of Parco Co.’s managing directors were arrested in connection with a 1.5-million-yen payoff.

In 1992, the president of Ito-Yokado Co. stepped down after the supermarket chain operator’s auditors and managers were arrested on charges of paying 27 million yen to gangsters.

And it’s not only the retailers.

In 1993, the deputy president of Hanwa Bank Ltd. was shot to death in front of his home, followed by the murders of a Fuji Photo Film Co. manager and a branch manager at Sumitomo Bank Ltd. Those professional killings spawned media speculation about connections to organized crime.

On Thursday, more than 2,000 companies will hold their annual shareholders’ meeting. The concentration is in part aimed at limiting the “sokaiya,” or corporate extortionists, from interrupting the proceedings.

The number of individual sokaiya declined dramatically, to about 1,200 from about 6,800 by the mid-1980s, as a direct result of changes made in the commercial code in 1982, which were specifically targeted at weeding out the sokaiya, Miyawaki said.

After becoming the Japanese government’s first commissioner of public relations, Miyawaki served as an advisor to Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. and advertising giant Dentsu Inc.

Last year, Miyawaki set up his own office to continue advising corporate managers and to publish warnings on the scope of gang penetration in the Japanese economy.

“Japan needs a heightened sense of crisis,” he said. “It needs to investigate the reality of the situation, and to put the findings before the people.”