The Yakuza Part 1: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Feared Mafia
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Welcome to the Underworld Podcast, where we dive into the secret world of the underground and organized crime groups and things of that nature. I am Danny Gold, and I'm here with Sean Williams, and we have an episode today on the Yakuza we're going to be bringing you. But first, I think we have an update, yeah? Yeah.

Yeah, we got some comeback on our first episode. Remember Arkans Ice Cream Parlor? Yeah, I do. Yes, I do. Yeah, so someone got back to us about that. They said that their parents were diplomats in Yugoslavia at the time. And they said that this place, it was like visited by groups of men dressed in suits.

traditional Serbian outfits and at night they parked their vans and armoured vehicle by the ice cream shop so it's just as shady as you might think it was. Do we have a verdict on the actual ice cream itself? Like whether it was good or not? What kind of flavours they had? I got nothing on flavours but I quote the ice cream was good those days anything out of the ordinary in Belgrade seemed the best thing on earth so...

I think that's about as good as we're going to get right now. I mean, it sounds like the bar was set pretty low in terms of good flavors for ice cream. I'm not imagining that the Balkans were the top place for getting your ice cream.

You know, your vanillas and your chocolate chip, stuff like that at the time. But they said another thing about it was that it was the first public space in Belgrade with a satellite dish. So everyone from out of town would come and gather around to watch like foreign football matches and that kind of stuff. So it's kind of like he managed to find this kind of hipster like meeting spot outside the football ground. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And that's it? I mean, do they have anything else to add?

No, not really. I mean, they said that they stopped going because it got a bit too sketchy, but I don't know how sketchy Arkans Ice Cream Shop has to get before you decide that it's gone beyond. I don't know. Does it start? Yeah, I think it started pretty sketchy, but either way, I'm glad that our listeners chimed in. Look at this. We're keeping it interactive. People coming in. We're doing callbacks to previous episodes. I mean, this is a professional outfit. Yeah, we're listening to you guys. We're really, really listening.

Anyway, so onto something completely different. What do you know about the Yakuza? They're pretty big, but does anyone really know that much about them? I mean, I know about the tattoos, and that's why if I ever go to Japan, I can't go into a traditional bathhouse, which sucks. Right. Because I definitely don't look like a Yakuza person. I know that they're the inspiration for when I really fuck things up, and I offer to cut off my pinky for people.

But actually, I'm going to ruin the bit of it because I know actually a lot of... I read Tokyo Vice, which was a great book about the Yakuza. Yeah. But I'm sure I'm going to learn more right now from you. Yeah. I mean, you're sporting all your tats there as well. You've got a vest on. You're showing it all off. So we're going to get to that. It's hot here. Yeah. I don't usually do the podcast shirtless. I'm not shirtless. Potentially. I'm like... You can say that. You can get the listeners going. Let's get going. All right. Cool. Well...

I mean, we're going to get into the tattoos and the finger cutting, which is all pretty grim kind of stuff and quite sort of salacious. But I want to start this episode somewhere really, really different. You know, we usually kick off these shows with some kind of a crazy scene, like a brawl or a boxing match or a murder or like some kind of attack or something like that. There's plenty of that going on in this, but I want to start somewhere a little different, right? So it's a bunch of middle-aged guys scrubbing shit off a cruise ship. Like literal, literal shit? Uh...

I mean, possibly. I mean, when I tell you about the story in a minute, it might make more sense that there is some shit going around. But that might not sound like the sexiest opening scene you've ever heard. But over the course of the episode, I'm going to show you how that kind of sums up where the modern Yakuza have got. You know, they're this feared mafia, kind of renowned around the world, steeped in crime, tradition, everything. But, you know, they've fallen on kind of hard times. Haven't we all? Exactly, right? Yeah.

Says all podcasters. Do you remember the Diamond Princess, that cruise ship that had a COVID outbreak and had to quarantine for like a month and all these people are trapped in this dock?

Yeah. Yeah, I do. It seems like a different lifetime back then, but yeah, I remember all the cruise ships going through that. Yeah, remember when cruise ships were the biggest concern? That was great, wasn't it? Yeah. That was fucking awesome. So this February, the Diamond Princess is docked in Yokohama, which is a port city that's part of greater Tokyo, and no one really knows what to do with it at all. So eventually the passengers are allowed to get off. I think like 14 of them died or something. But now Japan has a massive liner that's riddled with the virus, and they've really got no clue what they're going to do next.

So enter this bunch of aging Yakuza mobsters, all tatted up. They offer to scrub the Diamond Princess themselves, right? And one of the leading members tells a reporter, humans like us should do the dirty work. It seems like a nice thing to do, right? It's very noble. Yeah, yeah, this is like community service, right? But is this really what one of the world's most feared mafias now does with its time? Wash muck off boats for a few brownie points? Well, yeah, actually, but...

That thing the gangster says about humans like us doing the job, that's actually really important. It goes back hundreds of years to when the Yakuza were a very, very different outfit. So here's a story about how samurai became scrubbers. There's an absolute ton of wild shit along the way, so don't worry about that. Okay, so let's get things started on this episode of the Underworld Podcast. Let's do it, man. Yeah, Danny, you ever been to Tokyo? Ever been to Japan? Yeah.

I have not. I never wanted to way back when for a while because I always thought it was too expensive, everything I heard about it. But I had friends that have gone recently and everyone just swears that it's just a wonderful place to visit and a wonderful culture to explore. I mean, I obviously was a fan of Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift. I mean, who isn't? It's probably the greatest Japanese film of all time, right? Yeah, yeah. Just a purely complete accurate representation of the culture and what to expect there. Actually, we're going to...

get into some of that later on as well so it's good that you mentioned that I'm not sure how many of these episodes that we're going to do are going to go like hundreds of years back maybe we're going to do something on Roman or ancient Greek math is or saying when we like episodes 580 or some shit let's get historical man people people dig it yeah let's get some crossover listeners right

So the origin of the Yakuza stretch all the way back to the early 1600s, actually, when military dictators or shoguns declared rule over Japan with hundreds of feudal lords taking control of the islands.

These lords had used samurai, who are these kind of high-caste grand warriors, to keep an eye on the masses during wartime. But when the shogunate takes power, it's like this really hard military dictatorship. So ushers in peacetime, and loads of the samurai just get laid off. Yeah, that's a tough thing to figure out. It always seems like a common thread in organized crime or in war.

of revolutions or insurrections in general is that, you know, when you have soldiers or violent people getting laid off and with nothing to do, they try to find somewhere where they can take their skillset. If you look at like the Russian oligarchs and the mafias that took over in the 80s and 90s,

Lots of their hitmen and their soldiers were actual former soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan and couldn't find work, or KGB guys, officers, law enforcement, things along those lines. Yeah, I mean, when you tool a bunch of guys up and then you give them nothing to do, then you're going to expect trouble, right? So you get these, like, in Japan at that time, you get these so-called ronin or drifters, and these are samurai with no masters. I think they're plastered all over Japanese movies, and there was that crap thing.

action film with Robert De Niro or something in the 90s, but... Dude, that movie ruled. Yeah? Cool. All right. Let's move on. And then...

So instead of sitting around all day and getting wasted, right, they form their own groups. And these are called Hatamoto Yako or Servants of the Shogun. By the way, I'm going to butcher loads of Japanese in this episode. Just beware. I think that's one thing that we can promise viewers is that like viewers, listeners, is that every episode we will just completely mispronounce just a ton of terms. It's not a, you know, we're not insulting anyone here. Just deal with it. It's going to happen. It's all good.

They call themselves the servants of the Shogun. You might have seen the wild battle dresses of samurai in films or museums, and these groups carry on the flame. They wear crazy, colourful outfits, they use these long katana swords, and they give themselves names like the All Gods Gang, which is pretty good, by all accounts.

Yeah, top name, respect for that. Yeah, yeah, they're good at this stuff. So they go around robbing, terrorizing towns and generally causing mayhem. Some of them carry out this particularly gruesome act called Tsuji Giri, which is basically just cutting random people's heads off with katanas and robbing them on the side of the street. So these guys are pretty nasty guys, right?

It's one way to send a message, yeah? Yeah, yeah. Understandably, the shogunate wants to rub out this menace. So his forces round up tons of ronin and execute a bunch of them. The All Gods gang leaders were killed in 1686, for example. But there's another line of defence against their gangsters, and these are the really important ones. So these are townsfolk that banded together to form vigilante groups called machi yako. These are usually just guys from the village or ronin who didn't want to necessarily cut random people's heads off in the street.

People love these ragtag guys and they become these kind of folkloric Robin Hood style characters in Japanese history defending the weak from the strong, noble outlaws, this kind of thing. Wait, so these guys banded together to fight against the unemployed samurai? Yeah, yeah. These are kind of like just these neighborhood watch guys that are going around making sure that the ronin don't clatter through and kill everyone in sight.

So these Machi Yako, they're the ones who modern yakuza actually believe they're the natural heirs to. But there's probably plenty of the ronin in there too and it gets pretty mixed up when you get to history.

So fast forward about 100 years and Japan is still run by these really restrictive feudal overlords. There's really very little protection for people beyond the state. For working class Japanese, the country is a wild west. Among them, there are two classes of people that are particularly at risk, peddlers and gamblers. This is when the first organized yakuza start to appear.

They run protection rackets for peddlers and gamblers from thieves and fervent authorities. As time goes on, these gangsters run construction projects even and get in bed with the government. So you can kind of see where these Italian mob kind of similarities are coming in at this point, right? Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a typical story, but it's interesting, man. I didn't know any of this. It's fascinating. Yeah, these guys are kind of like just low rent racketeers come good.

And they keep on, you know... And thanks to all these hazy tales and noble fighters, the Japanese mafia, as they're kind of banded together now, is able to paint itself as this higher-minded force, fighting for the people, even when they're fleeting them for personal gain themselves.

So there are tons of fable-like stories of Robin Hood-ish gangsters fighting evil authorities, and there's steeped in rigid Japanese concepts of tradition and honour that are going to come in way, way, way later in this story. There's a bunch of good ones, but my favourite is definitely this guy who, air quotes here, like, broke celibacy during a sword fighting class, then cut his arm off to say sorry. So that's a hell of a danger wank right there.

What the hell are you talking about? Can you just explain what you just said? There's a story, right, of this guy. He's doing, he's like one of the members of these groups and he's taking a sword fighting class. And he says, it says that he broke celibacy during the class. I mean, I mean, maybe he was screwing someone else, but I'm guessing he was just sitting there having fun. But then to say sorry, he cuts his own arm off with his sword.

It's a fucking bizarre story. But yeah. All right, moving on. So there's a caste element to this as well, right? So a lot of these Yakuza come from this caste called the Burakumin, which is basically Japanese version of the Dalits or Untouchables in India. They often wind up doing things nobody else wants, like butchery or grave digging. A lot of them live in squalor, and by the mid-1800s, there's about half a million of them in a country of 33 million people.

Yeah, I didn't even know there was a caste system in feudal Japan. Yeah, it's pretty rigid and it carries all the way through to today as well. There's a load of people who think that they're the natural heirs of these untouchables and as we're going to find out, they kind of turn it around and use it to their own advantage a bit. For these guys, yeah, the yakuza is a way to get out of poverty, right? It's something to do outside the system, kind of screw the government kind of thing. Social mobility, same as in Sicily, right?

Even today, around half of all Yakuza members identify with the Burakumin, though there's probably a lot of folklore thrown in there too, like with the Machi Yako stuff. But they're really good at stories, these guys. And that's partly why you get that Yakuza gangster telling the reporter he's cleaning the Diamond Princess because no one else will. They'll do the dirty work, the cops or state won't. It's a PR campaign. And they've done it before, during earthquakes and even the Fukushima disaster. Yeah, it's pretty brilliant, actually, when... You know, it's...

Handing out turkeys in the projects when you're the guy who runs the drug trade there at Thanksgiving. Or even the Hezbollah method of providing social services when you're starting out just to show that you're more than just criminals or a militia or anything like that. Yeah, like painting the churches in Medellin kind of stuff. It's like...

But we've got a lot of stuff to get through till we get to the Corona stuff just yet. Thank God. I want to also say at this point, a lot of information in this pod comes from two fantastic sources, right? So one is David Kaplan's Yakuza, which is basically a Bible of information on the group. And this is essential reading for anybody who wants to know more beyond this episode. I also got a bunch of cool stories from the History of Japan podcast, which did a two-parter on the Yakuza, I think like a few years ago. And that's really great.

But going back to the history, let's actually clear up what Yakuza means. So you know how some Yakuza come from that gambling cast, right? There was a cast of just gamblers, which is pretty... I mean, that's pretty cool. Yeah, and they were just trying to make a dollar, right? Just trying to get buyers to band together. Yeah.

Kenny Rogers cast? Yeah. These guys, they call themselves the Bakuto. And for much of Japan's history, gambling's banned, hence the trouble they often get into, right? So one of the most popular card games is called Hanafuda, a bit like Baccarat, apparently. Combination hand of eight, nine, and three was the worst you could have, and they spelled out Yaku and Za, which was also shorthand for gambler or, worse, good for nothing. And that's stuck with them ever since.

I kind of like that. So it was just, you know, they're just like, hey, we're these guys that are on the fringes of society. Good for nothing, wastoids. And like, this is, we're the Yakuza and this is what we're going to do. And we're going to, we're going to make our own destiny. Like, I kind of dig that. I'm buying into the folklore, man. I'm with it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you might identify with them a little bit less later on, but certainly at the start, they seem like pretty cool guys, right? I mean, they've got, they've got a story behind them.

Look, they like bathhouses and they have bad tattoos. That's 90% of my personality, so I'm with it, man. Come on.

Yeah, like they have this Robin Hood image. So like similar to so many mafias around the world. There's a guy who particularly sums this up. He's living in the 1800s. He's called Shimizu no Jirochu, which just means Jirochu of Shimizu, which is a city kind of near Tokyo. He was a Bakuto too, and he built his own Yakuza gang. But instead of tearing things apart, he built agricultural centers, a new downtown, even a prison, ironically.

People still visit his grave now, which is at the foot of Mount Fuji, and he's kind of seen as a grandfather of what's going to become the modern Yakuza movement. Obviously, this guy wasn't doing anything on his own, and the state was helping him out, right? So Yakuza at the end of the 1800s acted just like a state within a state, just like Italy's mobsters.

They operated under these strict family-like hierarchies with a father, or oibun, at the top, and kobun, or children, at the bottom, doing his dirty work. In between, there's capos looking after admin, legal, accounts, all kinds of stuff like that. It sounds like they're pretty organized and efficient as far as organized crime groups go. Yeah, they're super, super efficient, super pyramidal structure. And this is a big reason why the authorities haven't been able to clean these guys up, because...

They haven't really got the laws to deal with organized crime in Japan, even now. So God knows what it was like back then.

Initiates into these Yakuza gangs back then, they would normally do a ceremony with the father involving toasting sake and doing a blood bond. So seeing like a lot of similarities here with the European gangsters. They promised stuff like never to reveal gang secrets, snitch or attack other members' families, which just like Sicilian mafia wasn't exactly a cut and dry thing when it comes to the real world. Yeah, honor only goes so far, I guess. But yeah, frivolity.

For offences, these guys did actually cut their fingers off with a knife and present them to their bosses. It's called Yubitsume, and it goes back to when losing a finger would mean you couldn't grip your sword as well in battle, which is another shout-out to the samurai, of course.

You usually lose the pinky first. But in 1993, the Japanese government found that 15% of Yakuza had more than one missing. I feel like if I was Yakuza, I would be down to my toes by now. You know? Like, I would... I'd be running out of options. Yeah, I mean... I've got other people there who are missing every finger on their... on, like, one hand. You've got, like, no ears. Maybe a couple toes, too. Yeah. And, like...

I mean, I guess you're going to be taken off Hitman duty if you've got like a thumb, right? And nothing else. I don't really know what you're doing at the point at which you lose like three or four fingers, right? Do you just give up, call it a day and take a pension or something?

Yeah, at some point you just got to quit if you're losing three or four fingers per hand. It's just like you're not meant for this. Like it's time to leave the Yakuza life. Yeah, and then you get the Tats, right? And that's called Irizumi. So as you might imagine, the importance of them goes way, way back to back under the Shogunate, you could in theory get the dictatorship's tattoo removed.

like on your neck to avoid getting the death penalty if you got caught out doing anything dodgy but often the authorities would just slice the tattoo out before killing you so i'm not really sure what the point was there but you get this kind of early association between tattoos and outlaws and like the ronin the yakuza really went for it with all these flowery colorful images that go from neck to ankle which is really important actually it's not on the face and not on the hands or anything like

Loads get koi carp because, according to legend, koi can swim against the rage of a waterfall. It's all quite spiritual and poetic. It's hardly a naked chick riding a Harley, right?

Yeah, I really like the Japanese tattoo designs. I have a couple similar. You've got a choir for you. Yeah, I've got the flowers and stuff, but just the style of the way it's done, I've always thought it looked really, really great. And I don't think people who don't have tattoos realize how much time and effort and pain it takes to get a full body tattoo. Right.

Right. It's like hundreds and hundreds of hours, right? Yeah, excruciating. And I've always kind of wondered how, like when you're a gangster, how do they take care of them? You know, like how do they not get infected? When you're, you know, you don't have that much time off to run around putting wraps on and taking care of these things. You've got to run out and do gangster things. It's always mystified me. Right. I mean, it's like...

And they don't get like the tattoos that, you know, you get in the West, right? A regular tattoo parlor. They're going to get these stick and poke tattoos that take hundreds and hundreds of hours a go.

Yakuza gets so many of these like crazy traditional tattoos that they actually like often die of liver diseases. And there's still places like you said earlier that have signs out front saying no tattoos, which is basically saying no gangsters. So sometimes they have their own bath houses where they can go and show a tattoo off away from the cops.

Yeah, the ink, I think, is if you have too much in it, it can just kind of poison your system, which it sounds like happens to them, which makes sense for just covered head to toe. Yeah, yeah. And that's I mean, that's going to prove important later on when we're talking about one of the big gangsters, actually, and kind of how he got caught out. Yeah. So there's this key difference between Yakuza tats and the tats in other gangs like MS-13 or West Coast gangs. Like here's a Yakuza tattooist talking to a vice journal a few years ago.

Criminality doesn't interest us. Neither does plastic intimidation. We don't get tattoos to show off masculinity. A lot of our designs contain a scene from a story. If you wear the symbols of punishment as a tattoo, it's not cool. Because it means you got arrested for doing something small. In the Edo period, if you've committed a serious crime, you'd have your head cut off. It's weird talking about what's cool when we talk about crime. So you can kind of see where he's coming from there.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Yakuza are well established all over Japan and there's dozens of different families. They're entrenched in about every criminal activity you can imagine. Drugs, sex, gambling, racketeering, extortion. And they're building legitimate businesses with the help of authorities too.

Up and down the nation, cops tend to believe that if there's crime, it's better it's organised. Japan too is moving really, really fast at this point. It's kind of hurtling towards war. The economy is rattling along and mechanising, and just like in Germany, the UK, France and elsewhere, ultra-nationalism is getting really popular. You can imagine that with their strict hierarchies and traditions and working class backgrounds, there's plenty of crossover between far-right politicians and the Yakuza. And from the late 1800s, they're pretty much going hand in glove.

Tons of right-wing groups with bonkers names like the Ronin appear across Japan. These are really good. They've got massive ties to the underworld. So these are the Blood Pledge Corps Association for Heavenly Action. They pretty much just sound like Californian death cults from the 80s or something. Blood Pledge Corps is a... I mean, I'm sure they were terrible, but it's a solid name for a right-wing group, you know? Yeah, yeah. You pretty much know what they're going to be doing from that name, right? Yeah.

Yeah, you know what they're about. So there's this one group that kind of stands up above all of the others, and it's called the Dark Ocean Society. And it's made up of 300 Yakuza. And it's responsible for the assassination of the Queen of Korea in 1885. And that eventually leads to Japanese colonization of Korea in 1910. And that's one of many moves that's going to send the world tumbling into global war. According to one source at the time, quote, Yakuza groups were incorporated into early imperial Japan's political machine.

Shit's getting serious, basically. So they were crime groups or a wing of the government or both? These are like freelancers, but they're just so in with the government at this point. There's pretty much no telling them apart, especially the far right, who they kind of stay close to for decades and decades afterwards as well.

A year after Japan invades Korea, a kid called Yoshio Kodama is born. This guy is going to be one of the craziest characters in 20th century Japan, and he's a blueprint for the modern Yakuza. He grew up partly in occupied Korea, but Imperial Japan wasn't even racist enough for him. In 1932, Kodama's court planning hits on Japanese politicians he thought weren't right-wing enough, and he spent three years behind bars for a bombing campaign, basically.

And that's just where his story begins. It gets way crazier. By 1919, a national Yakuza network is established in Japan that links up loads of these families and political figures together. So their idea is, you know, it's better to stay together. There's not much violence between the groups. It's more, you know, that's more profitable for them. In 1930, Japan invades the Chinese region of Manchuria, which is kind of northeastern China between Russia and Korea. Um,

Kodama is one of the biggest beneficiaries of this. He makes a fortune selling opium to the Chinese, which is actually a matter of Japanese government policy to try and keep the locals addicted and out of action.

While there, he also creates a network of spies, the actual Manchurian candidates. Opium business back then. I mean, there's no money like opium money. Oh, yeah. I mean, that whole opium wars fought over it as well. I mean, and it's still massive, massive business in the Far East. Kodama becomes this so-called Kudamaku, or behind-the-scenes guy. These are the people dressed in black who they move around things in Kabuki theater. And he's amazing at it. David Kaplan describes him like this.

Kodama operated as a sort of imperial Japanese version of Catch-22's Milo Minderbinder, buying tungsten here, guns there, reselling them, and peddling vast stores of radium, cobalt, nickel and copper. He obtained the materials in China and Manchuria, forcing the Chinese at gunpoint to sell at pitifully low prices.

It was an incredibly lucrative effort, one that might easily be termed looting. I don't think people realize how many of these kingpins sort of arise from just an ability to do wheeler-dealer type of stuff, whether it's moving supplies that are legal, illegal, smuggling, and just kind of like organizing these big business deals and making money off that. And then when you throw in violence as a tactic into that mix, that sort of natural business mentality, it just...

I don't know. You'll go pretty far. Like, I don't know if a lot of people know this, but Jeff Bezos, actually, he murdered both Barnes and Noble before Amazon really took... You won't read that in the MSM, right? No, no. He beat the crap out of Carl Borders, the guy who founded Borders, just beat him half to death. And that's why he was able to take over and just dominate the market with Amazon. Yeah, people can go to your website where you're writing these true stories.

It's going to be great. I can't go. Yeah, we'll get there. That'll be a later episode. The rise of Bezos. Yeah. I mean, Kadama, the early Bezos is like, it becomes one of the richest men in Asia. So they're pretty similar. And he's standing at this perfect crossroads of politics and organized crime. And then the war hit and everything changed overnight. Right. Most Yakuza are drafted into the army and many didn't make it out.

It's worth saying that a quarter of all Japanese troops died during the Second World War, compared to 2.5% of American troops. So the whole Japanese male population is just totally fucking destroyed. The Yakuza who survived the war were being hunted down by authorities in the aftermath of the war too, as Japan tried to sweep up its organised criminals.

So the US occupied Japan in 1945, and the guy in charge, Colonel Louis Cardas, says, this clannish and clandestine combination of bosses, hoodlums, and racketeers is the greatest threat to American democratic aims in Japan. It's interesting if you read, I think, Naples 44. It's, you know, when the Allies have occupied part of Italy,

while the war is ongoing and just all the all the hustling that goes on between some of the soldiers and as well as the people there in terms of uh breaking things down stealing from the occupied efforts selling it racketeering gambling it really does give rise to such a powerful element of organized crime everyone's just getting their you know their sergeant bilko on yeah i mean last time i was out in um afghanistan actually i met this random like

german afghan guy who was like peddling gemstones from the areas of eastern afghanistan that were basically on fire the whole time and he was just like following around behind all of these battles just picking up all of these like priceless gems and mineral stuff and like yeah it's how it works right i mean there's always someone to pounce on the money when it all goes tits up yeah but forget even just just the actual war stuff i mean the the post-war

You know, there's just so much money flying around, goods, services, you need people, transpo, all that sort of stuff. It's just, it's wide open for someone to step in and just make a ton of money off of. Yeah. And I mean, that guy is going to be Kadama big time. So what Cardis is saying about the US and the Yakuza being a threat to democratic aims, that's complete bullshit. And America probably helped create the modern post-war Yakuza more than

more than anything else. Just always got to blame us, man. Like the Brits are so innocent, right? Like your, your, your legacy is that of innocence and not creating any other conflict, right? Yeah. I'm just gunning for that tanky money. So that wraps up episode one of this story about the Yakuza. We've got to the war. Everything's going batshit crazy. And in part two, we're going to get into the modern history of the Yakuza and kind of how these former samurai end up scrubbing crap off of ship.

Yeah, we're going to break this up into two episodes, two shorter episodes. We'll release them all. I mean, the next episode will be released, I think, at the end of this week. So let us know whether you like this better, what you think of it, because when we have longer ones, we're trying to figure out what to do.

But yeah, thanks again for tuning in to the Underworld podcast. I want to thank our audio producer, Dale Isinger, who's been doing a fantastic job making sure this thing runs smoothly and editing out all the mistakes that me and Sean constantly make as we do this. Yeah. Yeah. Once again, you can hear us. Obviously, if you're listening to us, you can hear us anywhere. But the Patreon is patreon.com slash the Underworld podcast. It'll keep us going. We have bonus episodes up.

and all other sorts of goodies that you can get there. But yeah, thanks again for listening and please tune in later this week for part two of our Yakuza episode.