The Yakuza Part 2: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Feared Mafia
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Hello and welcome to the Underworld Podcast, where we dive into the secret worlds of transnational organized crime with me, Danny Gold, and my co-host, Sean Williams. Hey, hey. Today, we've got the second part in our podcast about the Yakuza, Japan's famous mafia, where we had already talked about the history of the samurai and ronin, ancient vigilantes, and...

My bad tattoos, cutting off pinky fingers, and guys who potentially masturbated during sworn fighting class maybe had sex during it. We didn't figure that out. There was a lot to take in. And if you haven't listened to it, go back and listen and come back here right afterwards. So at the end of the last episode, we were talking about the stuff leading up to the Second World War, right? The ultra-nationalists, Kadama, his spies in China, and the bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nakazaki.

And we left with the head of the US Army in occupied Japan telling us how the Yakuza are, quote, the greatest threat to American democratic aims in Japan. Well, that's complete crap, to put it mildly. Let's go back to our pal Yoshio Kodama. He's the gangster who was rounded up for trying to kill moderate Japanese politicians in the early 30s. He established a spy and drug network between Japan and China in the years leading up to the war.

and he became one of Asia's richest men, potentially, on the back of all of them. Yeah, how is that complete rubbish then? I mean, he sounds like a pretty big threat to all this stuff going on, you know? Are we going to learn more moving forward that throws that out the window? We're going to learn that the US Army and the throes of the Cold War wasn't particularly being truthful with what they were saying. In 1947, they did actually lock him up, though. Kodama was thrown in prison by the Americans as a war criminal. So, so far, they're sticking to their word. But...

But it's the late 40s, and the US is gripped by McCarthyism. They're shitting themselves about a communist uprising in Japan. So who do they turn to? Naturally, the racist Sakuza drug dealer who'd spent the last couple of decades cosying up to fascists.

In 1948, the American government gets Kadama out of prison, by which time he's already written a couple of books about his life and work, kind of a my-camp moment. He also gets to be buddies with a bunch of right-wing politicians, and that's going to become really important later on. The US actually does this with a load of Japanese nationalists who'd been locked up after the war, and it just basically sets them three out into the community to break up leftism over the country.

Cops who often had similar kind of political ideals wouldn't touch these guys, and Japan kind of turned into a right-wing free-for-all. The CIA actually paid Kadama and his thugs to beat up leftists, which was on brand for them during the Cold War, I guess. At one time, it paid them to smuggle tungsten out of China, but he screwed them over. He claimed the boats sinked, and he took the cash for himself. He's pretty much the king of Tokyo at this point, and that's one of the biggest cities on Earth, so you can imagine how powerful this guy is.

Around this time, late 40s, early 50s kind of time, the Yakuza are getting mega powerful. Food and supplies are scarce after the war, and that leaves room for gangs who are good at smuggling to begin with, and they control entire markets. One of them is meth, which the Japanese army had created in tons to keep its soldiers wired, and Yakuza ship it all over the region, making it their primary product. So this is like the precursor to Yaba and everything like that, huh? I didn't know anything about that. Yeah, this is the OG. Yeah. Yeah, this is the stuff that like...

Hitler is injected into his backside and all the German troops are doing him pills on the front line and stuff. They were doing the same in Japan, yeah. And yeah, once the war ended, then you just got stacks and stacks of this stuff waiting to be sold. And probably a whole bunch of addicts too. Oh, tons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also like prostitution skyrocketed at this time as well because there's no economy basically and women are desperate to claw anything out of a broken country because they're obviously ready and willing to take a big chunk out of that as well.

In 1958, Tokyo's cops estimate there are around 70,000 Yakuza across Japan, which has itself around 90 million people. Five years later, it's 184,000. In 1960, Americans are still pushing the Yakuza, using them as heavies to put down leftist demos during a state visit by Dwight Eisenhower. And they're about to get way more powerful.

But I kind of want to rewind for a moment because a lot of this episode is going to focus on Japan's most powerful Yakuza family and how it's swallowed up massive swathes of the country's underworld in its path. This is called the Yamaguchi Gumi, and anyone who knows anything about the Yakuza knows that name and their black diamond-shaped logo that they still use today.

So the Yamaguchi Gumi starts out in 1915, when tons of these groups are springing up as a kind of labor dispatch service by a fisherman called Harakichi Yamaguchi in the port city of Kobe, which is, yep, where we get the famous beef from. But while the Yamaguchi Gumi carries its founder's name, there's another guy who's its spiritual godfather. Kazuo Toyoko was an orphan who grew up in a shipyard.

While Yoshio Kodama is committing all these fascist, overtly political acts, Toku is just a straight up and down street thug by all accounts. And people like to call him Kuma or the bear. He loves to fight. And guys use him to settle disputes on the docks. Ah, the docks. Are the docks still a scene these days? Because so many good legends and stories come out from the docks back in the day. I believe so, yeah.

I mean, they're scrubbing the ship down in the docks. They're selling the meth down in the docks. And this guy's beating the crap out of other guys down in the docks. It's all happening there. It always starts and ends right at the docks. This ain't going to be no different. In 1936, Tohoku is arrested for slashing a guy to death. And he spends the lion's share of the war behind bars. I don't know.

I got the word slash from the source online. I don't know how you slash someone to death. That sounds pretty awful. But just like we learned with Kodama, prison is no barrier to success in post-war Yakuza world. Touka is one of those who profits from Japan being in tatters as well. And his Kobe goons create this giant mafia out of pretty much nothing. By the 60s, the Yamaguchi Gumi has 13,000 members and it's got his fingers in all kinds of pies, illegal and legal. Full fingers in the pies or just the digits that were left after they...

I reckon his guys maybe even got two or three fingers, so maybe they're not so good with that stuff. I mean, these guys are like...

crazy fighters, as we're going to find out. They quickly sweep all of the gangs in Kobe. They actually move over to Osaka, which is Japan's second largest city. Like other gangs, the Yamaguchi Gumi adheres to these ancient legends of the so-called Bakuto gamblers. But Seika's difference is his ruthlessness, as you might imagine, and violence.

And many Yakuza outfits team up to become stronger, but at the time, he wants none of it at all. In 1963, he even turns down a request from Kodama himself to form a Tokyo-Osaka Yakuza Federation. By 1965, Toyoka's dox firms alone are making him $140 million in today's money, and he even starts up a movie company. How was he making money on the dox? Just...

Bringing stuff in, bringing stuff out, charging fees. Like what are we talking about here? He's basically running like a labor union. So he's bringing guys in. He kind of runs everyone that's working down by the water. Now he's like going into movies. He's making these glitzy films about Yakuza that's kind of glamorizing their lives. And they go around fighting the bad guys and always saving the township from, you know, these kind of bad dudes and the government are against them.

Cops barely touch him because they still want to keep crime organized. And Taioka even works with them to eliminate foreign gangs from Korea, Taiwan and other nations nearby. We're trying to grab some of Japan's giant illicit market in drugs, sex, gambling and other rackets. Can you talk a bit about what you mean by keeping crime organized? Like what the cops, why they're doing that and what it means?

Yeah, I think it goes back to the stuff we were talking about in episode one, about all this tradition and hierarchical structure, right? So Japan is such a traditional society and culture that I think that there's this really, really deep, pervasive thought that things are just better when they're organized. And I think because Japan's crime stats generally are way lower than other Western nations, Japan's

People in charge of the country and the cops and even the citizens are really into this idea that, you know, you keep them in the suits, you keep them doing high level stuff and it's not going to break down into chaos. And that kind of runs through this entire story of the Yakuza. It's really, really powerful force for them.

So as you imagine, by the 60s, everything's going their way. They're getting money from everything, the Yakuza. And Japan's politicians are totally in their pockets. And it's not just the far right, by the way, who work with them. Centre and left politicians start realising that without the Yakuza, they might as well kiss power goodbye. Kodama is still the spiritual leader of the Yakuza at this point. And in 1964, he forms this federation of Yakuza in the greater Tokyo area. But he's got a problem.

Fights are breaking out between the Yamaguchi Gumi and the Inagawa Kai, a big family in Yokohama, led by Kajugi... Led by Kajugi... Oh, fuck's sake. You got this, man. Come on, you got this. And the Inagawa Kai, a big family in Yokohama, led by Kaguji Inagawa, a former soldier. Yeah, we'll leave that in.

There. Kadama's still on his anti-communist crusades at this point, and he thinks the violence is turning Japanese citizens against the Yakuza. They've somehow managed to keep that Robin Hood image we mentioned in the last episode, and he wants to keep it firmly that way. So he broke his peace between the two gangs, and at first it seems like a pretty solid move. But Kadama's old school.

So he broke the truce to send people out to put

petition yeah he's basically sending those guys that like clubby for charity stuff in the street right just greenpeace guy he's sending the equivalent of greenpeace guys who are against drugs and that that initiates war all right interesting yeah he's uh it's like a it's like a kind of passag move i guess yeah yeah sending his uh chants into the street do you have this phrase chants never mind no no no idea no i don't think i want to know what it means either

Yeah. So this obviously riles up the Inagawa Kai, but Inagawa's men are no match for Toyoka's thugs or connections. And after spending some jail time and seeing his numbers shattered by the Yamaguchi Gumi, Inagawa concedes defeat to Toyoka in 1972, and the Yamaguchi Gumi pretty much are more powerful than they've ever been. So in the 70s, US officials estimate the total haul of all Yakuza families to be around $500 billion in today's cash.

Meth and speed are still their cash cows, and they take a lot of members from biker gangs called Bozozuku, or Speed Tribes, who are the chief peddlers of meth and other stimulant drugs. These guys are kind of a mirror of Yakuza families, but they're younger, and the Yakuza tend to look down at them for that. Are these, like, Harley-style biker gangs? Like, outlaws and banditos? Or are they dudes on Japanese bikes? Oh, man, this is like... This is like, imagine that on steroids in Japan. Like, these guys...

Bolting on old bits of steel to cars. They look like Mad Max hot rodders. They're completely fucking bonkers. So not like on Japanese-style bikes? Because we're talking two very different kinds of leather in that situation. We're talking guys who are getting 250cc Suzuki's and turning them into something out of an anime. It's like...

It's batshit and they wear like jodhpurs or like sprayed silver leathers and stuff like this. They look like futuristic kind of

I don't know. They look like aliens, basically, but they're also setting speed, because why not? Sounds awesome. The Yakuza branch into a ton of other countries at this time, as you might imagine, including the States. So they target places with large Japanese expat communities like San Fran and L.A., but it's nothing like Hawaii, which actually today still has the largest community of Japanese Americans.

By the late 80s, Japanese investors run all but one of the hotels in Waikiki, many of which are highly suspected, obviously, to be Yakuza. This gets so much that the mayor of Honolulu actually calls for a ban on foreign, i.e. Japanese, investment in the city. He doesn't get his way, obviously. But the 70s and 80s are really when the feds start knocking on the Yakuza's door, and there's way more to come there later on.

It just seems like such a bad move for these organized crime groups. I understand if, you know, America's a ton of money, a lot of money to be made here. But if you're doing well not on American soil, then you enter American soil and you get the attention of the feds. Like, it just doesn't... It rarely ever ends well. I guess, like, was Hawaii at the time kind of a bit of a forgotten backwater? Maybe the feds weren't really that, like...

clued up there. They didn't really give a shit. Any excuse they can use to go after someone involving American action. You know, they go after places, people that don't even operate in America if they're sending stuff into America. But...

Yeah, it's just like a risk-reward thing there, man, and they must feel like the rewards are worth the risk. Yeah, they're going to do a lot more crazy stuff in America as well as this goes on. In 1976, there's this massive corruption scandal with the US playmaker Lockheed Martin, which brings down Japanese PM Kikue Tanaka. This is a moment David Kaplan calls Japan's Watergate.

You can find it in the Wikipedia article Lockheed Bribery Scandals, by the way. Yeah, great research. The most amazing thing about it, Yoshio Kodama had actually been working as a secret agent for Lockheed for over 15 years by that point.

After that, Kodama was kind of too hot to handle, though, and he fell from power pretty quickly. There was tons of public outrage about his work for the Americans, and in 1977, this failing actor called Mitsuyasu Maeno flew his plane into the Godfather's Tokyo home, screaming the Kamikaze war cry as he died in a ball of flames. This is crazy, man. Please tell me there's a movie about this guy. Actually...

I can't find anything. Like, maybe there is something in some, like, backstreet VHS store in Tokyo, but nah. I mean, there needs to be, right? There needs to be. Yeah, just like some weirdo, taxi driver-esque, loner, dark indie film. Like, that's perfect. Yeah, old boy, but for Kodama, right? So, Kodama was in another wing of the house at the time, and he escapes unhurt. This is a pretty useless kamikaze mission for this guy, right?

but it was a pretty symbolic act against a guy who'd been untouchable for decades. And he died in 1984 with his power in tatters. In 1978, Kazuo Toyoka survives an assassination attempt at a Kyoto nightclub by a member of the Matsuda Gumi, which is a local rival to the Yamaguchi Gumi. The shooter's found dead soon after in Kobe, of course, but Toyoka kicks off this gang war that went against the traditional codes of the Yakuza altogether, and it horrifies the public.

Soon after Yamaguchi Gumi declared an end to the war, and in the style of a group whose activities now stretch way into the legal economy, it did so with a press pack for attending journalists. Can you imagine that? It's pretty solid access. But they, I mean, they clearly, they just won the war, right? He must have wiped the floor with their rivals. Yeah, yeah, he totally did. It's not the first time. It's not going to be the last.

I mean, this was arguably the pinnacle era for the Yakuza. Just like in the States, Japan goes through this economic boom in the 80s, fuelled by electronics and other exports, the Yakuza get into every little bit of it. This is how Kaplan describes it. While Japanese crime syndicates remained embedded in their traditional fiefdoms, a new breed of Japanese gangster was emerging, both at home and abroad.

We saw the gangs moving from gambling dens to the stock market, from construction gangs to real estate, and from local feudal structures to multinational corporate ones. Kind of reminds me, there's like an old Russian gangster saying from the 90s, which is, why rob a bank when you can be the bank? And why, you know, dip your fingers into drugs when you can just build entire cities, which is pretty much what these guys are doing, and the drugs, and the pimping, and everything else, actually.

So, these guys are still the tattooed, fingerless crooks who'd taken over after the war, but they're smart-dressed now, rich, a world away from the poor untouchables they claimed they were. They're still drug dealers, and they're still running prostitution rings, but they're stockbrokers and bankers as well. Japan doesn't have a RICO Act, so it's almost impossible to crack down on the mob as a whole, and they go global, buying assets everywhere and elbowing out local mobsters.

The Yakuza's are just kind of armies of golden geckos taking everything. It's a wave. They even start doing this crazy thing called Sokaia, which is when corporate gangsters blackmail companies by threatening to humiliate them at the AGM. It's mad, this thing. These guys buy enough stock in, say, Sony to get into the ballroom, and then when they're there, they'll just start threatening all these suits that they're going to cause a bunch of trouble unless they're paid off.

This thing becomes totally commonplace during boom time Japan. And the list of firms who paid these bizarre bribes is pretty much most big Japanese brands. One time mobsters threw a bottle of whiskey at a company leader, which I guess is what tons of people wanted to do to Mark Zuckerberg. I want to do it to Mark Zuckerberg.

So these guys are the real deal and they're acting completely untouchable. They've got their own Yakuza offices with the name of the gang and its logo on the door and the gangsters just go around in suits with little badges of the gang on them like the fucking Rotary Club or something. They've got photos of present and past leaders there as well. Maybe they've even got employees of the month or something.

I think I've seen business cards, too, that actually list that they're a member of this mafia or organized crime organization. Yeah, yeah. They don't give a shit at all, these guys. I mean, that sign thing, it's like having a big office in downtown Manhattan with Gambino headquarters, New York division on the front, right? I love it.

That stuff's going to stick around, and they control plenty of the media as well, including the movies. Even the Japanese version of Kaplan's book, which loads of the information in this pod is from, got pulped at first in the mid-80s when the publisher backed off under pressure from a super right-wing mob boss, and it didn't even come out till the early 90s. These are the high times for the Yakuza, but things are about to go completely haywire, particularly for the Yamaguchi Gumi.

Its rise has been completely ridiculous at this point, and it's swallowed up almost everything in its path. In 1980, Teoka tries to take over gangs on the northern island of Hokkaido, but he fails, and a year later he dies from a heart attack, leaving the gang to his widow, Fumiko. Wait, are these different Yakuza gangs on the island? And like, what's the structure? There's a lot of these gangs all over, right? And Yakuza, it's kind of like the title Kimura, it's just a catch-all for...

basically Japanese gang? Yeah, pretty much. The Yakuza is the Kachou, the Ne'er-do-wells, or however you want to translate that. But below them, there's all of these different families. At this point in 1980, there's dozens if not hundreds of them. Many of them are getting subsumed into the Yamaguchi Gumi and other big ones. Today, there's way, way less, but there's still quite a few. And they have their own little carved out bits of territory all over Japan.

So at this point, the Yamaguchi Gumi is under the control of Toyoka's widow, Fumiko. But in Japan's deeply sexist society, there's no chance a woman's going to run the country's biggest mafia, which at this point is more like a franchise with 587 gangs and 13,346 mobsters in its control. So Fumiko chooses a kumicho, or boss, Masahisa Takenaka,

That pisses off his rival, Hiroshi Yamamoto, who gathers 3,000 members to form his own rival gang, the Ichiwakai. The war begins on January 26th, 1985. It's a Saturday night. At least four Ichiwakai men arrive in the black car at the Osaka apartment of Takenaka's mistress. As Takenaka and his two highest gang bosses step into an elevator, a hail of bullets rip through their bodies. All die of their wounds.

In one violent act, the Ichiwakai has swept away all of the top leadership of the Yamaguchi Gumi. This launches off a murderous so-called Yama-Ichi war, the bloodshed for which has never been repeated in Japan. 220 gun battles rage against four years, killing 26 gangsters. The Ichiwakai's chairman home is even suicide bombed. That's a lot for Japan too, because generally they almost have like no murders, right? I mean, American cities just have so many...

like typical murders that I feel like that kind of thing would still be bad, but it wouldn't be as, as egregious. But in Japan, I mean, their murder rates got to be like minuscule compared to the murder rate here.

Yeah, it is. I'm going to get into some of those stats later. But essentially at this point, the Yamaguchi Gumi and the other gangs are like corporate raiders as much as they are sort of street level thugs. So for them, peacetime is profit and they really want to keep that. You get the odd sort of slurring up of violence. Yeah, I mean, it's smart and it's very, very Japanese. Yeah.

But it doesn't kind of go to plan. I mean, in one insane episode during this war, the Yamaguchi Gumi buys a stack of weapons from what turns out to be FBI agents in Hawaii, including three rocket launchers. They pay for with 52 pounds of meth and 12 pounds of heroin worth 56 million bucks.

Literally a smoking gun case, right? Well, no. The defense argues that the Japanese word height doesn't just mean yes, but also I understand what you're saying. And get this, the jury lets them off. I don't understand how that works. They're saying that the guy wasn't saying yes, just that he was understanding what they were saying? Yeah, yeah.

So you go to Hawaii, right? You're a Japanese gangster. You tell an FBI agent that you want to buy a rocket launcher and you've got heroin. He says, okay. And by saying yes to that deal, you're actually saying, I just understand that this is what you're saying. So, yeah. Oh, so you understand the terms of the deal. That was the defense. We understand the terms of the deal. We're not saying yes to the deal. Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah.

shouldn't work. It shouldn't work because I'm guessing that if you're on a foreign island looking for rocket launchers in return for heroin, you should probably... That should probably be the smoking gun, right? But apparently not. Yeah, that alone should make you guilty. But anyway. Yeah. I imagine the judge was pretty pissed off at that one. But...

By 1989, the Yamaichi war is over. An Ichiwakai boss presents his chopped off finger, can seize defeat, and a more low-key guy called Yoshinori Watanabe becomes the boss of the Yamaguchi Gumi. By 1990, it and the Tokyo-based Sumiyoshi Kai control around half the entire underworld in Japan. But that Robin Hood image, right, that we mentioned before? After years of destruction, it's really dying.

By 1992, Yakuza membership has dropped off from almost 200,000 in the 60s to 80,000. In 1995, mobsters helped rescue efforts after the giant Kobe earthquake that kills over 6,000 people, a big step in its attempt to claw back respect, but it's fighting an uphill task.

People still have this fear that breaking up the Yakuza will cause crime to spill onto Japanese streets, though. And a businessman tells Kaplan that, quote, if you destroy the Yakuza, where will all the criminals go? This is kind of like doing the kingpin theory in reverse, where, you know, a lot of times American law enforcement think if they take off the head that they're

that it'll shut things down when it just creates chaos. Here, they're letting the head stay there because if they break down everything, they think it'll just cause chaos. Yeah, totally, totally. That's like the biggest ethos running through the cops in Japan throughout this entire history. Just to give you some ideas of where they're coming from, actually, the crime stats that they're so scared of. Compared to the US, Japan has four times fewer crimes committed. The murder rate's a fifth.

and gun crime isn't even comparable. I think last year Japan had 48 gun murders and America had 9,369. Yeah, baby. But anyway, this is also not, like I looked this up, Japan's murder rate is way, way lower. I think Japan's murder rate is something like 0.25 and America's is around 5, which is actually lower than I expected. But it's more than just, it's way less than just the fifth. I'm screwing them over. Yeah, okay.

People are scared that these kind of figures are going to shoot right up if the Yakuza are destroyed, right? So Japan's cops, they don't destroy them. They kill it with a thousand cuts instead.

A succession of anti-gang laws slowly dent the mob's ambitions over the years. That's not to say the Yakuza are a spent force. Politicians are constantly being caught with ties to the mob, and cops are still paid off. In 2007, gangsters killed the mayor of Nagasaki. In Jake Edelstein's brilliant book Tokyo Vice, he shows how raids are often announced to the media before they've even happened, rendering them useless to let gangsters clear up contraband and the like.

There's a movie actually coming out of that book soon, so I'm hoping to get Jake on the pod for an interview, so watch the space for that. Jake's biggest scoop in that book was actually showing how Yakuza boss Tadamasa Goto led an insurrection after being thrown out of the Yamaguchi Gumi. Like tons of...

with their heavy smoking, drinking and all over body tats, Goto was suffering from liver failure and caused a pretty big stir when it was revealed he'd made a deal with feds to get a transplant at UCLA. But at the highest level, despite everything that's gone before, Japan's police are actually quite canny by this point. In 2007, they warned the public that Yakuza are screwing up the nation's economy.

So always go for the economy. And in 2010, they go on this campaign to clean Yakuza from sumo, the national sport, which itself has this kind of almost spiritual place in Japanese culture bound with the Shinto religion. It's as much to wash away that honour from crime bosses, really, to dislocate them from the public. That same year, citizens take to the streets of Fukuoka, which is a mid-sized city, to demand this really violent group called the Kudokai, who'd even petrol-bombed the official home of Shinzo Abe, be kicked out of town.

A year later, Japan passes this massive bill that prevents people from doing business with known Yakuza, which blasts entire chunks out of their business clean off. Since then, membership has been in free fall. Supporting the public is still weirdly high, actually. And as late as 2015, over 60% of people said they supported the Yakuza's existence. It's kind of this necessary evil. But it's all in free fall now, right? It's interesting, though, how they have this thing where they seem very concerned with...

how they appear and what their PR is and what their image is. You know, I don't think you see... Obviously, in some organized crime elements in different countries, they want to be portrayed as heroes to the public and stuff like that, but they're not as majorly concerned as these guys are. Yeah, these guys have this kind of...

sticking point. I mean, they're almost acting as if they're corporations, right? It's like corporate social responsibility and they're trying to show that they're not just sort of batting for the citizens, but they're actually batting for the country itself and they're actually a good thing for the economy and

security and all these kind of weird things that are going on yeah it's totally fascinating in 2013 the yamaguchi gumi even releases its own magazine which is filled with mundane articles on fishing poetry and other stuff that mobsters presumably like but two years later the group splits when boss kanichi shinoda kind of looks like this japanese johnny depp decides he's going to go down tayoka's old path and bans drug dealing his biggest source of income

Yeah, I googled that dude and he does indeed look like Johnny Depp, but not like young, cool Johnny Depp, just old, weird Johnny Depp that refused to change out of the wardrobe for Pirates of the Caribbean. Yeah, totally. Totally. It's not, it's more the passed out by the side of the bed Johnny Depp, right? Right, exactly. Yeah.

So in 2017, the Yamaguchi Gumi has this other split over what some of them say are just unfair membership fees. So are you getting the idea by this point these might not be the warriors of old? And the US sanctions Yamaguchi Gumi leaders. So it's pretty much on its ass these days.

Here's a great quote Jake Edelstein got from a police officer last year. Quote, As long as the Yamaguchi Gumi thugs are warring against each other, I don't see much of a downside. It just reduces the number of Yakuza in the end, and it weakens the power of the groups. They're throttling their own throats. There are barely 5,000 Yamaguchi Gumi members today, ahead of the Sumiyoshi Kai's 3,000. Across the whole of Japan, there are only 28,000 Yakuza mobsters. That's a third of MetLife Stadium, by the way.

Where did you pull MetLife Stadium? Like, there's no way you know where MetLife Stadium is or what sports are played there. I'm just trying to get on the American level, you know? Like, apparently it's something. I don't know. I don't even know what it is. Half of all Yakuza are age 50 plus these days and just 5% are under 20. The anti-gang laws mean that Yakuza can't even get bank accounts, insurance, even phone contracts. And the police are arresting more and more of those who carry on with the lifestyle.

Young guys just don't want to be gangsters in Japan anymore, basically. Why do the hard work and become a gangster when you can just be one on like a video game, you know? Exactly, exactly. I've got a quote here from one guy, right? He says,

See, this is a failure of PR. You know, they need like influencers because I know all the moron teens in the U.S., all they want to do is be a gangster and pose with the, you know, the fancy cars and the money and the women. And Japan, it just sounds like the opposite right now. And they're just not, they need to hire influencers to come over there and really show, you know, spread the word and get recruitment levels up. You're saying that instead of doing like public cleanup acts, they just need to get on Instagram and they'd be all right.

100%. Yeah, fair. Yeah, I mean, ultimately all of this is good news, right? I mean, like, there are less gangsters on the street, there's...

Fewer organised criminals running around everywhere, and yet it feels such a whimper of a death knell from a group that once ruled the country, more or less. Here's a really depressing quote from a Nippon.com article. This is so depressing. Recently quoting a mobster, he says,

And when we do go out, it's the somewhere owned by relatives, the younger members, women. So we keep it in the family. It's not too depressing. It just sounds like being in your late 30s. You know, we go out less. We drink at home or with our friends' companies or at the office. It's just like, you know, it's par for the course when you get to that age. Yeah, I mean, they're actually the Rotary Club, right?

I mean, they're definitely not the samurai of old. The brazen Bakuto took on the country and basically won. They're just old guys drinking at home, shirking trouble and keeping the meter ticking over. And when they get a chance to claw back some PR points from the public, they're out scrubbing shit off the diamond princess. So yeah, that's the story of the Yakuza from high to low, low to high, wherever you want to see it. But these guys have had a crazy history.

Yeah, it's a sad decline. But thanks again, everyone, for tuning in to the Underworld Podcast. I want to thank our audio producer, Dale Isinger, who's been doing an amazing job cleaning these things up when me and Sean continuously mess up. And again, check the Patreon, patreon.com slash the Underworld Podcast. Give us some money so we can keep doing this and keep you guys entertained. But for now, later. See ya.