The Yakuza Are Legal: How Japan’s Mafia Hides in Plain Sight
The Yakuza Are Legal: How Japan’s Mafia Hides in Plain Sight
On April 7th, 2025, three senior executives of the Yamaguchi-gumi walked into the Hyogo Prefectural Police Headquarters in the city of Kobe. Two of them were visibly missing fingers. They handed the officer on duty a single sheet of paper. It was a written pledge that the largest organized crime group in Japanese history had decided to stop fighting. No negotiation, no conditions.
After 10 years of shootings in shopping arcades and submachine gun hits in the suburbs of Amagasaki, the gang that once commanded 40,000 soldiers and an estimated $6.6 billion a year in revenue had just surrendered. Surrendered to a country that has never once in its entire history made it illegal to be a Yakuza.
That’s the part I want to explain. >> [music] >> Because the story most people know about the Japanese mafia, the tattoos, the missing fingers, the Kitano films, is not the story that matters anymore. The story that matters is that a constitutional democracy figured out how to regulate a 110-year-old criminal empire out of existence without ever banning it.
And the architecture they used is one of the most quietly brilliant pieces of legal engineering >> [music] >> in modern criminal justice history. It’s also, I think, one of the most dangerous. And by the end of this, I want you to understand why. Before we get to the machine, I want you to see the rubble.
Because while those three executives were walking into the Kobe Police Station in April 2025, something else was happening a few hundred miles away in Tokyo. The Sumiyoshikai, the second largest Yakuza syndicate in Japan, a federation of more than 100 affiliated gangs with roots going back to 1868, was quietly selling its own headquarters, a condominium in [music] Shinjuku that the Tokyo Metropolitan Police had designated as a gang office in November 2023.
>> [music] >> By June of 2024, a district court had issued an injunction banning its use. By 2025, they were just getting rid of it, moving on. A month after that, four members of a Yakuza affiliate group got arrested in Tokyo. The charge was not murder or extortion or drug trafficking. [music] The charge was that their office was located too close to a public library.
One of the men they arrested was 77 years old. This is what the end of the Yakuza looks like. Not a shootout, to not a RICO trial, an old man in custody because his office was across the street from the wrong building. To understand how we got here, you have to go back to a year most people don’t associate with the Yakuza at all, 1963.
[music] Not the bubble economy, not the postwar black markets. [music] 1963, the year the Yakuza was bigger than the entire Japanese Self-Defense Force, 184,000 confirmed [music] members, 5,216 separate organizations. An organized crime population roughly the size of the standing army of a mid-tier European nation. >> [music] >> And the man who, more than anyone else, built that empire was a Kobe dockworker named Kazuo Taoka.
The thing that got me when I first started reading about this, and I mean really reading, not just watching Kitano films, is how much of the Yakuza myth the Yakuza themselves wrote. Taoka was the template, orphaned, young, nicknamed the bear for his fighting [music] style. Took over the Yamaguchi-gumi in October 1946 when it had 33 members and turned it over the next three and a half decades >> [music] >> into a federation of 343 affiliated gangs operating in every major [music] Japanese city.
And he did it using a business plan that almost no American mafia boss ever understood. He went [music] into the entertainment industry. In 1957, he founded a talent agency called Kobe Geinosha and [music] signed Hibari Misora, the most famous female singer in postwar Japan. He signed the pro wrestler Rikidozan.
And by [music] 1965, his organization was grossing $17 million a year, an enormous figure for that period. And most of it came not from extortion, but from the entertainment business, the construction industry, and dockworker labor contracts. This is the Yakuza model you need to understand before anything else makes sense. They were not hiding.
They were not a secret society. They operated the way a business operates. They had offices. They had crests. They had business cards. They published newsletters. A senior Yakuza boss in 1975 [music] could walk into a Tokyo bank wearing his pinstripes and open a corporate account for [music] his organization.
The bank knew who he was. Everyone knew who he was. [music] And that was the point. They called themselves Ninkyō dantai, chivalrous organizations. The state called them Bōryokudan, violence groups. The code they swore to forbade drugs, theft, robbery, and indecent [music] acts. What it permitted explicitly was extortion, blackmail, gambling, protection rackets, and the running of brothels.
The code, in other words, was written to make them tolerable to Japanese society, not to restrain them from any of the behavior that would eventually bring them down. And here’s the detail I kept coming back to. The same code that permitted extortion, the same code Kazuo Taoka swore to in 1946, [music] that is the exact code a Kudo-kai boss named Satoru [music] Nomura would stand before a judge invoking in August 2021, hoping it would save him from a death [music] sentence.
More on that in a minute. No, because first, I have to tell you about the bubble. If 1963 was the demographic peak of the Yakuza, the 1980s were the financial [music] peak. Japan’s economy in that decade was, depending on how you measured it, somewhere between the second [music] and third largest in the world. And a staggering amount of the money that moved through it passed through Yakuza hands.
>> [music] >> Peter Hill, the British academic who wrote the definitive book on the Japanese mafia, estimated that up to 40% of the bad loans Japan’s banks [music] were sitting on after the bubble burst were tied directly or indirectly [music] to organized crime. The FBI estimated in 1991 that up to 90% of the Japanese art market was laundered money.
>> [music] >> The Yakuza were not infiltrating the Japanese economy. They were one of its operating systems. They had a specialty called Jiageya, land sharks. A real estate developer would want to put up a high-rise in central Tokyo, but there would be one stubborn tenant in a tiny property [music] refusing to sell.
The developer would quietly hire a Yakuza affiliate. Within weeks, the tenant’s windows would be smashed. Centipedes [music] would arrive in the mail. Bogus food deliveries at 3:00 in the morning. Doorbell ringing for hours. [music] Arson, if necessary, the tenant would sell. By 1990, the Osaka Police had documented 1,600 Jiageya cases.
Almost none of them resulted in convictions. [music] They had another specialty called Sokaiya, corporate extortionists who would buy a single share of a major Japanese company, attend the annual shareholder meeting, and threaten to disrupt it by airing embarrassing information unless the company paid them a retainer. [music] At the peak in the early 1980s, there were around 6,800 Sokaiya in 500 separate groups extracting up to $400 million a year.
In February 1994, the head of General Affairs at Fuji Photo Film, a man named Juntaro Suzuki, refused to pay and was murdered on a staircase outside his apartment. The banks got hit next. In 1991, three separate Tokyo branches of Fuji Bank were caught issuing forged [music] certificates of deposit worth approximately $2 billion for Yakuza-linked [music] property speculation.
Nomura Securities and [music] Nikko Securities were forced to publicly admit they had extended a $255 million credit line to an [music] Inagawa-kai boss named Susumu Ishii, which he used to ramp up the stock price of the Tokyu Corporation. Their chairman and president both resigned. >> [music] >> In September 1994, the manager of the Nagoya branch of Sumitomo Bank, a man named Kazufumi Hatanaka, was shot execution-style in his apartment.
David Kaplan, the author who has spent 40 years covering Japanese organized crime, told the Baltimore Sun it was, quote, an unmistakable message from the Japanese underworld to the Japanese banking world that you could forget about collecting on the bad debts. And this is the part I keep coming back to. Now, when that message arrived, when the bubble burst and the Japanese state finally had to confront the fact that organized crime was not a fringe problem, but a structural feature of its own economy, it had a constitutional problem.
Article 21 of the Japanese Constitution [music] guarantees freedom of assembly and freedom of association. You [music] cannot, under Japanese law, ban a group for what it [music] is. You can only punish it for what it does. The Supreme Court had confirmed this repeatedly. Even Aum Shinrikyo, [music] the doomsday cult that released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, could not be formally disbanded.
The Yakuza had been operating out in the open for over a century precisely because Japanese law had no mechanism to outlaw them. So, they had to invent one. If you’re still with me and you want to see how Japan actually pulled this off, a subscribe would mean a lot. This is the part where almost no international coverage gets right.
The first mechanism was a law passed by the Diet in May of 1991 and enforced [music] starting March 1st, 1992. Its formal name is the law concerning prevention of unjust acts by Boryokudan members. Everyone calls it the anti-Boryokudan Act or the Botaiho. And on the surface, it doesn’t look like much. It doesn’t [music] ban membership.
It doesn’t make being a Yakuza a crime. What it does instead is create a category. Groups that meet three specific [music] tests, their members use gang influence for their livelihood. They have a hierarchical single leader structure. She and they have a statistically elevated density of criminal records [music] can be formally designated as Boryokudan by a prefectural public safety commission.
The first designations came in June [music] 1992. About 25 groups carry the designation today. [music] And once you’re designated, certain acts that are legal for ordinary citizens, >> [music] >> aggressive debt collection, protection demands, threatening language, become illegal for you specifically. You can be issued a cease-and-desist order.
If you violate it, then you can be arrested. The Yakuza’s response was fascinating. About 130 of them staged a protest in Ginza in 1992 claiming the law violated their human rights. They circulated an internal manual titled How to evade the new law. The Yamaguchi-gumi, a after the 1995 Kobe earthquake disrupted its operations, actually filed a constitutional challenge.
The Kyoto [music] District Court rejected it. The Supreme Court confirmed the rejection in 1997. The ruling said, essentially, that the law did not restrict freedom of association itself. It only regulated [music] specific acts. The Yakuza were welcome to exist. They were just not welcome to do anything. But before I get to what came next, actually, there’s something else that matters more here because I keep talking about this as if the government strategy was obvious. It wasn’t.
For almost 20 years after the 1992 law, the Yakuza kept operating. They adapted. They fronted more aggressively through shell companies. Membership declined, but slowly. The Botaiho was a speed bump, not a wall. What the Japanese government realized somewhere between [music] 2000 and 2010 is that attacking the Yakuza directly [music] was the wrong strategy entirely.
The law had been built around the assumption that you regulate the criminals. The innovation, when it finally came, was to regulate everyone else. >> [music] >> This is the part I want you to sit with because I don’t think I’ve ever read a piece of legislation quite like it. Starting in Fukuoka Prefecture in April 2010 [music] and rolling out across all 47 Japanese prefectures by October 1st, 2011, every local government in Japan passed something called a Boryokudan [music] exclusion ordinance. In English, you’ll
see [music] it translated as the organized crime exclusion ordinance. And what it does is almost impossible to describe [music] without slowing down. It does not criminalize being Yakuza. It criminalizes doing business [music] with the Yakuza. If you are a Japanese bank, you are legally required to refuse to open an account for a designated Yakuza member.
If you are a mobile phone carrier, you cannot sell him a SIM [music] card. If you are a landlord, you cannot rent him an apartment. If you are an insurance company, you cannot write him a policy. >> [music] >> If you are a golf course, a hotel, a car dealership, an expressway company, no service.
Every standard contract in Japan now contains something [music] called an organized crime exclusion clause or OCEC, in which the counterparty warrants under penalty of the law that they are not >> [music] >> and have not been for the last 5 years a member of or associated with an antisocial force. And if you knowingly violate the ordinance, if you cut a deal, rent an apartment, maybe sell a SIM card to a Yakuza, you can be sentenced to up to 1 year in prison or fined 500,000 yen.
Think about what that actually means as a piece of statecraft. A country [music] that cannot ban a criminal organization because the Constitution protects freedom of assembly turned every single landlord, banker, [music] cell phone clerk, and hotel receptionist in the nation into an enforcement officer. The Yakuza could still legally be Yakuza.
[music] They just could not buy groceries without breaking somebody else’s law. I covered a story a few scripts back about the Georgian thieves in law, the vory, and how Georgia in 2005 passed a law that criminalized the status of being a thief in law. You could literally be sent to prison for calling yourself one.
And it worked in the sense that the vory left Georgia almost overnight. Japan did almost the exact opposite. They left membership legal and criminalized the counterparty relationship. >> [music] >> And somehow, both systems produced the same result. A mafia regulated out of its homeland. The practical effects in Japan were surgical.
The journalist Jake Adelstein, who has covered the Yakuza for over 30 years, documented [music] a case in which a bank froze a corporate account because its CEO had been seen having dinner with a Yakuza. Just dinner. Older Yakuza bosses today cannot upgrade from their 3G flip phones because no carrier in Japan will sell them a 21st century contract.
They can’t renew their car insurance. They can’t take out a mortgage. They can’t send their kids to certain schools. >> [music] >> Even 5 years after they formally leave the organization in what’s called the Motobo Gonin Juko, [music] as the former Yakuza 5-year clause, they remain locked out of the economy. In practice, the 5 years often stretches to 10 or forever.
[music] A former Yakuza lawyer named Yoshitomo Morohashi put it like this, “If an ex-member cannot open a bank account 5 or even 10 years later, they have no means of making a living. And if they want to eat, the only option is to return to the bad path.” Remember that sentence. >> [music] >> It becomes important later. By 2019, the anti-Boryokudan Act had led [music] to the dissolution of 192 separate Yakuza organizations.
Tokyo alone, at the end of 2010, had identified roughly 1,000 front companies. [music] Every single one of them now had to be disclosed on every contract they signed. The banks were going to check. The landlords were going to check. [music] And they had to check because if they didn’t, they were going to prison.
So, what do you do if you’re the boss? You make it your successor’s problem. There was one more piece of the machine. In 2008, the Diet amended the Botaiho to introduce something called employer liability or shiyosha sekinin. What it does is simple. [music] If a subordinate of a designated Yakuza boss commits a crime [music] in the course of Yakuza business, the boss is civilly and, in some cases, criminally responsible.
Not because he ordered the crime, because he was the boss. In August 2021, this provision produced something that had never happened before in the history of Japanese organized crime. Satoru Nomura, the fifth head of the Kudokai, a particularly violent Kyushu-based syndicate that the US [music] Treasury had sanctioned in 2014 as the most violent Yakuza syndicate was sentenced to death by hanging by the Fukuoka District Court.
It was the first death sentence ever handed to a designated Yakuza boss. When the verdict was read, Nomura reportedly turned to the judge and told him, “On the record, you’ll regret this for the rest of your life.” On March 2024, the Fukuoka High Court reduced the sentence to life imprisonment, but the line the state had crossed was permanent.
The message was delivered. >> [music] >> If your men act, you can hang. And this is the context in which the Yakuza started eating themselves. The Yamaguchi-gumi had been run since July 2005 by a man named Shinobu [music] Tsukasa, birth name Kenichi Shinoda, who came up through a Nagoya-based affiliate called the Kodokai. >> [music] >> The Kodokai was unusual.
No, it was newer than the other Yamaguchi-gumi factions, [music] heavier on ethnic Korean membership in some analyses, and had a reputation for operational secrecy >> [music] >> and corporate-style discipline. When Tsukasa became the sixth Kumicho, [music] he started placing Kodokai men in the top positions of the organization.
The Kansai-based old guard, the groups that had built the Yamaguchi-gumi under Taoka and his successors, watched with rising anger. >> [music] >> There was also a financial issue. By the 2010s, every designated Yakuza member was expected to pay a monthly tribute called Jonokin up the chain. Estimates put the monthly tribute for senior Yamaguchi-gumi members at around 2.
65 million yen, roughly $20,000, with seasonal gifts on top of it. So, the journalist Atsushi Mizoguchi estimated [music] Tsukasa’s personal annual take at around $8 million. At a time when the legal architecture was choking every revenue stream, the men paying the tribute were going broke while the Kodokai men at the top were not.
On August 27th, 2015, >> [music] >> deliberately chosen to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Yamaguchi-gumi and [music] Tsukasa’s 10th year as Kumicho, 13 affiliated gangs walked out. They were led by a Yamaken-gumi [music] boss named Kunio Inoue, a man from the same Oita Prefecture as Tsukasa himself, who had survived a grenade attack 5 years earlier.
They formed an organization called the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi. At founding, [music] they had approximately 3,000 members, almost 30% of the parent organization’s manpower. >> [music] >> Two years later, in April 2017, a second faction broke away under a man named Yoshinori [music] Oda. It would eventually be renamed the Kizunakay, the association of bonds.
Oda was unusual. He publicly acknowledged his Korean [music] ancestry. He toured South Sudan in 2017 to study private security work. He told a magazine called Flash, [music] quote, “After Japan’s economic bubble, we became a bunch of money-worshipping thugs, no better than common mafia across the world. We want to break away from antisocial [music] activities and put our talents to good use, possibly in private security.
” A Yakuza boss pitching himself as a private military contractor, and [music] then the bodies started dropping. In November 2015, >> [music] >> the boss of an affiliated group called the Aio-kai was found bludgeoned to death with an iron pipe at his second home in Yokahichi. In May 2016, [music] a Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi executive named Tadashi [music] Takagi was shot to death in a parking lot in Okayama.
In September [music] 2017, Oda’s convoy was ambushed in the Nagata ward of Kobe. [music] Oda himself was unhurt. His 44-year-old bodyguard, Yuhiro [music] Kusumoto, was killed on the spot. In November 2019, in a shopping district in Amagasaki, [music] a normal commercial street with people walking home from work, a 59-year-old Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi executive named Keiichi Furukawa was shot dead with a submachine gun, up to 30 rounds fired.
By January 2020, [music] the Japanese government did something it had never done before. It invoked a 2012 amendment that allowed the designation of specified conflict or Yakuza. The Yamaguchi-gumi [music] and Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi were the first groups to receive this designation, and within the warning zones established by the designation, it became illegal for five or more members of either group to assemble in public.
It became illegal to enter an affiliated office. It became illegal to meet in a restaurant. The state had invented a crime, public assembly, and made it apply only to these specific organizations. A Yakuza who wanted to have dinner with four colleagues in a ramen shop in Kobe was committing [music] a federal-level offense.
Here’s the question I want you to sit with. Is a criminal organization you can identify, register, and regulate more dangerous than one you can’t? No, because Japan was running the experiment in real time. By 2021, the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi was collapsing. In September of that year, the Yamaken-gumi, the very group that had been the heart of the breakaway, voted to defect back to the parent Yamaguchi-gumi.
By 2024, the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi had been reduced from its founding strength of 3,000 members to 320, a 96% [music] collapse in 9 years. The Kizunakay had shrunk from 400 founding members to roughly [music] 140, which brings us back to April 7th, 2025. Three senior [music] Yamaguchi-gumi executives walking into the Hyogo Police Headquarters, two of them missing fingers, handing over a written pledge that the organization was ending the conflict with no conditions, [music] no negotiations.
May the Yamaguchi-gumi’s own [music] internal publication, released a few days later for the 110th anniversary of the organization, contained a single sentence that I [music] think summarizes the entire last decade, quote, “This is a conflict with no victor. There’s no point in continuing it.” Jake Adelstein put it more directly.
The Kobe faction had no power [music] to push back. The fight had become so one-sided it was no longer a war, and I’ll be honest with you. When I first put this research together, I thought I was writing a story about a government that beat its mafia, a case study [music] in elegant legal architecture, a country that used constitutional constraints to invent a new form of suffocation-based law enforcement.
By the time I got to the part I’m about to tell you, I realized I was writing a different story, [music] because the crime didn’t vanish. It mutated. The Japanese National Police Agency started [music] noticing a new pattern in organized crime around 2022. They gave it a name the following year, Tokuryu, short for Tokumei Ryudo Gata, hands-off group.
Anonymous fluid crime groups, no oath, no sakazuki ceremony, no hierarchy, no registration, >> [music] >> no headquarters, no crest, no membership anyone could prove because there was no membership. There were only tasks. A recruiter on Twitter would post a so-called yami baito, a dark part-time job, offering 50,000 to 100,000 yen for a single night’s work.
An applicant would provide a photo ID, a selfie, and the contact information of their family members as security. They would be given instructions via Telegram. [music] They would not know who they worked for. They would not know the other members of their cell, and they would carry out the job and disappear. And the people directing them were often not even [music] in Japan.
The ringleaders operated from Manila, from Poipet in Cambodia, from call center compounds in Myanmar. The Japanese police gave the directors a nickname. They called them the Shijiaku, the pointers. They called the expendable field recruits the lizard’s tail, the part you let go of when you need to escape. In January 2023, a 90-year-old woman named Kaneyo Oshio was found dead in the basement of her home in Komai, a quiet suburb of Tokyo.
Her hands had been bound with zip ties. Her kneecap had been shattered. Her head had been beaten until she died. [music] The men who killed her had entered her home disguised as parcel delivery workers. They had never met each other [music] before that night. They had been hired on social media a by a leader operating [music] out of an immigration detention center in Manila, Philippines.
The leaders, four of them, had been using smuggled smartphones to run a network of more than 50 robberies across 14 Japanese prefectures. They called themselves Luffy, after the hero of the manga One [music] Piece. In February 2023, the Philippines deported them to Japan. Three years later, in February 2026, the Tokyo District Court sentenced one of them, Toshia Fujita, to life imprisonment for seven robberies, including the Kohmai murder.
In 2024, for the first time in modern [music] Japanese history, the number of Tokuryu suspects acted against by police, 10,105, exceeded the number of Yakuza acted against. That figure was 8,249, a record low. Now, by 2025, the Tokuryu [music] figure had risen to 12,178. Fraud losses from special fraud cases and social media investment scams in Japan in 2025 totaled 324 billion yen, roughly 2.
1 billion dollars, in a single year. 65.4% of the victims were senior citizens over the age of 65. [music] Remember that sentence I flagged earlier? >> [music] >> The one from the ex-Yakuza lawyer? That if former members cannot make a living in the legal economy, they return [music] to the bad path. An anonymous Tokyo Metropolitan Police officer told AFP in December 2025 that they had confirmed that some of the proceeds from Tokuryu crimes are flowing back to Yakuza organizations.
[music] The National Police Agency suspects some Yakuza cells are now directing Tokuryu cells the way a Kodokai lieutenant would once have directed a Jiyugaiya crew. The legal architecture that strangled the old Yakuza did not [music] end organized crime in Japan. It made organized crime harder to find. I don’t know the answer to this one.
Tell me what you think. Did Japan win? Or did Japan trade a mafia with a known address for a mafia it can’t locate? A judicial scrivener named Ryuichi Kamura, who has worked for years with former Yakuza trying to reintegrate [music] into Japanese society, told Nippon.com something that I don’t think I’ll forget.
Quote, “The Yakuza might be crooked, but they’re out in the open with offices and signs. The Tokuryu [music] are not. You cannot put an exclusion ordinance on a Telegram channel. You cannot freeze the bank account of a recruiter in Poipet. [music] The machine that killed the old enemy was beautifully engineered for that enemy.
It was not engineered for this one. The Yamaguchi-gumi headquarters is still there, 4-3-1 Shinohara, Hanmachi, Nada Ward, Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture. [music] A quiet three-story building on a residential street. If you walked past it today, you would see a sign identifying the occupants. You would see the Damon crest above the entrance.
>> [music] >> You would see the security cameras. You would probably see an elderly man in a dark suit stepping out to take a phone call on a 3G flip phone that he has owned for 15 years because no carrier in Japan will sell him a new one. He might have been young when Taoka was alive. He is old now. The organization he joined had 184,000 members.
The organization he serves today has fewer than 19,000, [music] and somewhere in an apartment in Poipet, in a call center compound in Myanmar, [music] on a Telegram channel that did not exist last month and will not exist next month, a 17-year-old who has never heard of shino or sakazuki or the ninkyo [music] code is reading a job post.
50,000 yen for the night. Bring a photo ID. Upload a selfie. We’ll send the address when it’s time. The old enemy had a headquarters. The new one does not.