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The Yakuza: Japan's Secret Criminal Empire — From Black Markets to the Stock Exchange | History Sleep Story (Rain Sounds) · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Picture, for a moment, a city that no longer looks like a city.
• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is the late summer of 1945, and Tokyo is a landscape of ash.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The wooden neighborhoods that once pressed close together along narrow lanes are gone.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Burned away in the fire bombing raids of the spring, and what remains standing does so almost by accident.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: a single concrete bank building here, a shrine gate there, rising out of a grey sea of rubble that stretches in places farther than the eye can follow.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The war is over, the emperor's voice, thin and formal.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: has come crackling out of radios across the country to tell his people that Japan has accepted defeat.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now the great imperial machine that organized every Russian card, every factory shift, every soldier's movement, for more than a decade has simply stopped.
• 1:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Into that stillness, something else begins to move.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within days of the surrender, and in some neighborhoods within hours, folding tables and wooden crates appear at the edges of train stations.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Someone has bread.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Someone else has cigarettes taken from a military depot before it could be inventoryed.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Someone else has sweet potatoes, aspirin, black market rice, smuggled in from the countryside under a coat.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: These little markets have no government charter and no legal standing, but they have something more useful in that moment, organisation, muscle, and men who already know how to run an operation that the authorities are not supposed to know about.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: some of those men are pedellers, some are gambellers.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of them, in one way or another, are airs to a tradition of organised outsiders that stretches back three centuries into Japan's feudal past.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: A tradition that is at this exact moment, about to be reborn as one of the most durable criminal institutions the modern world has ever produced.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of the Yakuza,
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not the version you may have seen in film, with tattooed men in dark suits, standing behind glass walled offices.
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though that image is not wrong, it is simply the end of a much longer road.
• 2:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to walk that entire road together.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, from its roots in the licensed peddler guilds and gambling dens of old Japan,
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: the dirt rings of sumo stadiums and the shareholder meetings of some of the largest corporations on earth.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will meet the black curtain fixes who move between the criminal underworld and the prime minister's office as easily as walking through a door.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will watch a criminal fraternity built on honour and obligation, slowly transform itself into something closer to a holding company, trading gambling dens for construction contracts, and back alley extortion for corporate blackmail, and we will watch in the final chapters of the story.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: as the government of Japan finally found a way to strangle that fraternity, not with guns or prison sentences, but with paperwork, bank forms, and a simple, quietly devastating idea that anyone who does business with these men should be punished right alongside them.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before we begin, if you are enjoying the show,
• 3:52
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• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It costs nothing, it takes a moment, and it is genuinely the best way to help a small, independent show like this one, keep finding new listeners who might need a little help falling asleep tonight.
• 4:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, before we begin tonight's story, I wanted to say that sleepless history is independent with no network behind it, just careful research and quiet evenings.
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: If these stories have become part of your nightly routine, you can support the show on Patreon linked in the show notes.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Early access, add free listening, and your favorite episodes with different or no background audio are waiting for you there.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if that's not for you right now, that's okay.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Simply commenting or following the show helps just as much.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now let's go back all the way back to the peddlers and gamblers of old Japan because that is where this story truly starts.
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter one, the peddlers and the gamblers.
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: During the Edo period which ran from the year 16003 to the year 1868, Japan was governed by the
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: a military government that imposed an extraordinarily detailed social order on the entire country.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Society was formally divided into four ranked classes.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The samurai at the top, then farmers, then artisans, then merchants at the bottom, and everyone, at least in theory, had a fixed and permanent place within that structure.
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Travel was restricted, trade was regulated.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even the length of a sword a person was allowed to carry,
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: but no system, however detailed, accounts for everyone, and Japan under the showguns generated its own population of people who existed at the margins of that four-class order.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Itinerant pedellers who traveled from town to town and festival to festival, selling goods that were sometimes of questionable quality.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Professional gamblers who ran dice games and card games for the labouring classes, day labourers who moved from job to job without a fixed home, and former samurai who had lost their masters and their income, and now drifted through the cities looking for work or trouble, often both.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some historians trace an even earlier route beneath these two traditions, reaching back to the very first decades of the Edo period itself.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1600s, as peace settled over Japan for the first time in generations, following centuries of civil war.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: tens of thousands of samurai who had served defeated lords, suddenly found themselves without a master, a stipend, or a clear place in the new peacetime order.
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of these masterless samurai, known as Ronin, drifted into the growing cities and formed gangs called Kabuki Mono.
• 7:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: meaning the crazy ones, distinguished by outlandish clothing, unusual hairstyles, oversized swords and a taste for random violence against ordinary townspeople that terrorize the city populations for decades.
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: In response, some accounts hold that groups of local commoners organized their own bands of self-defense, known as Machiaco or
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: servants of the town to protect their neighbourhoods from the Kabukimono's depredations.
• 7:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether or not the Machiyako were quite as heroic in practice, as later folklore made them sound.
• 7:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: This rough origin story chaos, among a class of violent men, left over from a
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: communal self-protection that gradually developed its own hierarchy, its own turf, and eventually its own rackets set a pattern that the Tequia and the Bacuto would follow more concretely over the following two centuries.
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Out of these groups,
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and out of this general environment of social marginality within an otherwise rigidly-ordered society grew the two traditions that historians generally point to as the direct ancestors of the modern Yakuza, the Tequia and the Bakuta.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Tequia were pedulous but not pedulous in any loose or casual sense.
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were organised, hierarchical and in their own way, licensed.
• 8:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many to gear set up their stores at temple festivals, shrine markets, and seasonal fares, selling everything from candied fruit and toys to medicine with dubious effectiveness.
• 9:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because these markets could attract enormous crowds, and because disputes over store placement, pricing, and territory could turn violent very quickly, Tequia organizations developed their own internal governments.
• 9:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: A boss called an Oyerbung, presided over a group of subordinates called Kobang in a relationship modeled explicitly.
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: on that of parent and child, even though there was rarely any blood relation involved at all.
• 9:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: This effective family structure is one of the single most important threads running through the entire history we are covering tonight.
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: because it gave criminal organisations something most criminal organisations lack, a language of loyalty, obligation, and inherited duty that could bind men together far more tightly than a simple business partnership ever could.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: What made the techier especially interesting and especially important to the story of the Yakuza's later respectability,
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: is that local authorities under the Tokugawa Shogunat did not simply tolerate them in many regions.
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Officials actively worked with Tequia bosses, granting them a kind of quasi-efficient status.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Tequia Oyabun might be responsible for keeping order at a market, collecting a portion of the sales as a fee, and paying a share upward to the local magistrate.
• 10:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: that Oyabun and his organization received something close to a monopoly over trade within a given festival or district.
• 10:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is, in essence, a very old protection racket, dressed up as a licensing system, and it worked precisely because the Shogunat found it easier
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: to let one organized group police an unruly marketplace then to police that marketplace directly.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some techier bosses were even granted the right to carry a short sword, a privilege normally reserved for the samurai class.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: which tells you how seriously the authorities took their semi-efficient role.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Bacuto, meanwhile, came from a rougher and more explicitly illegal world.
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their name simply means gamblers, and that is exactly what they were, men who ran dice games, card games, and other forms of wagering for travellers along the great highways that connected Edo.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city we now call Tokyo to the rest of the country and for the laborers who worked on public construction projects, mines and irrigation systems, gambling was illegal under the showgreens.
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: which meant the Bacuto operated entirely outside the law.
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Running their gaming houses in the shadows and relying on their own private enforcement to collect debts and settle disputes.
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since no magistrate would hear a gambling debt case, this is where two of the most famous and most enduring Yakuza customs are generally believed to have originated.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first is the word Yakuza itself.
• 12:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It comes from a losing hand in a card game called Oycho Kabu, a game similar to Blackjack, where players try to reach a score of nine.
• 12:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The losing combination was eight, nine, three in Japanese, Yaku and Zam, a hand that added up to zero and was in the game worthless.
• 12:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gamblers began calling themselves Yakuza as a kind of dark joke, a badge of honour built out of self-deprecation, identifying themselves as societies worthless men, the ones with nothing to lose.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the following centuries, that nickname stuck, long after most people had forgotten the card game that produced it.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second custom is far more physical and far more unsettling.
• 13:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: You bit soon, the practice of ritualy cutting off the top joint of one's own little finger, as an act of apology or penance, usually to an oil burn, for some failure or transgression.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The traditional explanation for this practice reaches back to the mechanics of swordsmanship.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: A samurai's grip on his sword depended heavily on the smallest fingers of the hand, which controlled the weapons stability during a strike.
• 13:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: By removing the top joint of the little finger, a gambler symbolically weakened his own ability to defend himself, making him more dependent on the protection of his organization, a physical demonstration, carried on the body itself, that he had bound his fate to the group.
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether or not that explanation is entirely accurate in its details,
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The practice survived for centuries inside Bakuto and later Yakuza circles as one of the most visible signs of loyalty, discipline, and shared suffering within the fraternity.
• 14:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alongside Yubitsume, another custom developed that would come to define the Yakuza's public image for the next 300 years.
• 14:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eresume, elaborate full body tattooing, often covering the back, arms and legs.
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: in dense, colorful designs drawn from folklore, mythology, and nature.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a society where tattooing carried strong associations with criminality and punishment, convicted criminals in some regions were tattooed as a mark of their crimes,
• 15:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: inside out, embracing tattoos as a voluntary, painful and expensive display of toughness, commitment and willingness to live permanently outside respectable society.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: A full traditional irresumy could take hundreds of hours in years to complete.
• 15:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: administered by hand with sharpened bamboo or metal needles, and the willingness to endure that process became in its own way, another form of initiation, both the Tequia and the Bekuto, organised themselves around the same essential architecture, the Oya-Bun Kobun relationship, sealed through a formal ceremony called Sakazuki Goji, in which the new
• 15:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: would exchange cups of sake in a ritual echoing marriage and adoption ceremonies from the broader culture.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: This ceremony created bonds that were treated as more binding than blood, governed by a code the members called Jingi, meaning something close to humanity and justice.
• 16:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And by the broader cultural concept of Giri and Ninjo,
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The tension between social duty and human feeling that runs through so much of traditional Japanese ethics and storytelling.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing on this point, because it explains something that can otherwise seem strange about the Yakuza.
• 16:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Unlike many criminal organisations around the world that operate purely in secrecy, the Yakuza,
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost from their earliest recorded history, cultivated a public facing identity, built around loyalty, honor, and a code of conduct, even while engaging in extortion, gambling, and violence.
• 16:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: That contradiction, half outlaw, half institution would follow the organization for the next three and a half centuries.
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Japan moved out of the Edo period,
• 17:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The country underwent one of the fastest and most dramatic modernizations any society has ever attempted, transforming in a matter of decades from a feudal, agrarian nation into an industrializing world power with railroads, factories, a modern army and a parliamentary government.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: This transformation created enormous demand for Labour dock workers to move cargo through the newly open treaty ports.
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Miners to extract coal and metal ore for the new industries, construction crews to build the railways and roads the new economy depended on.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Techia and Bakuto organizations, with their existing networks of loyal, hierarchically organized men, were perfectly positioned to step into this labour market as brokers, supplying workers to construction sites.
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: docks and mines in exchange for a cut of the wages, a practice that would echo forward all the way into the post-war reconstruction boom we will cover later tonight.
• 18:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was also during this period of rapid change that organized crime groups began drifting into the world of politics, supplying high-admustle-called saucy to political factions who needed men to intimidate rivals,
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: break up opposing rallies, or simply provide a visible show of force during the chaotic early decades of parliamentary politics in Japan.
• 18:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: This blending of criminal muscle and political ambition, which might seem like a strange and modern innovation, was in fact simply a continuation of the old-to-care relationship with local authorities.
• 19:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: updated for a new era of national politics.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it planted a seed that would flower spectacularly in the decades after the Second World War.
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: When we meet men like Kadama Yoshio, who's entire career was built on exactly this fusion of crime, nationalism and politics.
• 19:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: One organisation founded during this later, more industrial period, deserves special mention, because it will return again and again throughout tonight's episode.
• 19:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: the Yamaguchi Gumi.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Founded in the city of Kobe in the year 1915 by a man named Yamaguchi Harukiichi.
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The group began as a fairly modest labour dispatching organisation, supplying dock workers to Kobe's busy harbor.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the time, nobody could have guessed that this small labour brokerage would, within a century, grow into the single largest organised crime syndicate
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: and one of the largest in the entire world, with tens of thousands of members at its peak, and a present stretching into nearly every major industry we will discuss tonight.
• 20:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The years leading into and through the Second World War brought a strange interruption to this long historical arc, Japan's militarist government, which had consolidated near total control over the
• 20:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: viewed independent power centers of any kind, labor unions, religious movements, and organized crime alike as threats to be suppressed or absorbed into the war effort.
• 20:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many Yakuza-linked organizations found their activities curtailed, their leaders conscripted or imprisoned.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: their gambling operations shut down by a government that had little patience for any rival source of loyalty among the population.
• 21:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some individual Yakuza figures, nonetheless found ways to profit from the war itself.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: particularly through connections to the black markets and resource extraction operations that sprang up in Japan's occupied territories in China and Korea.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Smuggling goods and materials that were in desperately short supply back home.
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of those men, a young ultra-nationalist and wartime procurement agent named Kodama Yoshio, was quietly building the fortune and the connections that would make him the single most important behind the scenes figure in post-war organised crime.
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But his story truly begins where our next chapter begins.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the ashes of Japan's defeat.
• 21:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: For now, though, simply hold this picture in your mind.
• 22:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two old traditions, the licensed peddler and the Outlaw Gambler, spent three centuries developing an entire parallel society, complete with its own family structures, its own rituals, its own code of honour, and its own uneasy,
• 22:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: with the official authorities above them.
• 22:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: That parallel society survived the fall of the Shogunat, survived the upheaval of modernization, and survived indiminished form, even the crushing weight of a militarist wartime government.
• 22:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now, as Japan's empire collapses into rubble and foreign occupation,
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: is about to be handed an opportunity, unlike anything it has ever seen.
• 22:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 2, Ashes and Opportunity, the black markets of Occupy in Japan.
• 23:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Japan formally surrendered aboard the Battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay in early September of 1945,
• 23:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The country that surrendered barely resembled the country that had gone to war less than four years earlier.
• 23:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roughly 2.7 million Japanese soldiers and civilians were dead.
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: 66 major cities had been firebond, with Tokyo alone losing well over half of its urban area to fire.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been erased by atomic weapons.
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Millions of soldiers and colonial settlers were being repatriated from former territories across Asia and the Pacific.
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Flooding back into a home country that no longer had the housing, the food, all the jobs to absorb them.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The formal economy.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: which had been organized around total war production for years, essentially ceased to function overnight.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rashinging systems collapsed under the strain, and into that vacuum almost instantly rushed the black market.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Japanese term for these markets was Yami Ichi, literally darkness market.
• 24:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they appeared within days of the surrender in every major city in the country, clustering especially around train stations where the largest crowds of displaced, hungry and desperate people naturally gathered.
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Tokyo, the most famous of these markets, sprang up in the districts of Shinjuku,
• 24:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Shinjuku market, sometimes called the blue sky market for the fact that it operated entirely in the open air with no roof over its rows of stalls, was established with remarkable speed by a techier boss named Ozu Kenosuke, who understood almost immediately
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the collapse of formal distribution channels created a staggering opportunity for anyone with the organization and the nerve to seize it.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: OZOO's group, sometimes referred to as the OZOO Gooming, set up stalls selling everything the official rationing system
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: could no longer provide.
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rice, sugar, cigarettes, alcohol, medicine, clothing, and countless goods diverted from military stockpiles before the occupying forces could properly account for them.
• 25:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Similar markets run by similar techier descended organizations, appeared in Osaka, Kobe,
• 25:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yokohama and every other significant city across the country.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The goods moving through these markets reflected the peculiar mixture of scarcity and opportunity that defined the entire era.
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alongside, diverted military stockpiles, black marketeers, sold goods, stripped from abandoned factories, medical supplies taken from military hospitals, American cigarettes and chocolate, bought or bartered from occupation soldiers, and a bewildering variety of homemade liquor distilled from whatever starchy scraps could be found.
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of it contaminated enough to blind or even kill the people who drank it.
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: A genuinely dangerous product that nonetheless found eager buyers in a population desperate for anything resembling normal comfort.
• 26:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: compounding the chaos, the occupation government's own policy of breaking up Japan's great pre-war industrial conglomerates, the Zibatsu, temporarily disrupted the formal distribution networks that had once moved goods from factory to retailer in an orderly fashion, pushing
• 27:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: since no properly functioning legal alternative yet existed to replace what had been dismantled.
• 27:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Japan's own police force, meanwhile, found itself remarkably ill-equipped to reassert control over this landscape on its own.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The occupational authorities had deliberately stripped much of the pre-war police apparatus of its former powers.
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: wary of recreating the heavy-handed, secret police style enforcement that had helped sustain Japan's militarist government, and for the first several years after the surrender, ordinary Japanese police officers were themselves lightly armed, poorly funded, and administratively fragmented into thousands of small municipal forces.
• 28:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: rather than organised into anything resembling a single strong national body, faced with black markets that were, in some cases, better organised and more heavily armed than the police sent to control them.
• 28:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Local authorities frequently found it more practical to negotiate an uneasy coexistence with tachia-desended market bosses than to attempt an outright confrontation
• 28:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth taking a moment to understand exactly why the Tequia were so perfectly positioned to dominate this moment.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Remember from our last chapter that Tequia organisations had spent three centuries running licensed and semi-licensed markets, complete with internal hierarchies for allocating stall space, collecting fees and
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: resolving disputes, without appealing to outside authority, when the formal economy collapsed, that exact skill set, organizing chaotic, high volume, cash-based trading in public spaces, backed by the credible threat of enforcement against cheats or rivals, became the single most valuable expertise in the entire country.
• 29:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The tech here did not have to reinvent themselves to seize control of the black markets.
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: They simply had to do what they had always done at a much larger scale with much higher stakes in a landscape where the normal restraints of law and order had temporarily disappeared.
• 29:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The American-led Occupation Authorities, operating under the overall command of General Douglas MacArthur, faced an extraordinarily difficult balancing act in these early months.
• 29:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Officially,
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Occupation Government was committed to demilitarizing and democratizing Japan, breaking up the great industrial conglomerates known as Zai Batsu, purging wartime militarist leaders from public life, and building the institutions of a peaceful democracy.
• 30:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the immediate on-the-ground reality of feeding, housing, and maintaining order among a defeated and desperate population of roughly 70 million people took precedents over almost everything else.
• 30:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the black markets illegal as they were were in practice keeping millions of Japanese civilians alive during a period when the official rationing system simply could not.
• 30:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Occupational authorities alternated between periodic crackdowns on the most flagrant black market operators.
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a kind of exhausted tolerance for markets that whatever their legal status were functioning as the only reliable distribution network left standing in the country.
• 31:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: This tolerance combined with a genuine and growing American anxiety.
• 31:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: about the spread of communism through the labor movement, created the conditions for a much darker and more consequential relationship to develop between the occupational authorities and organized crime.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Japanese labor unions, many of them influenced or led by socialist and communist organizers.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: began staging large strikes and demonstrations in the late 1940s.
• 31:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: American occupation officials grew increasingly alarmed that Japan might drift toward the political left at the exact moment the Cold War was intensifying across Asia.
• 31:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some occupation officials, along with conservative Japanese politicians and business leaders who shared that anxiety,
• 31:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: began quietly turning to organised crime groups to help break strikes, intimidate labor organisers, and generally serve as a counterweight to the political left, techier and Bakuto organisations, already flush with black market profits and always eager to expand their influence, were more than willing to take on this role.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: when we meet the man who turned it into a personal empire.
• 32:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it is important to plant the idea here.
• 32:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within just a few years of Japan's total defeat, organized crime groups had gone from a suppressed underworld to an informal, unofficial arm of anti-communist enforcement, tolerated, and in some cases actively encouraged by the very foreign occupiers
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The black markets themselves, meanwhile, were not simply a peaceful business opportunity that fell into techier hands without a fight.
• 33:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the defining conflicts of this early post-war period involved a group of people whose legal status under the occupation was genuinely, deliberately, ambiguous.
• 33:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ethnic Koreans and Taiwanese who had lived under Japanese colonial rule before and during the war.
• 33:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: With Japan's defeat, its former colonies in Korea and Taiwan were no longer part of the empire, and the roughly 2 million ethnic Koreans and smaller numbers of Taiwanese still living in Japan at the war's end.
• 33:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: occupied a strange legal middle ground.
• 33:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were technically citizens of newly liberated nations and the occupational authorities referred to them using the term Sango Kujin, meaning third country nationals not fully Japanese, but not fully treated as citizens of an allied power, either.
• 34:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: In practice, this ambiguous status meant that some of these communities operated with a degree of freedom from ordinary Japanese police authority in the immediate post-war chaos.
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And members of these communities drawing on their own tight-knit networks built up over years of discrimination and mutual support under colonial rule,
• 34:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: particularly around major train stations and in districts like Surahashi in Osaka.
• 34:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: parts of Shinjuku and Shibuya in Tokyo.
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: This created direct and often violent competition between ethnic Korean and Taiwanese black market gangs and the established Japanese Tequia organisations for control of the most profitable market territories.
• 35:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The single most famous flashpoint
• 35:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: in what came to be known as the Shibuya incident, a dispute over control of black market territory near Shibuya Station.
• 35:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: between a Taiwanese gang and Japanese police, reportedly backed in formally by local Yakuza linked groups, escalated into an armed confrontation involving firearms remarkable in itself, given how tightly the occupational authorities controlled weapons that left several people dead, including police officers.
• 35:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: and drew direct intervention from the occupations military police to restore order.
• 35:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Shibuya incident became a symbol of the volatile, multi-ethnic, often lawless character of Japan's immediate post-war underworld.
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it hardened the resolve.
• 36:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: of established Japanese-organized crime groups to reassert dominance over black market territory that they increasingly viewed as rightfully theirs.
• 36:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Out of this chaotic, violent and financially explosive environment, several organizations that would dominate Japanese-organized crime for the rest of the 20th century.
• 36:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: either emerged for the first time or dramatically expanded their power, the Yamaguchi Gumi, that Kobe-based Labour dispatching group founded back in 1915, underwent an enormous transformation under its third generation leader, a man named Tauker Casuo.
• 36:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: who took control of the organization in the post-war period, and pursued an aggressive and remarkably modern strategy of expansion.
• 36:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than trying to conquer rival organizations outright and absorb their territory by force, Tauker pursued what might be called a franchise model.
• 37:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Local bosses in new territories could join the Yamaguchi Gumi while retaining significant autonomy over their own operations and members in exchange for accepting the Yamaguchi Gumi's overall banner contributing tribute payments up the chain of command and gaining access to the protection, prestige and resources of the larger national organization.
• 37:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: This structure, which echoed the old Oyer-Bunco-Bun-Fictive Family model, but applied it at an organizational, rather than purely individual level.
• 37:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: allowed the Yamaguchi Gumi to expand from a single city labour brokerage into a truly national syndicate with remarkable speed, eventually stretching across most of western Japan and pushing steadily eastward toward Tokyo alongside the Yamaguchi Gumi.
• 38:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: several other major organisations rose to prominence in the same post-war years.
• 38:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Inagawa Kai founded by a Bakuto-desended gambler named Inagawa Kakuji and based primarily around Yokohama and Tokyo built its power on the old gambling traditions rather than the Takiyah market traditions, running gambling houses and expanding gradually
• 38:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later reorganised as the Sumioshi Rango, drew more heavily on Tequia roots, and became one of the dominant organized crime federations in Tokyo itself.
• 38:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: and in Tokyo's glamorous Ginsa Entertainment District, an organization called The To Say Kai, rose under the leadership of a man named Machi Hisauki, an ethnic Korean who had grown up in Japan and built a fearsome reputation as a street fighter before assembling his own crime syndicate.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The To Say Kai,
• 39:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: became so associated with maintaining order of a criminal kind.
• 39:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the Ginsa district that matche himself earned the nickname The Ginsa Police and his organisations later renaming as the Toa UI Jigio Kumiai, or East Asia Friendship Enterprise Association.
• 39:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reflected the increasingly common Yakuza strategy of dressing criminal organisations in the language of legitimate business and mutual aid.
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: a strategy we will see repeated again and again as this story continues.
• 39:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the end of the 1940s then, Japan's organised crime landscape had been utterly transformed by less than five years of occupation and chaos.
• 39:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organizations that had spent three centuries operating in the margins of Japanese society tolerated but never fully respectable had used the total collapse of formal authority to seize control of the actual
• 40:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: functioning economy that ordinary Japanese people depended on to survive.
• 40:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had fought, and mostly won a series of violent territorial conflicts against rival ethnic gangs.
• 40:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, most consequently,
• 40:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: for everything that follows in tonight's story.
• 40:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had begun forming quiet, mutually beneficial relationships with anti-communist elements within both the American occupation government and Japan's own conservative political establishment relationships that would soon produce one of the strangest
• 40:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: and most influential figures in 20th century Japanese history, a man who moved between prison cells, corporate boardrooms, and the prime ministers in a circle with equal ease.
• 41:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is to that man, Kodama Yoshia, and the entire era of political fixes he represents that we turn next.
• 41:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: chapter three, the man in the shadows, Kodama Yoshio and the politics of the underworld.
• 41:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every era produces a handful of figures, who seem to exist at the exact intersection of forces that most people never even realise are connected.
• 41:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: In post-war Japan, that figure was a man named Kodama Yoshio.
• 41:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And understanding his career is essential to understanding how the Yakuza transformed from a black market power into something far more dangerous.
• 41:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: largely invisible participant in the highest levels of national politics.
• 42:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kodama was born in February of 1911 in Fukushima prefecture, into a family that had once held Samurai rank, but had fallen into poverty by the time of his birth.
• 42:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: As a young man, he spent time in Japanese occupied Korea, and it was there, and in the years that followed back in Japan, that he became involved in ultra-nationalist politics, eventually forming his own youth organization dedicated to what its members saw as purifying Japanese politics of corruption and weakness.
• 42:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, throughout right violence and intimidation
• 42:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: This activity landed Kodama in prison multiple times before the Second World War even began for his involvement in plots against sitting government officials.
• 42:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than ending his career, this early brush with radical nationalism and political violence became the foundation for it.
• 43:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: During the war,
• 43:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kodama was dispatched to Shanghai, China, where he established an organisation sometimes referred to as the Kodama Agency, officially tasked with procuring strategic materials for the Japanese military nickel, cobalt, copper, and other resources essential to a wartime industrial economy.
• 43:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: In practice, this procurement operation functioned largely as an organised, looting enterprise.
• 43:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: extracting resources from occupied Chinese territory through methods that ranged from coercive purchasing to outright theft and by some accounts, bartering for supplies, using opium and other narcotics that Kodama's networks controlled by the time Japan surrendered.
• 43:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kodama had personally accumulated a genuinely enormous private fortune.
• 44:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some estimates placing its value in the hundreds of millions of yen, much of it in the form of gold, platinum, and industrial diamonds that he managed to repatriate back to Japan before the occupational authorities could seize the assets of Japan's wartime enterprises.
• 44:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: and his ultra-nationalist history, it should come as no surprise that Kodama was arrested by occupational authorities after the war.
• 44:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: and held in Sugamo Prison as a suspected class a war criminal, the most serious category of war crimes charge, reserved for those accused of planning or waging a aggressive war.
• 44:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was during his imprisonment in Sugamo that Kodama formed a close friendship with another prominent inmate, a wealthy right-wing financier and fixer named Sassakawa Riowichi,
• 45:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: who would go on to build his own parallel career as a power broker, philanthropist and controversial figure with his own deep ties to organised crime, particularly through his control of motorboat racing gambling, which became a major and entirely legal source of funding for right-wing political
• 45:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sasakawa's own post-war career deserves a moment of attention here because it illustrates just how thoroughly the line between crime, nationalism and respectability could blur in this period.
• 45:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: After his own release from Shogamo, without ever facing trial, Sassakawa built an enormous fortune by securing a government sanction monopoly over motorboat racing, a legal form of gambling that became wildly popular across Japan and generated a steady, entirely lawful river of cash.
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than keeping that fortune quiet, Sassakawa spent decades cultivating a public image as a generous philanthropist, funding hospitals, disaster relief, and international causes through an organisation that eventually became known as the Nippon Foundation.
• 46:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: even as critics at home and abroad, pointing to his wartime ultra-nationalism, and his lifelong friendship with men like Kodama, sometimes described him as one of the wealthiest and most successful fascists ever to operate openly within a democratic country.
• 46:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sassaka was career running in parallel to Kodama's for decades.
• 46:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: shows that the post-war fusion of organised crime right-wing politics.
• 46:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: and legitimate business was never confined to a single man operating alone in the shadows.
• 47:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, instead, a durable paddle, with multiple, wealthy and well-connected figures, pursuing strikingly similar paths at the same time, each reinforcing the other's legitimacy and reach.
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here is where the story takes its most consequential turn.
• 47:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than being tried for war crimes, Kodama was released from Sugamo Prison in December of 1948, without ever facing formal charges.
• 47:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reason for this release, now well documented by historians with access to American intelligence archives, was straightforward and deeply cynical.
• 47:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: American intelligence officials, increasingly consumed by anxiety over the spread of communism across Asia, judged Kodama's fortune, his extensive underworld connections, and his fervent anti-communism to be more valuable as an asset than his wartime conduct was worth punishing.
• 48:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: In exchange for his freedom,
• 48:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kodama agreed to support anti-communist activities for American intelligence operations in Asia.
• 48:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: A relationship that, according to later reporting, continued in some form for years after.
• 48:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once free, Kodama used his fortune and his newly protected status to become what the Japanese press would eventually call Akuro Makulitrily, a black curtain, a term borrowed from the stage hands who work invisibly behind the curtain in traditional Japanese theatre, controlling the action on stage without ever being seen by the audience.
• 48:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: into supporting conservative anti-communist political causes, playing a significant behind the scenes role in the 1855 merger of Japan's Liberal Party and Democratic Party into a single unified Liberal Democratic Party, the party that would go on to dominate.
• 49:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Japanese politics for most of the following seven decades.
• 49:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He used his connections throughout the Yakuza world.
• 49:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Connections that by some accounts allowed him to command the loyalty of well over 100,000 rightists and organized crime members were needed.
• 49:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: to help suppress labor disputes, intimidate socialist and communist organizers, and generally serve as a bridge between the conservative political establishment, the criminal underworld.
• 49:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: and, at least informally, American intelligence interests in maintaining a stable anti-communist Japan.
• 50:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps the most vivid illustration of Kodama's power came in 1960, during the massive public protests against the renewal of the United States Japan Security Treaty.
• 50:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: an agreement that committed Japan to a continued close military alliance with the United States and that many on the political left viewed as a betrayal of Japan's postwar pacifist constitution.
• 50:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: These protests
• 50:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: known in Japan as the Ampo protests brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators into the streets and threatened to derail a planned visit to Japan or by President Dwight Eisenhower.
• 50:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to multiple historical accounts,
• 50:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Prime Minister Kishinobuske, who had himself been imprisoned as a suspected war criminal, before being released in a pattern strikingly similar to Kadama's own, turned to Kadama to organize right wing, counter-demonstrations, and provide security, mobilizing Yakuza linked muscle to protect visiting American officials and confront the leftist protestors directly.
• 51:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is, perhaps.
• 51:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: the single clearest example in this entire story of the fusion between organized crime, ultra-nationalist politics, and the machinery of the Japanese state itself.
• 51:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: A former war crime suspect commanding what amounted to a private army drawn substantially from organized crime ranks.
• 51:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: deployed at the request of a sitting Prime Minister to manage a national political crisis.
• 51:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kodama's influence continued to expand through the 1960s and into the 1970s, and he became closely associating with a series of business dealings that blurred every possible line between legitimate commerce, political lobbying, and outright bribery.
• 52:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: He maintained close ties to major Japanese corporations, to conservative politicians across multiple administrations, and to the leadership of organized crime syndicates, including the Yamaguchi Gumi, serving in many respects as the connective tissue that allowed these otherwise separate worlds to cooperate without ever having to interact directly with one another.
• 52:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: that entire architecture of quiet, deniable influence finally collapsed in public view in 1976.
• 52:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: In what became known as the Lockheed scandal, one of the largest corruption scandals in post-war Japanese history, the Lockheed aircraft corporation an American aerospace manufacturer had been attempting for years to sell its commercial aircraft.
• 52:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: particularly a wide-bodied jet called the Tristar to Japanese Airlines, and had struggled against a Japanese government leaning toward a competing American manufacturer instead.
• 53:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lockheed through an American consultant and its Japanese trading company representative turned to Kodama, whose reputation as a fixer with extraordinary reach into both the business world and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
• 53:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: made him the obvious choice to help reverse the government's decision.
• 53:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the following years, Lockheed channeled a staggering sum, reported to be more than 3 billion yen into covert payments in Japan, including substantial brides to cadama himself, and to a number of high-ranking government officials, all aimed at securing the sale of aircraft to all nip on airways.
• 53:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The scandal became public in February of 1976 when a United States Senate subcommittee investigating multinational corporate bribery, chaired by Senator Frank Church, revealed the scale of Lockheed's covert payments around the world, including in Japan.
• 54:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The revelations caused an immediate sensation in Japan.
• 54:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: when newspapers described the unfolding corruption as Kuroi Kiri, a black mist settling over the nation's politics.
• 54:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: By July of 1976, the scandal had reached the very top of Japanese politics.
• 54:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Prosecutors in Tokyo took the extraordinary step of arresting former Prime Minister Tenaka Kakawai for his role in the affair, a moment that remains to this day, one of the most dramatic examples
• 54:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: of a sitting or former head of government being held personally accountable for corruption in post-war Japan.
• 54:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kadama himself, though his name did not appear as prominently in the American Senate's public report as some of the other figures involved.
• 55:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: was separately indicted on related charges, and his health already declining, deteriorated further amid the scandal.
• 55:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Lockheed affair effectively marked the end of Codama's active career as a political fixer, though he lived for nearly another eight years, dying in his sleep
• 55:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a strange and almost cinematic coder to his story, two years before his death, a disillusioned former pornographic film actor turned ultra-nationalist, apparently convinced that Kodama had betrayed the right wing cause he claimed to champion.
• 55:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: attempted to assassinate the aging fixer by deliberately crashing a small aircraft into his Tokyo residence in a suicide attack.
• 55:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The attempt failed and Kodama survived, though the episode captured in its own bizarre way, just how deeply Kodama's life had become entangled with the world of extreme nationalist politics that he had helped fund and
• 56:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kodama Yoshio's career matters enormously to the broader story we are telling tonight.
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not simply because he was a colourful and consequential individual, but because he represents an entire category of person that recurred throughout post-war Japanese history.
• 56:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: the Kuramaku, the black curtain fixer who made himself indispensable precisely by operating in the space between legitimate and illegitimate power, taking money from corporations, favors from politicians, and loyalty from organised crime bosses.
• 56:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: and converting all three into a form of influence that no single institution could fully see or control.
• 57:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kadama was the most famous example, but he was far from the only one, and the pattern he established organized crime as a silent partner in Japan's conservative political establishment.
• 57:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: useful for suppressing labor unrest, mobilizing crowds, and moving money that needed to stay off the books would echo forward for decades, well past his own death, shaping the environment in which the Yakuza continued expanding into the legitimate economy.
• 57:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: throughout the second half of the 20th century.
• 57:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is that expansion into construction sites, real estate deals, sumo stadiums, and shareholder meetings that occupies our next chapter.
• 57:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4, concrete, canvas, and paper, construction, sumo, and the stock exchange.
• 58:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the immediate post-war years were about seizing control of the black market and the following decades were about building political influence through figures like Kadama Yoshio, then the next phase of Yakuza history was about something even more ambitious.
• 58:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: quietly embedding organised crime into the legitimate above ground economy, so thoroughly that untangling it would become almost impossible.
• 58:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: No where did this happen more completely than in the construction industry, which became and in many ways remains, the single most important legitimate business sector for organised crime groups throughout Japan.
• 58:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The roots of this relationship reach back to the same labor-broken traditions we discussed in early chapters.
• 58:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Japan entered its extraordinary period of post-war economic reconstruction and growth through the 1950s and 1960s, a period in which the country's economy expanded so rapidly and so consistently that it came to be known simply as the Japanese economic miracle.
• 59:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: the demand for construction labor exploded.
• 59:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roads, railways, factories, housing, and eventually.
• 59:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, an entirely new layer of modern infrastructure, including highways and a high-speed rail line, all needed to be built at a pace that strained the country's formal labour markets.
• 59:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Day labourers gathered every morning in specific districts of major cities.
• 59:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most famously in Tokyo's Sanya District and Osaka's Kamagasaki District, hoping to be selected for a day's work on a construction site, a shipping dock, or a factory floor.
• 1:00:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Standing between these laborers and the construction companies that needed them, were men called Tahaiishi, labor brokers who arranged the actual placement of workers on job sites in exchange for a fee.
• 1:00:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Typically, deducted directly from the workers' wages before he ever saw them.
• 1:00:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: This labour brokering role, legally murky at best, and often flatly illegal, was dominated almost from the start by organised crime groups.
• 1:00:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: who had both the manpower to organize large pools of transient laborers, and the willingness to enforce payment and discipline, through means that no legitimate employment agency could use, for the construction companies themselves.
• 1:00:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Working with Yakuza connected labor brokers, solved a genuine and pressing business problem, reliably staffing enormous, time-sensitive infrastructure projects, and this practical value gave organized crime groups a foothold in the construction industry that proved extraordinarily durable.
• 1:01:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: This dynamic reached a particularly intense peak in the years leading up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, when the government poured enormous public investment into new highways.
• 1:01:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: a new international airport terminal, hotels, and the world's first high-speed rail line that took Hydoshin cancelled all on a compressed timeline that left construction firms desperate for reliable labour and willing to look past exactly who was supplying it.
• 1:01:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Olympics functioned, in effect, as a preview
• 1:01:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: of the far larger infrastructure booms to come over the following decades.
• 1:02:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: and organized crime's labor-broken role during this frantic building period helped cement relationships with major construction firms that would continue paying dividends in every sense of the word for years afterward.
• 1:02:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: That foothold expanded over time from simply supplying labor into something far more lucrative, managing the flow of the construction
• 1:02:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Japan's system for awarding public works contracts developed to widespread and for decades.
• 1:02:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: largely tolerated practice known as Dango, a form of bid rigging in which competing construction companies would secretly coordinate among themselves before a public bidding process, agreeing in advance which company would win a particular contract and at what price.
• 1:02:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Effectively eliminating genuine competition while creating the appearance of a fair bidding process.
• 1:03:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organised crime groups frequently played a facilitating role in these arrangements, serving as trusted intermediaries who could enforce the informal agreements between competing firms, punish companies that broke ranks by underbitting, and extract a share of the inflated contract value for their trouble.
• 1:03:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes through direct payments, and sometimes by inserting Yakuza linked companies as subcontractors on projects, regardless of whether those companies performed any meaningful work.
• 1:03:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beyond bid rigging, Yakuza-connected operatives became deeply involved in what is sometimes
• 1:03:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: to resolve ordinary civil disputes that would, in most countries, be handled entirely through courts and lawyers.
• 1:04:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Construction firms facing disputes over land rights, unpaid debts, tenant evictions, or contractual disagreements found it faster and often cheaper.
• 1:04:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: to hire Yakuza connected fixes to apply direct pressure than to wait for a slow-moving civil court system to resolve the matter.
• 1:04:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: This service, unglomerous as it sounds, became a significant and steady revenue stream for organised crime groups throughout the post-war decades.
• 1:04:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it directly set the stage for what may be the single most notorious episode of Yakuza involvement in the real estate business, the land-sharking of Japan's bubble economy.
• 1:04:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: To understand Giajia,
• 1:04:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: the land sharks of the 1980s.
• 1:04:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: You first have to understand the extraordinary economic environment that produced them.
• 1:05:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beginning in the mid-1980s and accelerating through the end of the decade,
• 1:05:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Japan experienced one of the most dramatic asset-priced bubbles in modern economic history.
• 1:05:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stopprices sought and real estate values particularly in Tokyo, reach levels that seem almost unbelievable in hindsight at the peak of the bubble.
• 1:05:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The land beneath the Imperial Palace grounds in central Tokyo was, according to widely cited estimates at the time, theoretically worth more than the entire state of California.
• 1:05:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Banks extended enormous amounts of credit against real estate, as collateral, developers scrambled to assemble large parcels of land.
• 1:05:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: for ambitious new commercial and residential projects.
• 1:05:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the pressure to acquire prime urban real estate by whatever means necessary became immense.
• 1:06:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The problem for developers was that much of Tokyo's most desirable land was occupied not by convenient empty lots, but by dense neighborhoods of small,
• 1:06:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of them held by elderly residents who had lived in the same modest house for decades and had no interest in selling, regardless of the price offered, assembling a large enough parcel for a major new development, often meant convincing or forcing, dozens of individual property owners to sell simultaneously.
• 1:06:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is exactly the kind of high pressure, legally
• 1:06:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: that organized crime groups had spent decades perfecting through their construction industry civil intervention business.
• 1:06:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Geogaea literally meaning those who raise land or land sharks were operatives.
• 1:07:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Frequently Yakuza connected, hired by developers to convince Cajol and when necessary, intimidate reluctant landowners into selling their property.
• 1:07:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: using tactics that ranged from persistent and unwelcome visits to harassment such as parking trucks that block to home's entrance or playing loud noise at all hours to more direct threats and
• 1:07:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: in a number of documented cases, arson attacks against properties whose owners refused to sell.
• 1:07:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The scale of geology activity during the bubble years was staggering.
• 1:07:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Entire neighborhoods in central Tokyo were transformed within a few short years, as Yakuza-connected land sharks systematically pressured long-time residents out of properties that developers, banks, and speculators desperately wanted to redevelop.
• 1:07:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: This activity generated enormous profits for organized crime groups, who typically received a fee proportional to the value of the land they helped assemble, and it also drew them deeper into the financial mechanics of the bubble economy itself.
• 1:08:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some Yakuza-linked figures moved beyond simple land-sharking fees.
• 1:08:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: into direct participation in real estate speculation, and in what was known in Japan as Zaitek.
• 1:08:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: or financial engineering using borrowed money to speculate in stocks, real estate, and other assets in pursuit of the extraordinary paper profits.
• 1:08:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The bubble economy seem to promise almost effortlessly.
• 1:08:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Golf club memberships and unlikely but genuinely significant asset class during the bubble years offer one small but telling illustration
• 1:09:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Memberships at exclusive Japanese gold courses were bought, sold and traded, almost like shares of stock during the bubble.
• 1:09:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: With prices for a single membership at a prestigious course, sometimes reaching the equivalent of a comfortable house.
• 1:09:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: and organized crime figures, flush with real estate and construction profits, were active participants in this market as well.
• 1:09:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Treating golf club memberships as one more speculative vehicle in an economy where nearly every asset seemed for a few giddy years to only ever go up in value.
• 1:09:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Japan's asset bubble finally burst at the start of the 1990s, triggering more than a decade of economic stagnation that Japanese commentators would later call the lost decade.
• 1:09:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The consequences for organized crime's real estate ties became painfully clear.
• 1:10:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: In enormous amounts of bank lending during the bubble years had gone to speculative real estate ventures.
• 1:10:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of them connected directly or indirectly to organized crime figures who had borrowed heavily against wildly inflated land values.
• 1:10:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: When those values collapsed, borrowers defaulted on mass, leaving Japanese banks and, in particular, a category of specialized housing loan companies known as Juson, holding
• 1:10:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The resulting Jews and crisis, which came to a head around 1996, revealed the full extent to which organized crime figures had been embedded in the speculative excesses of the bubble years, and it required a massive taxpayer-funded bailout to stabilize the affected lending institutions.
• 1:10:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: a bailout that provoked considerable public anger.
• 1:11:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once the scale of Yukusa involvement in the underlying bad loans became widely known.
• 1:11:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Construction and real estate were far from the only legitimate industries that organized crime penetrated during these decades.
• 1:11:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps no connection surprises newcomers to this history, more than the deep and long-standing relationship between organised crime and sumo wrestling, Japan's ancient national sport, steeped in Shinto ritual and centuries of tradition, and yet, for much of the modern era, quietly entangled with the criminal underworld.
• 1:11:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Organised crimes relationship with Sumo operated on several levels simultaneously.
• 1:11:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the most visible level, Yakuza bosses were, for decades, prominent and welcome figures at Sumo tournaments, occupying prestigious ring-side seats, known as Sunakaburi, literally meaning sand-covered seats.
• 1:12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So close to the ring that spectators there risk being shoured with sand kicked up during a bout.
• 1:12:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sitting in these seats was, and to some extent remains, a visible marker of status and connections, with in certain circles of Japanese society, and organized crime figures cultivated relationships with individual sumo-stables called Heir.
• 1:12:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes providing financial support to struggling stables, arranging ticket sales and promotional appearances, or simply attending tournaments as honoured guests.
• 1:12:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some individual wrestlers and even stable masters developed personal relationships with organised crime figures that went beyond simple spectatorship,
• 1:13:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: or maintaining social ties that Sumo's governing body, the Japan Sumo Association would spend decades trying with limited success to sever.
• 1:13:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Suspicion that some of this stable-level patronage crossed over into direct influence over sporting outcomes was hardly new by the time the scandals of 2010.
• 1:13:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: 2011 broke, journalists and former wrestlers had alleged matchfixing in Japanese Sumo for decades.
• 1:13:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the Japan-Sumo Association responded to these allegations on more than one occasion, not with investigation but with litigation, suing weekly magazines and their reporters for defamation, rather than opening its own inquiry into the claims being made.
• 1:13:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: This pattern of aggressive denial defended in court rather than examined internally, meant that when hard evidence
• 1:14:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: of both organised crime-linked gambling and outright match-fixing, finally surfaced through the seized phone records of 2010 and 2011.
• 1:14:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It landed not as a total surprise to longtime observers of the sport, but as the long delayed confirmation of suspicions that Sumo's own governing body had spent years actively trying to suppress.
• 1:14:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The darker and more consequential dimension of this relationship involved match-fixing known in Japanese as Yau-cho.
• 1:14:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rumors and allegations of fixed bouts had circulated around professional sumo for generations.
• 1:14:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: fueled in part by the sports unusual promotion and demotion system, in which a restless ranking, salary, and status depend heavily on winning at least 8 of his 15 bouts in a given tournament to avoid demotion to a lower division.
• 1:15:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: this structure creates an obvious incentive for collusion between wrestlers, a wrestler who was already secured his eighth win has comparatively little to lose by allowing an opponent desperately needing one more victory to win instead.
• 1:15:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: especially if the favour might be returned in some future tournament.
• 1:15:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Academic researchers who studied decades of official sumo results found statistical patterns strongly consistent with this kind of informal wrestler to wrestler collusion.
• 1:15:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though the Japan sumo association for many years publicly and vigorously denied that any such fixing occurred, even pursuing legal action against journalists and publishers who alleged otherwise.
• 1:15:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The connection to organized crimes specifically
• 1:16:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: rather than simply informal collusion between wrestlers became undeniable in a pair of scandals that struck Japanese Sumo in close succession around the years 2010 and 2011.
• 1:16:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the summer of 2010,
• 1:16:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Investigators uncovered evidence that dozens of wrestlers, along with senior officials within the sumo world, had been participating in illegal gambling on professional baseball games, organized through a betting syndicate that police determined was run by organized crime groups.
• 1:16:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: including members connected to the Yamaguchi Gumi.
• 1:16:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The revelation caused sponsors to withdraw from an upcoming tournament in Nagoya and threatened for the first time since the chaotic aftermath of the Second World War to force the outright cancellation of a major sumo tournament.
• 1:16:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: far more damaging still was what followed just months later.
• 1:17:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: In investigating the illegal baseball gambling ring, police seized the cell phones of numerous individuals involved and buried within those seized phones.
• 1:17:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Investigators discovered text messages between wrestlers that appear to explicitly discuss, arranging or fixing the outcomes of specific sumo bouts.
• 1:17:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: including negotiations over the exact payment involved in throwing a match.
• 1:17:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: This discovery made public in February of 2011, provided the first hard documentary evidence of match fixing that the Japan Sumo Association could no longer credibly deny.
• 1:17:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: An internal investigation eventually implicated more than a dozen wrestlers and stable masters.
• 1:17:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: and in a decision without precedent since the war damaged stadium forced to cancelation back in 1946.
• 1:17:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Japan Sumo Association
• 1:18:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: cancelled its scheduled spring tournament entirely, rather than proceed under the cloud of the unfolding scandal.
• 1:18:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time the investigation concluded that spring, the sumo association had disciplined more than 20 wrestlers and several stable masters, imposing lifetime bands on a number of individuals, including one wrestler who had reached the second highest rank in the sport and was forced into retirement.
• 1:18:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The financial damage to organized Sumo was severe with industry estimates, placing the total losses from cancelled tournaments, with drawn sponsorships, and lost broadcasting revenue at more than $160 million.
• 1:18:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, by any measure, one of the most damaging scandals in the modern history of Japan's national sports.
• 1:18:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it offered the Japanese public an unusually clear window into just how deeply organised crimes fingerprints could be found.
• 1:19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: On an institution most people thought of as a dignified ancient tradition entirely removed from the criminal underworld.
• 1:19:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The final arena we need to explore in this chapter takes us from the sumo ring to the corporate boardroom and to a uniquely Japanese form of white-collar extortion known as Sokaya.
• 1:19:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word combines Sokai, meaning a general shareholder meeting with a suffix indicating a specialist or professional.
• 1:19:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it describes individuals often connected to organized crime, who purchase a small number of shares in publicly traded companies for the specific purpose of gaining admission to that company's annual shareholder meeting, where they then either disrupt the proceedings with embarrassing questions, allegations,
• 1:20:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: quietly threaten to do so unless the company agrees to pay them off first.
• 1:20:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The mechanics of the Tsukaya business were almost elegant in their cynicism.
• 1:20:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Tsukaya operative or organisation would research a target company thoroughly, digging up whatever embarrassing information they could find about corporate misconduct, executive scandals, product defects, or financial irregularities, whether that information was entirely accurate
• 1:20:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Armed with this material, the SOCIA would approach the company's management before its annual shareholder meeting and make clear implicitly or explicitly that failing to reach a financial arrangement.
• 1:20:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: would result in that information being aired publicly, at length, in front of shareholders, journalists and anyone else in attendance.
• 1:21:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Companies that agreed to pay typically disguised the payment as something superficially legitimate, such as an absurdly expensive subscription
• 1:21:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: and in exchange, the Sakaya would not only stay quiet during the meeting, but would often actively work to keep the meeting short and free of difficult questions from other shareholders.
• 1:21:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, even physically shouting down or intimidating legitimate shareholders.
• 1:21:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: who tried to raise uncomfortable issues.
• 1:21:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Companies that refused to pay risked exactly the scenario they feared, shareholder meetings that dragged on for hours, filled with coordinated disruption, threats, and in some documented instances, genuine violence.
• 1:22:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: This practice became so widespread and so damaging to ordinary corporate governance in Japan.
• 1:22:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the government amended the country's commercial code in 1982, specifically to combat it.
• 1:22:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Introducing a rule requiring shareholders to hold a certain minimum number of shares before they could attend and participate in a company's general meeting.
• 1:22:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: An attempt to make it more expensive and logistically difficult for so-care operatives to buy their way into meetings
• 1:22:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The law also explicitly criminalised the act of making payments to Sokaya, placing legal risk directly on the corporate executives who paid the bribes.
• 1:22:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not just on the Sokaya, extorting them, despite these legal reforms, the practice persisted for well over another decade, in part because so many companies concluded that quietly paying a Sokaya,
• 1:23:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: was still simpler, cheaper, and less embarrassing than risking a public confrontation.
• 1:23:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in part, because so-care operations proved remarkably adaptable, restructuring themselves as ostensibly legitimate financial publishing companies.
• 1:23:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: shareholder advisory services or business consultancies to obscure their true purpose.
• 1:23:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most significant public reckoning with the so-care problem arrived in 1997, in a scandal that reached into the highest levels of Japan's most prestigious financial institutions.
• 1:23:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Investigators uncovered evidence that numerous securities then and now,
• 1:23:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: one of Japan's largest and most prominent brokerage firms had conspired to pay approximately 370 million yen to a sokaya operative named Coike Ryuchi in exchange for his cooperation at shareholder meetings as the investigation widened.
• 1:24:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: it became clear that Koyke's network extended well beyond Nomura, implicating several of Japan's other major brokerages, as well as Daiichi Kangiobank, one of the country's largest financial institutions.
• 1:24:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The scandal forced the resignation of Nimura's president in March of 1997.
• 1:24:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And by the end of that year, a former Norma represident, along with several other senior directors, had pleaded guilty in criminal court to violating both the commercial code
• 1:24:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Japan's security's laws.
• 1:24:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Nomura and Daiichi Kangyo scandal became a landmark moment in exposing just how deeply sokaya extortion had penetrated.
• 1:25:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: even Japan's most respected financial institutions and it accelerated a broader public and regulatory push to finally sever the long-standing, quietly tolerated relationship between corporate Japan and organised crime.
• 1:25:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That relationship, unfortunately, had already proven capable of turning genuinely
• 1:25:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: an executive at the photography and film company Fujifilm was murdered after he stopped making payments to Sakaia extortionists who had been demanding money from the company, a stark reminder that behind the seemingly bureaucratic language of consulting fees and newsletter subscriptions lay the same capacity for violence that had always defined organized crimes activities.
• 1:25:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether in a 19th century gambling den or a 20th century boardroom, taken together, construction kickbacks, bubble era landsharking, sumo match fixing, and shareholder meeting extortion, teleconsistent story about how the accuser evolved across the second half of the 20th century.
• 1:26:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The organisation did not abandon its roots in intimidation and violence, but it learned with remarkable sophistication to apply those same underlying tools, organised manpower, credible threats, and a willingness to operate in legal grey areas that formal institutions struggled to police to industries that most ordinary Japanese citizens would never have
• 1:26:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time Japan's bubble economy collapsed at the start of the 1990s, the Yakuza were no longer simply a black market phenomenon confined to the chaotic aftermath of war.
• 1:27:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were, in a very real sense, load-bearing elements, within several of Japan's most important legitimate industries.
• 1:27:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: it would take an entirely new kind of legal strategy.
• 1:27:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: One built not around punishing organised crime members directly, but around punishing anyone who did business with them.
• 1:27:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: To finally begin dismantling that deep entanglement, that strategy and the long, still ongoing decline of the yakuza that it produced is where our story turns next and last.
• 1:27:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: chapter 5, the long retreat, crackdown and decline.
• 1:27:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: For most of the post-war period we have covered tonight, Japanese law enforcement approached organised crime with a curious kind of institutional resignation.
• 1:27:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Individual Yakuza members could certainly be arrested and prosecuted for specific crimes and periodic police crackdowns
• 1:28:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: did target particular organisations or particular rackets, but the Yakuza has an institution operated with a level of public visibility that would be almost unthinkable for organised crime in most other countries.
• 1:28:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Major syndicates maintain offices with name plates on the door, sometimes prominently displaying their organisations crest.
• 1:28:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some groups
• 1:28:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: published their own internal newsletters and fan magazines.
• 1:28:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Members could often be seen entering and leaving recognized headquarters buildings without any particular effort at concealment.
• 1:28:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: This visibility reflected the long history we traced back in chapter one, where Tequia and Bakuto organizations had operated for centuries
• 1:28:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: in a kind of quasi-efficient, tolerated space at the edge of formal authority, and that historical pattern of tolerance persisted in modified form, deep into the 20th century.
• 1:29:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: That began to change in a serious and sustained way in 1992.
• 1:29:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the Japanese government enacted a piece of legislation, formally known as the Act on Prevention of Unjust Acts by Organised Crime Group members, universally referred to in short-hand as the Anti-Boreo Kudan Act, or by its Japanese abbreviation, the Botejo.
• 1:29:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word Boreo Kudan, meaning violence group, was the formal legal and police terminology for organized crime syndicates, deliberately chosen to strip away some of the romanticized cultural baggage that had attached itself to the word Yakuza over the centuries.
• 1:30:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: gave Japan's national public safety commission and prefectural police forces, the authority to formally designate specific organisations as Borio Kudan, based on defined criteria, including the proportion of members with prior criminal convictions and the presence of a clear, hierarchical command structure.
• 1:30:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once an organisation received this formal designation, police gained significantly expanded powers to investigate its activities, search its offices, and hold organisational leadership accountable for crimes committed by their subordinates, a legal innovation that directly attacked the effective family structure that Yakuza had relied on for protection since the earliest
• 1:30:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The immediate impact of the 1992 law was real, but limited.
• 1:31:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the years following its passage, the law contributed to the formal dissolution of nearly 200 Borio Cudan organizations nationwide.
• 1:31:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it pushed many surviving groups to adopt superficially more legitimate corporate structures in an effort to evade the law's provisions.
• 1:31:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: In one particularly telling example, the Yamaguchi Gumi reportedly instructed its local affiliated bosses across the country to formally register their organisations as ordinary companies.
• 1:31:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: with the bosses themselves serving as company chairman and their left tenants are pointed as corporate directors and the Inagawa Kai based in Tokyo's upscale Rpongi district.
• 1:31:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Simply replace the nameplate outside its headquarters to read Inagawa Industries.
• 1:32:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Yamaguchi Gumi even filed and later withdrew an administrative lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the new law.
• 1:32:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: an audacious move that underscored just how confident organised crime groups still felt in their ability to operate within.
• 1:32:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: or at least alongside Japan's formal legal system.
• 1:32:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The truly transformative legal innovation would not arrive for almost another two decades, and it came not from national legislation, but from local government ordinances, beginning with a single prefecture and eventually spreading to cover the entire country.
• 1:32:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 2009, Saga prefecture
• 1:32:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: to pass what became known as a barrio kudan exclusion ordinance, a fundamentally different kind of law from the 1992 anti-barrio kudan act.
• 1:33:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than targeting organised crime members themselves, exclusion ordinances targeted the ordinary citizens, businesses, and institutions that did business with organised crime members, making it illegal, or at minimum grounds for significant civil and financial penalty, to knowingly provide goods, services, financing, or business relationships,
• 1:33:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The strategic logic behind this approach was explicitly described by Japanese law enforcement officials as an attempt to shift the entire framing of the conflict from a fight between the Yakuza and the police into a fight between the Yakuza and ordinary Japanese society itself.
• 1:33:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The effect of this shift proved devastating in a way that decades of direct police action against organised crime had never quite managed to achieve, because it attacked the Yakuza's economic lifelines, rather than simply its individual members.
• 1:34:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Following Saga prefectures lead, other prefectures across Japan rapidly adopted their own versions of exclusion ordinances throughout 2010 and into 2011, and by October of 2011, all 47 prefectures in Japan had implemented some form of the policy.
• 1:34:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Banks, under mounting regulatory and social pressure, began systematically closing accounts, held by known or suspected organised crime members, and refusing to open new accounts for them, cutting off access to the ordinary financial system that any modern business, legitimate or otherwise, ultimately depends on.
• 1:34:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Landlords faced pressure, not to rent apartments, or commercial space,
• 1:35:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Insurance companies decline to write policies.
• 1:35:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even something as mundane as opening a mobile phone account or joining a golf club could become difficult or impossible for an identified organised crime member.
• 1:35:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: as businesses across the country fearful of the public exposure and legal liability that came with violating the new ordinances simply refused to serve them.
• 1:35:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The social consequences of this shift became visible almost immediately and in some cases played out publicly through Japan's
• 1:35:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: one of Japan's most popular comedians, a performer named Shimada Shinsuke, was forced into an abrupt and embarrassing departure from his talent agency.
• 1:35:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: After it was revealed that he had maintained a personal relationship with a senior member of a Kyoto-based organized crime syndicate.
• 1:36:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: His agency, one of the largest and most powerful talent management companies in the country, moved swiftly and publicly to sever all ties with him, a decision that would have been almost unthinkable in earlier decades.
• 1:36:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: When such connections, if not exactly celebrated, were at least treated as an open secret that rarely produced serious professional consequences.
• 1:36:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: That same year, national police leadership under the head of the National Police Agency publicly declared what amounted to an intensified campaign against a specific and particularly aggressive faction within the Yamaguchi Gumi.
• 1:36:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: signalling that even Japan's most powerful and best established syndicate was no longer operating with any expectation of official tolerance, squeezed by declining economic opportunity in their traditional legitimate rackets.
• 1:37:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: and facing an increasingly hostile regulatory environment.
• 1:37:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The great syndicates that had dominated organized crime for the better part of a century began to show real signs of internal strain.
• 1:37:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: That strain erupted into open conflict in the most dramatic possible way in 2015.
• 1:37:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: When a significant faction of senior leaders within the Yamaguchi Gumi,
• 1:37:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: reportedly divided over questions of leadership succession, financial distribution, and strategic direction amid the shrinking opportunities created by decades of legal crackdowns.
• 1:37:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: formerly broke away from the parent organization to establish a rival syndicate, calling itself the Kobe Yamaguchi Gumi.
• 1:38:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: This split represented the single largest fracture in the history of Japan's largest and most powerful organized crime group.
• 1:38:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it triggered a period of genuine, sometimes violent conflict between the two rival factions, as they competed over territory, members, and the right to claim the prestigious Yamaguchi Gumi name and legacy that Tauka Kazuo.
• 1:38:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: had spent decades building after the Second World War.
• 1:38:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fracturing did not stop there.
• 1:38:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: In April of 2017, a further faction split away from the newly formed Kobe Yamaguchi Gumi, establishing yet another rival organization.
• 1:38:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: that eventually took the name, Ninkyo Yamaguchi Gumi, meaning something like the shivalrous Yamaguchi Gumi.
• 1:38:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: A name deliberately chosen to invoke the old romanticized ideals of honour and duty that the organisations found as had always claimed to embody.
• 1:39:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even as the reality of the ongoing 3-way conflict looked far more like a bitter, sometimes bloody power struggle than any kind of
• 1:39:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Violence between these competing factions continued for years, including a shooting in September of 2017, that killed a bodyguard, protecting the leader of the newly formed Ninkyo Yamaguchi Gumi, underscoring just how real the underlying tensions had become.
• 1:39:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: even as all three organizations operated under an ever-tightening legal and financial news imposed by the exclusion ordinances and continued police pressure.
• 1:39:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Further amendments to the Anti-Boreo Cudan Act in 2012 closed several of the loopholes.
• 1:39:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: that had allowed some organizations to shield their own leadership from liability and individual prefectures.
• 1:40:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fukuoka, among the most aggressive, pursued additional local measures, specifically targeting banks and financial institutions.
• 1:40:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: that continue to maintain accounts or lending relationships with identified, organized crime figures.
• 1:40:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Closing off yet another avenue that the accuser had relied on for generations to move and store their money.
• 1:40:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The vacuum left behind by shrinking traditional syndicates has not remained entirely empty.
• 1:40:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Japanese police and journalists have spent the past decade and a half tracking the rise of looser, less formally structured young criminal networks known as Hangurai, a slang term blending the words for half and delinquent.
• 1:40:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: to describe groups that operate with much of the same appetite for fraud, extortion, and violent enforcement as the traditional Yakuza, but without the formal Ayabun Kobun hierarchy, the initiation rituals, or the visible headquarters that make older organizations such easy targets for the exclusion ordinances.
• 1:41:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: these loosenet works have proven especially active in a particularly modern and particularly cruel category of crime, so-called special fraud schemes, often nicknamed or or scams.
• 1:41:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: After the exact phrase, meaning it's me, it's me that callers use to convince elderly victims they are speaking with a panicked relative in urgent need of money.
• 1:41:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Japanese police attribute a significant share of these telephone and internet-based fraud operations, which collectively steal tens of billions of yen from elderly victims across the country every year.
• 1:42:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: To loosely organize networks with historical or personal ties to organized crime,
• 1:42:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: even when no formal Yakuza membership can be proven.
• 1:42:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this sense, the pressure that has driven down official Yakuza membership figures, for more than two decades, has not eliminated organized criminal activity in Japan.
• 1:42:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So much as it has pushed that activity into less visible, less formally structured, and in some ways harder to prosecute, forms a reminder that the underlying economic and social conditions that produced the Tequia and the Bacuto three centuries ago have never entirely disappeared.
• 1:42:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even as the particular organisations built directly on top of them will continue their long, well documented decline.
• 1:42:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The cumulative effect of all these pressures sustain now for more than three decades since the original 1992 legislation shows up with striking clarity in the membership statistics that Japan's national police agency has tracked continuously since 1958.
• 1:43:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: making organized crime membership, one of the very few criminal statistics in the world that a national government tracks, publishes, and audits with anything resembling the rigor typically reserved for economic or demographic data, at its historical peak in 1963.
• 1:43:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The National Police Agency recorded approximately 184,100 Yakuza members and quasi members, organized across more than 5,000 separate gangs nationwide.
• 1:43:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: A criminal population that, at the time, was larger than the entire active duty strength.
• 1:43:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: of Japan's post-war self-defense forces.
• 1:43:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: By 1991, on the eve of the Antiborio Kudan Act, that number had already fallen substantially, to roughly 63,800 full members, along with a further 27,200 quasi members and associates.
• 1:44:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The decline accelerated dramatically after the 2009 through 2011 rollout of the exclusion ordinances.
• 1:44:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Falling from more than 80,000 members in 2009 to a series of new record lows in nearly every year that followed.
• 1:44:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the early 2020s, total membership and closest associate numbers had fallen below 20,000 for the first time since records began, and by the mid 2020s, National Police Agency reports placed the figure that somewhere around 17 to 18,000 members and associates nationwide,
• 1:45:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The organisations that remain today are also in a very literal sense, dying of old age.
• 1:45:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: National police agency demographic data from recent years shows an organised crime population with a median age well into its fifties, reflecting the simple fact that very few young people in contemporary Japan see any appeal
• 1:45:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: in joining an organisation that can no longer offer them a bank account, a rental apartment, or a legitimate looking business career.
• 1:45:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let alone the kind of glamorous, high visibility, criminal lifestyle that earlier generations of Yakuza sometimes enjoyed.
• 1:45:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The construction kick backs, the land-sharking operations, the sumo connections, and the Sokaya extortion rackets we spent our last chapter exploring have not disappeared entirely, but they have been driven so far underground and made so legally dangerous for any legitimate business or individual to participate in, that they now represent a small and shrinking fraction of what was once.
• 1:46:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: at the height of the post-war boom and the bubble economy, a sprawling, semi-visible economic empire, touching nearly every corner of Japanese commercial life.
• 1:46:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing in these final moments to consider just how remarkable this entire arc really is.
• 1:46:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: We began this story with peddlers and gamblers operating at the margins of a rigid feudal society
• 1:46:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: developing their own codes of honour, and their own rituals of loyalty, because the formal society around them offered no place for men who lived outside its rules.
• 1:47:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: We watch those same traditions seize control of an entire nation's functioning economy in the ashes of total military defeat.
• 1:47:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: filling a vacuum that neither a shattered Japanese government nor an overwhelmed foreign occupation force could fill on its own.
• 1:47:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: We met a single extraordinary fixer who turned organised crimes usefulness to anti-communist politics into a personal empire reaching into the prime minister's office itself.
• 1:47:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: We traced that same underworld as it quietly wove itself into the concrete of Japan's
• 1:47:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: the soaring land values of its bubble economy, the ancient dignity of its national sport, and the boardrooms of its largest financial institutions.
• 1:47:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we have now watched across three decades of steady, patient, legal and social pressure, as that entire vast structure has been reduced to a fraction of its former size, aging out of existence in real time.
• 1:48:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its membership numbers ticking quietly downward year after year, in the annual reports of the very police agency that spent so many decades unable or unwilling to stop it.
• 1:48:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story of the Yakuza, in the end, is not really a story about any single dramatic crime or any single infamous boss.
• 1:48:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a story about the strange, persistent relationship between a society's formal rules and the people who live in the space just outside them and about how long and how deeply that space can end up shaping the society that tried to keep it at arms
• 1:48:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this evening with sleepless history.
• 1:48:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have traveled a very great distance tonight from the festival markets of feudal Japan through the rubble and rationing of a defeated empire into the private offices of a nation's most powerful political fixes.
• 1:49:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: across construction sites and sumo rings and shareholder meetings and finally into the slow grinding decline of an institution that once seemed as permanent a fixture of Japanese life as the seasons themselves.
• 1:49:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: If tonight's episode helped you find that rest, please consider leaving a comment to let us know and subscribing so that future episodes can find their way to you as
• 1:49:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It genuinely helps this show continue to grow, one evening at a time.
• 1:49:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: This has been Sleepless History.
• 1:49:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll see you in the next one.
• 1:49:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good night.