Japan’s crime syndicates, the yakuza, are pictured as nine-fingered killers covered in elaborate full-body tattoos and wielding nunchuks. To be more precise, these gangsters can gamble on the financial market better than Wall Street brokers, or deliver aid to populations in need more efficiently than the Red Cross itself.
The yakuza were reportedly the first to react to Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami last March. In the disaster’s immediate aftermath, they dispatched at least 70 trucks loaded with supplies worth more than $500,000, according to Jake Adelstein, a well-known crime reporter in Japan. In fact, they like to refer to think about themselves as ninkyo dantai or “humanitarian groups.”
“They are always in place when a disaster happens,” Adelstein tells Metro. “Since Japan is in a hurry to reconstruct, eliminating organized crime elements from reconstruction and waste disposal is simply not possible.”
Given a strict code of conduct that forbids its members from street crimes, prostitution and big heists, yakuza gangsters have traditionally been tolerated by Japanese society.
“There’s a general acceptance towards yakuza as institution,” explains David Kaplan, journalist and writer of Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld. “Japan always has had a philosophy of containment rather than punishment.”
For these mobsters, helping the population is partly about living up the code of honor they profess, partly to get a chunk in the big business of reconstruction.
Yet their affairs are not all about real estate investments. Just like any other entrepreneurial group, they also have been affected by the weak economic climate. Recent reports have emerged that financial brokers who helped disgraced
electronics group Olympus hide years of investment losses have links to
the yakuza.
“Obviously with less money around and a stagnant economy, there’s less money for them to make. So they have moved also to the financial sector,” Adelstein says. “Yakuza gangs invest in emerging stock markets, move money overseas and are involved in large-scale financial crimes. And then, of course, extortion, gambling and drugs are still making the revenues.”
As Kaplan points out, “Yakuza is the most entrepreneurial class in Japan, as well as the most adaptable one.” As to say, they are the next “Goldman Sachs, but with guns.”
