The predominant organized crime group in Japan is the yamaguchi-gumi, commonly known as the yakuza. It has been described as a highly centralized and structured organization, resembling legitimate businesses with its hierarchy. In fact, the Japanese government’s approach to the yakuza is to regulate it and not ban it outright. It operates in the open, and membership in the organization is not inherently illegal (Matsangou 2017). Thus, the yakuza is to the Italian mafia what cigarettes are to hashish (as evaluated under the U.S. norms and law).
Moreover, interpreting the yakuza as a single organization would be misleading. Instead, it is comprised of many smaller organized crime groups and gangs whose actions are licit, illicit, and hybrid. The enterprise of yakuza is more plural than singular; more heterogeneous than homogenous; more process than structure; more dispersed than concentrated. It is indeed an exemplar of organized economic crime.
However, organizations begin, with their origins usually recessed into centuries-old folklore that cannot be investigated absent the willingness to pursue a doctorate with pre existing knowledge of the functional language, these organizations, illicit and licit, adapt or perish. The yakuza persist, though like the so-called five mafia families in the New York City metropolitan area, they are not now what they were represented to be from the narratives propounded by criminal investigators, public prosecutors, and scholars.
Reportedly originally developing in the early 18th century (if not earlier), the yakuza were not materially different from modern mafia groups, specializing in protection rackets, gambling, and other fraudulent and illicit conduct (Szczepanski 2019). The forms of criminal activities are familiar, still practiced today in Japan and elsewhere.
One questionable attribute is important to consider, that is, are the entities currently described as organized crime groups innovators or imitators? Echoes of organized crime are not Italian, Sicilian, American, or sourced entirely from any one ethnicity; these patterns reverberate through time and across geography. The yakuza filled and presently fill a niche—the gap between actions that get initiated, authorized, and completed through official means such as the government and actions that satisfy needs and wants beyond (or quicker than) the capacity of official organs of supply and demand.
The premium that one incurs by subjecting him- or herself to the vagaries of organized criminals cannot be measured macroeconomically. It may be disclosed as the vigorish to obtain a loan from a loan shark; the cost of obtaining pharmaceuticals of unsure origin and quality in the gray market; the long-term price to be paid by obtaining a business partner via the illicit pathway. This premium would also include as a cost of doing business the sanctions imminent for failure to live up to the informal, legally unenforceable agreement (e.g., death, grievous bodily injury, arson, insurance fraud).
Thus, only the desperate need apply for the assistance of organized crime groups; this is as much a Japanese issue as a New York City issue as a Sicilian issue. Cf. victims of organized economic criminals operating through valid licenses and registrations in various jurisdictions—these individuals may not even realize they are being bamboozled, made to overpay, in receipt of counterfeit goods. The global economy is not too remote from America’s wild, wild west.
To an extent and degree neither accurately nor completely captured by current data gathering tools and techniques but communicated from generation-to-generation across cultures through formal and informal narratives, whether in Asia or North America, organized crime persists as a cause and effect within the society at large and political economy as a whole. Yakuza members beginning with the social status of outcasts and losers in the 11th century, as individuals in the Burakumin caste, persisted until becoming over generations charitable, valued contributors in modern day Japan, only to face an abundance of new laws designed to enfeeble their organizations. Adapt or perish applies at the individual and entity levels. This is a familiar trajectory: failure turns to success then deals with an existential threat from law and public policy (Oliver 2019). Consider the reputed influence of New York City’s five families—only to be undone by the harsh sanctions of the racketeer influenced and corrupt organization act in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
Brute force characterizes the original attribute and lever of success; that is, the capacity to use violence to obtain financial and other resources from an inadequately protected victim or even one’s lower ranked associates and colleagues seeking illicit advantage is and was indispensable. This, of course, comprised a low bar of entry to the illicit profession. Extortion may be the mother action of entities like the yakuza, providing libraries and media with terrifying stories and mythologies of days gone by. However, there’s not enough economic and political growth in those original seeds. Its power dissipated. Thus, the yakuza adapted to the opportunities presented to white-collar criminals, initiating and exploiting pathways of wider development beyond the locality of the neighborhood and into a wider realm of commerce. From importing drugs to fixing construction contracts, the yakuza methodology and practices seemed familiar to Western perspectives.
Observations and analysis of organized crime groups in Japan are supportive of the theory that organized crime groups develop from fecklessness of state institutions, that is, the organized crime group provides an alternative to state-provided and state-sponsored rights enforcement mechanisms (Milhaupt and West 2000, 92). Thus, organized crime groups may operate under weak state jurisdictions as a protection racket (and not merely as the traditionally conceived extortion racket and purveyors of prohibited products and services such as illegal drug distribution, prostitution, and gambling): counterintuitively, organized crime groups may enhance overall justice in the state albeit through informal and illicit means. The real issue is what is meant by justice, with offenders, victims, rivals, criminal investigators, and so on possessing different opinions. The state in reserving the creation and legitimation of markets to itself; in reserving the right to commit violence against residents and others to itself; in establishing protocols and processes (transaction costs) before authorizing action; in substantially delimiting the right of selfhelp of the residents—has unwittingly given rise to the practical need for organized criminals to exist. Like other organized crime groups, the yakuza live in neighborhoods and may attend to neighbors’ needs where the state is too slow or obtuse.
The amorality of organized criminals lends itself to flexibility of role. However, need someone to give a beating; need some cocaine; need sex with children; need unregistered firearms; need to curry favor with a judge, jury, or politician? Organized crime steps in where the state won’t. As organized crime goes global, the connection between manufacturer, distributor, buyer, facilitator, bank custodian … becomes tenuous. Not knowing the victims of human trafficking, or the dead from drug overdosing, or the lifeless bodies taken down by the use of firearms, the organized criminal is remote to his or her effects. However, this does not interfere sometimes with being a good neighbor.
Organized crime groups played a similar role in Italy, especially in Sicily in the late 19th century. Even the bad guys take off their black hats on occasion.