The Modernizing Mob

Of course, financial manipulation takes a lot of sophistication, but Yakuza 2.0 has become adept at recruiting the necessary talent. As Yohei Kojima, an organized crime analyst at the National Police Agency, notes, "The problem is not just the yakuza themselves but the wide variety of people willing to work with them." One sign of the yakuza's growing financial involvement: the Tokyo Stock Exchange has begun holding seminars for the police on how to cope with white-collar crimes of the sort favored by mobsters.

Then there's the matter of foreign competition. Rising immigration into Japan in recent years has prompted hysterical media reports about local gangs being squeezed out by rapacious Chinese and Russians. In reality, Japan's mobsters have usually managed to co-opt outsiders. "I've heard directly from the yakuza that they don't feel invaded," says Atsushi Mizoguchi, author of several books on the yakuza. To the contrary, there have been numerous reports of recent crimes, such as the kidnapping of a Tokyo woman last summer, involving collaboration between Japanese, Chinese and Korean mafiosi. Mizoguchi says that the yakuza are happy to let foreign gangs operate in niche businesses, such as drug dealing among immigrants, that don't threaten the yakuza's core practices. It's a strategy not unlike that pursued by Japan Inc., where business leaders have let foreign companies into the domestic market but drawn the line when outsiders have tried to take over Japanese firms.

It's helped the Yamaguchi-gumi that it has more experience operating globally than many Japanese corporations. Indeed, the yakuza were early pioneers of the internationalization of organized crime. The process started when the Japanese tourist industry exploded in the 1960s and '70s, with the yakuza organizing sex tours and drug deals across Southeast Asia. Nowadays they're known to work closely with the Russian mafia, buying seafood spirited illegally out of Russian waters and selling it for huge markups in Japan. One new sphere of operations is Uzbekistan, from which the Yamaguchi-gumi has been known to charter direct flights—perhaps to transport Uzbek women for prostitution.

Amid the changes, Japan's cops worry that the modernized mobsters are increasingly contemptuous of old yakuza traditions, such as a strict ban on hurting women and children. The result is a recent spike in gang-related violence, at least according to media reports; in the last year, for example, there have been shots exchanged between the yakuza and police in ordinary residential neighborhoods. This is leading to one positive trend, however: growing public disillusionment with the gangsters. That's partly a result of their brutality and partly a product of tough times. "During the bubble period, the yakuza's image among juvenile delinquents was good," says Mizoguchi. "They were wearing nice clothes, driving expensive cars, drinking in cool bars." But nowadays many yakuza—especially those outside the Yamaguchi—"are poor."

As a result, law-enforcement officials say, the mobsters are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit fresh members. According to Mizoguchi, the Yamaguchi-gumi recently responded to the problem by instituting a makeshift pension system designed to give senior gang members an incentive to move aside for younger ones. Still, no one is talking about the yakuza's demise just yet—they're just too deeply ingrained a part of Japanese society. Just look at those spreadsheets.

© 2007