The 6 Yakuza Chairmen No Japanese Prime Minister Dared to Touch

The 6 Yakuza Chairmen No Japanese Prime Minister Dared to Touch 

184,100. That was the number. In 1963, Japan’s Yakuza counted more active members than the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force. They published their headquarters addresses in phone directories. They held press conferences. They attended public funerals flanked by police escorts. And the most powerful men among them, the chairman, who commanded tens of thousands, shared something with every Japanese prime minister from 1955 onward. They knew [music] each other.

Some had funded their campaigns. Some had helped rig their elections. And one of them, a convicted war criminal released from prison by American intelligence, had used a fortune looted from occupied China to bankroll the creation of the political party that would rule Japan for the next seven decades. >> [music] >> The men who ran Japan’s democracy and the men who ran its underworld were not on opposite sides of a wall.

 They were sitting at the same table. These are the six Yakuza chairmen so deeply woven into Japan’s power structure that no prime minister across seven decades and dozens of administrations dared to move against them. And the last man on this list is still alive. He is 83 years old. He has served six years in prison, watched his organization tear itself in half, been sanctioned by the United States Treasury, and he still holds his title today.

To understand how these men became untouchable, you need to understand what Japan looked like in the years after the war. 1945, the empire was ash, cities were rubble, millions were homeless. Yet the American occupation had two priorities, rebuild the economy and stop communism. And to accomplish both, they made a deal that would shape Japan for the rest of the century.

>> [music] >> American intelligence officers walked into Sugamo Prison where Japan’s convicted war criminals were being held, and they started releasing them. Not because these men had been rehabilitated, because they were useful. One of those men had spent the war running a smuggling and procurement network across occupied China for the Imperial Japanese [music] Navy.

 He had looted materials, dealt in contraband, and by some accounts trafficked opium. By 1945, he had amassed a fortune estimated at $175 million, making him one of the wealthiest men in Asia. His name was Yoshio Kodama. And the system he built, linking American intelligence money, conservative [music] politics, and organized crime muscle, is the reason every man in this video was untouchable.

Kodama was born on February the 18th, 1911 in Nihonmatsu, Fukushima Prefecture. The fifth son of a bankrupt businessman who claimed samurai lineage. By the time he was 9 years old, his family had sent him to work in a steel mill in Japanese-occupied Korea. By his late teens, >> [music] >> he was a committed ultra-nationalist.

In 1929, he was arrested for attempting to hand Emperor Hirohito a handwritten [music] petition during a military parade. He spent most of the 1930s cycling between prison [music] and increasingly violent political activism. His organizations were linked to the murders of three Japanese politicians. In 1937, [music] he was released from prison at the personal request of Colonel Kenji Doihara, Japan’s chief spymaster [music] in Manchuria.

For the next 8 years, his Kodama organization operated across occupied China, accumulating a wartime fortune so vast that CIA documents would later reference hidden assets including platinum, diamonds, and 70 million yen in documented reserves [music] with the precious metals on top of that. Arrested as a Class A war criminal in March of 1946, Kodama was locked in Sugamo Prison alongside two men who would define his future.

 [music] One was Ryoichi Sasakawa, a gambling magnate. The other was Nobusuke Kishi, a future prime minister. All three were released by American intelligence between 1948 and 1949. No CIA station report from Tokyo in September 1953 [music] described Kodama as a professional liar, a gangster, a charlatan, >> [music] >> and an outright thief.

 They kept using him anyway. According to multiple historians, Kodama remained on the CIA payroll until the day he died. And here is what he did with that relationship. Kodama’s wartime fortune funded the creation of Japan’s postwar conservative [music] establishment. CIA declassified documents confirm that he gave 10 million yen to Ichiro Hatoyama when the Liberal Party was formed in [music] late 1945.

In 1955, his Sugamo cellmate, Kishi, engineered the merger of the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party into the Liberal Democratic Party, the L D P, the party that would govern Japan almost without interruption for seven decades. Kodama’s money, connections, [music] and Yakuza muscle were central to that merger. CIA archives are blunt about it.

He was instrumental in founding the L D P. He had a hand in naming several prime ministers. [music] He commanded the allegiance of Japan’s ultra-nationalists and maintained blood brotherhood with the country’s most powerful Yakuza bosses. Through the 1950s and ’60s, [music] the CIA funneled an estimated $1 to $15 million per year into the L D P with Kodama serving as one of the key conduits.

 His power was not just political, it was [music] physical. In 1960, when Prime Minister Kishi’s ratification of the revised US- [music] Japan Security Treaty provoked the largest protest in modern Japanese history, an estimated 30 million people participating, Kishi turned to Kodama. The plan that emerged proposed deploying up to 146,000 Yakuza, rightists, and street vendors as a [music] private counterforce.

The government would supply helicopters, trucks, food, and $2.3 [music] million in operational funds. On June 15th, Yakuza and rightists clashed with student protesters outside the Diet building. A Tokyo University [music] student named Michiko Kanba was killed. Eisenhower’s visit to Japan was canceled.

 Kishi resigned, but Kodama’s position was stronger than ever. He had demonstrated that the ruling party’s survival could depend on organized crime’s muscle. Then the Lockheed [music] scandal destroyed his public image, though not his freedom. Kodama had served as a secret paid agent of the Lockheed Corporation [music] since 1958, receiving approximately $7 million in fees and commissions for influencing Japanese aircraft purchases.

 When the scandal broke publicly in February 1976, the total bribes funneled into Japan reached $12.6 million >> [music] >> with Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka personally receiving the equivalent of $2.1 million. Kodama had suffered [music] a debilitating stroke the year before and was confined to his home. On March the 23rd, 1976, an ultra-nationalist actor named Mitsuyasu [music] Maeno, enraged that Kodama had betrayed the right-wing code by taking bribes from the American company whose planes had bombed Japan, rented a Piper Cherokee from Chofu

Airport, dressed in a kamikaze pilot’s uniform, and dove the plane directly [music] into Kodama’s mansion in Setagaya Ward. Maeno died on impact. Kodama, in another room, survived [music] without a scratch. He was indicted for tax evasion. He never stood trial. Confined first to his home, then hospitalized, [music] Yoshio Kodama died on January 17th, 1984 at the age of 72.

 [music] He had not spent a single day in prison after his release from Sugamo. He built a system so durable that it outlived him by decades. And every man who follows in this [music] video operated inside the architecture he designed. From the corridors of Tokyo power, we go to the docks of Kobe and a man they called the bear.

 Kazuo Taoka was born on March 28th, 1913 [music] in Tokushima Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. His father died before his birth. His mother died of exhaustion when he was six. Sent to live with an abusive uncle in Kobe, the young Taoka was delivering newspapers before he finished elementary school just to survive. Through a classmate, the brother of the Yamaguchi-gumi’s second boss, he drifted into dock labor and then [music] into the organization itself.

 He earned his nickname for his signature fighting technique. He gouged opponents’ eyes with his fingers. In 1937, [music] he killed a man with a Japanese sword during a duel at gang headquarters and received an 8-year prison sentence. >> [music] >> When he was released in 1943 under a wartime amnesty, he [music] found the Yamaguchi-gumi decimated.

 Conscription and police [music] crackdowns had gutted the membership. In October 1946, [music] Taoka took over with 33 men and a territory limited to the Kobe waterfront. 35 years later, Machii commanded over 13,000 [music] members in 343 affiliated gangs operating across 36 of Japan’s 47 prefectures. It was the largest criminal organization on Earth.

His genius was threefold. First, he organized a vigilante force to combat ethnic Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese gangs dominating Kobe’s black markets after the war, which earned him public gratitude and [music] political protection. Second, he exploited the Korean War. When Kobe became a major American military logistics hub between 1950 [music] and 1953, Taoka’s control of the waterfront meant enormous profits.

 By the mid-1960s, [music] the Yamaguchi-gumi controlled 80% of all cargo loading on the Kobe docks. Third, and this was the masterstroke, he took over Japan’s entertainment industry. In 1957, [music] he founded Kobe Performing Arts Promotion and began signing exclusive contracts with the nation’s biggest stars.

 He secured Misora Hibari, [music] Japan’s most beloved singer. He locked down Rikidozan, the father of professional wrestling. When his operatives beat the enormously popular actor Saruta Koji at an Osaka hotel in 1953 for showing disrespect, every entertainment figure in Japan understood the message. >> [music] >> Advancement required cooperation.

This was a franchise model. Regional gangs that wanted access to star-studded [music] touring shows cooperated with the Yamaguchi-gumi. Those that refused faced consequences. At the time of Taoka’s death, the Yamaguchi-gumi’s annual revenue was estimated [music] at $460 million. That was larger than the GDP of several United Nations member states.

 Even by the 1970s, his empire [music] spanned port operations, construction, over 100 entertainment companies, professional sports, gambling, methamphetamine [music] trafficking, and real estate. Taoka published a best-selling three-volume [music] autobiography. Films based on his life starred Ken Takakura, Japan’s [music] biggest action star.

 He attended public events. He was photographed with politicians. He lived in the open. On July 11th, 1978, a member of the rival Matsuda-gumi named Kiyoshi Narumi shot Taoka in the back of the neck with a .38 caliber pistol during a limbo dance exhibition at the Balcony nightclub in Kyoto. Taoka survived, rushed to the hospital in his bulletproof Cadillac.

 Narumi was found dead weeks later in the woods near Mount Rokko. Taoka died of a heart attack on July 23rd, 1981, 1 month before he was scheduled to be sentenced by a Kobe court. >> [music] >> His funeral was a nationally televised spectacle. 1,300 Yakuza from 200 gangs attended. 800 riot police stood guard outside. He had proved that a criminal organization could function like a corporation and that made it harder to destroy than any army.

 But while Taoka built his empire through fists and franchise agreements, another man in Tokyo [music] was playing an entirely different game. Hisayuki Machii was born Chung Won Young on July 20th, 1923 [music] in Tokyo’s Shiba Ward to Korean immigrant parents. Not in a society that systematically discriminated [music] against Koreans, they made up barely half a percent of the population and faced exclusion from virtually every institution.

 [music] Machii turned his outsider status into his greatest weapon. Standing 185 cm tall and weighing 100 kg, he cut an imposing figure, but his real advantage was strategic brilliance. While Japanese Yakuza leaders faced scrutiny from American occupation authorities, Korean gangsters operated more freely >> [music] >> in the postwar chaos.

Rather than competing with the Japanese bosses, [music] Machii made alliances with them. In 1948, he founded the Tosei-kai, the Voice of the East gang, [music] initially as a far-right anti-communist organization. It grew [music] to over 1,500 members and dominated Tokyo’s Ginza district so completely that its enforcers were known as the Ginza [music] police.

Even Taoka’s Yamaguchi-gumi had to negotiate with Machii to operate in the capital. What made Machii truly untouchable was not his muscle. It was his usefulness. He worked simultaneously with three intelligence agencies, the American Counter Intelligence Corps >> [music] >> during the occupation, the CIA through Kodama, and the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

>> [music] >> When South Korean opposition leader Kim Dae-jung was kidnapped from a Tokyo hotel in 1973 by KCIA agents, >> [music] >> drugged, bound, and taken by boat to be drowned before American diplomatic intervention saved his life. Police [music] investigators discovered that Machii’s people had rented every other room on the hotel floor where Kim [music] was staying.

 Machii was never charged. Think about what that means. A Korean-born gangster in a country that systematically excluded Koreans was awarded a national medal by the South Korean government, brokered a diplomatic treaty between Tokyo and Seoul, worked with three intelligence [music] services, and ran the most powerful gang in the Japanese capital.

No one touched him. That is not luck. That is leverage. His legitimate [music] empire was equally formidable. He owned the largest ferry service between Japan [music] and South Korea, bars, restaurants, an oil importing company, and the TSK CC Terminal building in Roppongi, a seven-floor complex whose opening gala in 1973 drew the chairman of Nomura Securities, the chairman of Mitsukoshi Department Stores, and multiple sitting politicians.

 Kodama himself served as chairman of Machii’s front company. The building was financed with a 5.4 billion yen loan guaranteed by the Korean government-backed Korea Exchange Bank. Forced to disband the Tosei-kai under police pressure, Machii reorganized under business fronts. >> [music] >> His empire eventually collapsed when his holding company declared bankruptcy in 1977.

He withdrew from public life spending his [music] later years in his Roppongi apartment. He died on September 14th, 2002 at 79. >> [music] >> He had never served a day in prison. He understood something the others didn’t. That the most [music] powerful man in the room is not the one with the most soldiers. It is the one nobody can afford to lose.

And the man who made all of this possible, who brokered Machii’s alliances, who unified the gangs, but who connected the worlds of crime and politics, was the same man who had been pulling strings from [music] the beginning. Kodama’s network extended across all of Japan’s major syndicates. And in the Kanto region around Tokyo, his most [music] trusted partner was a man who had been there since the very beginning.

Kakuji Inagawa was born in November 1914 in Yokohama into poverty so total he never attended a day of school. He entered the Yakuza world through judo circles and rose through the ranks as an enforcer of extreme ruthlessness. He served in the Imperial Japanese Army’s 29th [music] Regiment and reportedly participated in the February 26th incident of 1936, the attempted coup [music] by ultra-nationalist officers that briefly seized central Tokyo.

 After the war, he organized gangs to fight Chinese and Korean groups in occupied Yokohama. In 1949, he founded the Inagawa-gumi [music] in Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, building it from traditional itinerant gamblers into the dominant force in the Kanto region. His motto revealed everything about the bargain these men had struck with the state.

He [music] said that men like him could not walk in broad daylight, but if they united and formed a wall to stop communism, they could be of service to the nation. Under Kodama’s orchestration, Inagawa headed the Kanto-kai Federation, >> [music] >> a coalition of roughly 13,000 gangsters from seven major syndicates.

>> [music] >> He was among the Yakuza bosses who sat down personally with LDP officials to plan the deployment of organized crime muscle [music] during the 1960 and post security treaty crisis. By 1979, my his organization ran 879 legitimate businesses. Remember that Inagawa’s successor, Susumu Ishii, accumulated assets exceeding 1.

5 billion [music] dollars during the bubble economy. That figure alone is staggering enough. But here is the part that reveals the system. Major Japanese banks and [music] brokerages gave Ishii 2.3 billion dollars in loans and guarantees. [music] They knew exactly who they were lending to. Everyone in Japan’s financial establishment knew.

And nobody stopped it because stopping it would have meant admitting what the system actually was. Inagawa stepped down as chairman in 1985. [music] His only significant conviction in a career spanning six decades was a three-year sentence for illegal gambling in 1969. He died on December 22nd, 2007 at the age of 93.

 He had outlived the system that created him and watched it begin to crack [music] from the inside. But by the early 1990s, something changed. >> [music] >> In 1989, the bloodiest gang war in Japanese history, the Yama-Ichi War, ended [music] after four years of open warfare that had produced 36 dead, over 220 gun battles, and roughly a thousand arrests.

The Japanese public’s tolerance for organized crime had shattered. The bubble economy was collapsing and the extent of Yakuza penetration into the banking system was becoming impossible to ignore. In 1991, Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu pushed through the Boryokudan Countermeasures Law, Japan’s first ever legislation specifically targeting organized crime.

The man tasked with navigating this new reality was Yoshinori Watanabe, who had been elected fifth chairman of the Yamaguchi-gumi in April 1989. Born in 1941 [music] in Tochigi Prefecture to a farming family, Watanabe had entered organized crime at 17 and risen through the ranks as both a feared enforcer and a skilled mediator.

 He inherited an organization devastated by the Yama-Ichi War and now facing real legal pressure for the first time in its history. [music] His response was a master class in institutional adaptation. He distributed a manual to every affiliate titled How to Evade the New Law. He reorganized the Yamaguchi-gumi [music] into seven semi-autonomous regional groups to obscure its centralized command structure.

 So, he ordered local bosses to register [music] their operations as legitimate companies, replacing gang headquarters signage with corporate nameplates. He even filed a constitutional challenge against the law itself. [music] Here is what makes this story unlike anything in the history of organized crime. In Italy, they passed an anti-mafia law and membership became a criminal offense.

 In America, RICO turned the bosses into criminal conspirators who could be prosecuted for the actions of their subordinates. In Japan, they passed a law and [music] the Yakuza grew. Under Watanabe’s leadership, the Yamaguchi-gumi added 5,000 new full-time members to reach approximately >> [music] >> 16,500 active operatives spread across 43 of Japan’s 47 prefectures.

 Not because the law was weak, because the system was designed so that the law could not reach the men at the top. The 1995 Kobe earthquake gave Watanabe an unexpected gift. While the Japanese government’s response was widely criticized as sluggish and disorganized, Watanabe ordered the Yamaguchi-gumi to deliver food, water, and blankets [music] to affected residents from their Kobe headquarters.

 The organization claimed to have distributed 1 billion yen worth of goods and 20,000 free lunches. Newspaper photographs showed Yakuza members handing meals to elderly survivors. For a brief moment, the most powerful criminal organization in Japan >> [music] >> had better public relations than the government. His reign ended in July 2005, [music] not by arrest, not by assassination, but from within.

 [music] According to investigative journalist Jake Adelstein, Watanabe was forced out at gunpoint by the faction loyal to his successor, Kenichi Shinoda. He became the first Yamaguchi-gumi boss in history to resign while still alive. All four of his predecessors had served until death. A landmark court ruling during his tenure had established that crime bosses bear employer liability for the actions of their subordinates.

 80 million yen in damages for a single killing. The legal walls were closing in, but it was the internal walls that fell first. [music] Watanabe died on December 1st, 2012 in Kobe. He was 71. He had proved that the Yakuza could survive the arrival of the law. What he could not survive was his own organization. And the man who pushed him out has been sitting at the top ever since.

Kenichi Shinoda, known by his Yakuza name, [music] Shinobu Tsukasa, was born on January 25th, 1942 in Oita Prefecture on the island of Kyushu. The son of a fisherman, a graduate of a prefectural fisheries high school, [music] the most improbable leader in the 100-year history of Japan’s most powerful criminal organization.

 After briefly working at a fisheries company, Shinoda joined a Nagoya-based Yamaguchi-gumi affiliate in 1962. [music] In the early 1970s, he killed a rival boss with the katana during a gang war, earning a 13-year prison sentence. After his release, he co-founded the Kodokai with Kiyoshi Takayama, aggressively expanding into [music] 18 prefectures, building the faction that would eventually seize the entire organization.

 When Watanabe was pushed out in 2005, chapter war versus say, chapter Ni Shinoda took control. His personal style rejected everything the previous bosses had represented. He took a commuter train to his induction ceremony instead of a limousine. He stopped at a ramen stand on the way to the lavish banquet, but beneath that modest surface was an iron fist.

 He installed Kodokai loyalists in every key position. He raised association dues to 30% of subgroup revenues and demanded monthly fees of approximately 10,000 dollars from every affiliated boss. >> [music] >> Four months after becoming the sixth chairman, Shinoda was convicted of conspiring in his bodyguard’s illegal firearms possession >> [music] >> and began serving a six-year prison sentence.

And here is where the story enters territory that has no parallel in the history of organized crime anywhere in the world. The Yamaguchi-gumi held his position open for for six years. The entire organization, tens of thousands of men, waited for their imprisoned boss to return. >> [music] >> He was released in April 2011 and immediately reasserted control as if he had never left.

On August 27th, 2015, the 100th anniversary of the Yamaguchi-gumi’s founding, approximately 13 factions with between 3,000 and 6,000 members [music] split off to form the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi. The rebellion was driven by financial grievances, resentment of Kodokai dominance, and deep tensions between [music] the Kobe-based old guard and Shinoda’s faction.

 Over 100 incidents of violence followed. Shootings, stabbings, a 68-year-old hitman disguised as a [music] reporter gunning down two rival members outside their own headquarters. By the end of 2024, the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi had collapsed to 120 members. On April 7th, 2025, the Yamaguchi-gumi submitted a written pledge to police promising to end all infighting.

The United States Treasury placed [music] Shinoda on a sanctions list, freezing any American assets. He was named as a defendant [music] in a fraud lawsuit seeking 22.5 million yen. He is still alive. He is 83 years old. He still holds the title of sixth chairman and his Yamaguchi-gumi, once 40,000 strong, now counts 3,300 members. From 40,000 to [music] 3,300.

He is 83 years old. Every one of these men was shielded not by their power alone, >> [music] >> but by a system of mutual dependence so deeply embedded that dismantling it would have meant dismantling post-war Japan itself. The CIA needed anti-communist muscle, so they funded Kodama. The LDP needed campaign money and strike breakers, >> [music] >> so they partnered with the syndicates.

Japanese corporations needed sokaiya enforcers to manage shareholder meetings and construction [music] fixers to rig bids in an industry employing 7 million workers. And Japanese society needed somewhere to put the people it refused to see. 60% of Yakuza members came from burakumin backgrounds, >> [music] >> descendants of feudal era outcast communities who still faced systematic discrimination.

 30% were Zainichi Koreans. Only 10% came from non-marginalized Japanese families. The Yakuza was not just a criminal enterprise. it was where Japan housed the people it had excluded from everything else. If you watched my video on how the Yakuza are technically legal in Japan, [music] you already know that the law eventually went after citizens who dealt with the Yakuza, [music] rather than penalizing the organizations themselves.

 What that video did not [music] get into was why. And the answer starts with these six men. Criminalizing the supply, banning Yakuza membership outright the way Italy banned mafia membership in 1982 would have meant prosecuting organizations whose members were overwhelmingly [music] drawn from populations Japan had spent centuries marginalizing.

It would have meant exposing financial relationships between Yakuza and the banks, [music] the construction firms, and the political parties that formed the backbone of the Japanese economy. [music] And so they criminalized the demand instead. They made it illegal to do business with the Yakuza, and they left the organizations themselves technically to exist.

 Today, the numbers tell a story that none of these six men could have imagined. From 184,100 members in 1963 to 18,800 at the end [music] of 2024, a 90% decline. The 20th consecutive year of decrease. The average Yakuza member is now 54 years old. Over half are 50 or older. Only 5% are in their 20s. >> [music] >> The Yamaguchi-gumi, once the most powerful criminal organization on Earth, now fields [music] 3,300 members.

 But something new is growing in the space the Yakuza are leaving behind. Tokuryu. Anonymous. Fluid. [snorts] Criminal networks that recruit through social media job postings and operate [music] without the rigid hierarchy, the blood oaths, or the visible tattoos. In 2024, investigations into Tokuryu [music] linked suspects exceeded traditional Yakuza arrests for the first time.

 The institution is dying, but the functions it performed, absorbing the excluded, enforcing the unofficial, filling the gaps the state would not acknowledge, have not [music] disappeared. They have simply gone underground in a different form. 184,100. That was the number in 1963, the year Kodama tried to unify every Yakuza in Japan >> [music] >> under one federation, the year the system reached its peak, the year its machinery was most visible.

 Today, the number is 18,800. [music] The phone directory listings are gone. The press conferences have stopped. The public funerals with police escorts [music] are a memory, but the party Kodama helped build still governs Japan. The construction industry [music] still operates on relationships forged when Yakuza enforced the bids.

 [music] The social structures that pushed burakumin and Korean Japanese into organized crime [music] still exist, even if the language around them has softened. And at 83 years old, in a city he has controlled for two decades, the last of the untouchable chairman still holds his title. No prime minister ever dared to touch these men, not because they feared the violence, because touching them would have meant admitting what the system actually was.

 And that was the one thing [music] no one in power could ever afford to do. Some systems are not dismantled. They are simply outlived.