CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Yakuza to the rescue

The most important thing is to help the weak. Duty and kindness follow. Then the third would be: don’t betray others.

–SHINICHI MATUSYAMA, CHAIRMAN OF THE KYOKUTO-KAI, ON WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A YAKUZA MEMBER

Maybe it has to do with living up to the slogans that the yakuza profess. Or maybe it’s about getting a stake in the reconstruction of Japan. Construction is a big business.

–SUZUKI TOMOHIKO, FORMER YAKUZA FAN MAGAZINE EDITOR, AND AUTHOR OF YAKUZA AND THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY

Sometimes, bad people do good things, but that doesn’t mean they’ve suddenly become good people. Sometimes, kind people do cruel things, but that doesn’t mean they’ve become cruel people, or were cruel bastards all along. Adversity brings out the best and worst in people.

The yakuza have always professed to be good Samaritans, fighting the strong, protecting the weak, and coming to the aid of the struggling in times of calamity. The period after 3/11* was one of those rare times when the yakuza were a benefit to society.

[* “3/11” has become shorthand for the series of disastrous events that rocked Japan, starting on March 11, 2011: the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country and the nuclear reactors in the Fukushima prefecture. Just as 9/11 is self-explanatory in the U.S., in Japan, when you say 3/11, everyone knows what you mean.]

I remembered that after the Kobe earthquake in 1995, the Yamaguchi-gumi had been faster than the government in getting help to the people that needed it. They provided soup, warm blankets, makeshift beds, diapers, and other living essentials faster than the Red Cross. It helped that they had huge amounts of money available, made from squeezing local businesses and illegal enterprises nationwide. They could afford to be generous. They also benefited from strong leadership, deep connections in the logistics industry, and no red tape. No receipts needed. No approval required. No bureaucracy. Kobe was their turf, and they took the opportunity to show the community that they were part of it—not just parasites, but sometimes providers. Of course, there was a calculated public relations aspect to that selfless work, but there was also genuine concern for the welfare of those who lived there.

I went to cover the Kobe earthquake in 1995. I’d talked to some of the Yamaguchi-gumi members there about the work they’d done, and to the locals. I also remembered that in the chaos that followed the earthquake, some Yamaguchi-gumi factions killed their criminal rivals and buried the bodies in the rubble. When opportunity knocks …

Aside from a few inter-yakuza murders, the Yamaguchi-gumi had mostly done a great job of helping the residents. These charitable acts were, of course, milked for years to justify their own existence, but it doesn’t mean the thugs at the ground floor weren’t sincere in their work.

A few hours after the 3/11 earthquake, I figured the yakuza would be running to the rescue again. I figured correctly.

Right after the meltdown, while I was still in New York trying to find my way home, Lucas Wittman from The Daily Beast sent me an email. He knew my editor, Timothy O’Connell, at Random House/Pantheon. The Daily Beast, which was still vaguely part of Newsweek at the time, wanted coverage of the disaster—including anything I could bring to the table. I pitched him “Yakuza to the Rescue.”

I told him on a phone call, “You need to know the yakuza’s standing in Japanese society to understand why they’d play a useful role in preserving peace and providing humanitarian relief.”

I told him they had 80,000 members, and when you added up their front companies, affiliated industries, and associates, they were almost a second army in Japan. And as unlikely as it might seem in the aftermath of the disaster, they might be among Japan’s first responders.

I was in touch with Saigo and a few other sources back in Japan, and, sure enough, the yakuza were doing their part to aid in the disaster relief. It took phone calls and emails to catch up. Twitter was working, even while the phone lines were not. The internet was definitely a more reliable communications network.

The Inagawa-kai—which had 10,000 members, offices all over Japan, and a foothold in the Fukushima area—was divided up into blocks, and the Tokyo block (known as Kanagawa) was doing the heavy lifting. They were already dropping off a lot of supplies in Fukushima and Ibaraki. This was the beginning of their humanitarian efforts. Supplies included cup ramen, bean sprouts, paper diapers, tea, and drinking water. The drive from Tokyo to the devastated area took them twelve hours. They went through back roads to get there. They traveled through the highly radioactive forbidden zones. They were going into radiated areas without any protection or potassium iodide. Typically, 100 to 150 members would go per mission with a minimum of twenty trucks.

On the micro-level, the Kanagawa block of the Inagawa-kai sent seventy trucks to Ibaraki and Fukushima, dropping off supplies in areas with high radiation levels. They didn’t keep track of how many tons of supplies they moved. The Inagawa-kai as a whole had already moved over one hundred tons of supplies to the Tohoku region.

I didn’t doubt the people I was speaking to about their efforts in bringing aid, but I needed some proof for my editor. I called up a boss of a low-ranking yakuza group in Tokyo, Mr Purple, fondly beloved by all. That is, unless you were on his bad side.

“Hey, I think what you’re doing out there is awesome. I’d like to write it up. Do you have any photos I can use?” I asked.

“Photos? Maybe. Maybe I can send some video. But you can’t use it. We’d be so fucked. We’re trying to keep this on the down-low, so the cops don’t get in the way.”

“I think they’ll figure it out pretty quickly.”

“Yeah.”

There was a long pause.

“You gonna run this story immediately?”

“No, a few days from now. Will you have time to do what you have to do as the first responder?”

“Perhaps. I’ll send some footage. It’s really cool! Some guys were even wearing Inagawa-kai jumpsuits to help out. But that was a little too conspicuous. You get what I mean?”

I had seen the tracksuits, so I knew. I sent the footage to Lucas with strict instructions about how to handle it. I began documenting the yakuza aid efforts from across the ocean with help from sources, cops, locals, and, surprisingly, a great number of yakuza as well.

It was important for me to get a granular sense of the yakuza’s role as first responders in the rescue effort. I had footage of their efforts in one city and talked to people who had gone on the run. Also on the scene was a friend of mine, a local reporter.

It was at about midnight on March 12, less than a day after the devastating earthquake struck the Tohoku region, that trucks carrying roughly fifty tons of supplies arrived in front of the Hitachinaka City Hall in Hitachinaka, in the Ibaraki prefecture. A hundred guys in long sleeves and coats started unloading the boxes right away. They weren’t the Red Cross. They were part of the Inagawa-kai. All of them tried to hide their affiliation.

The sleeves were rolled down to hide the ornate tattoos that marked so many of Japan’s yakuza members. Those who had missing fingers wore gloves. There were no gang badges with bushels of rice and Mount Fuji in the background, like the Inagawa-kai symbol. The yakuza group’s corporate emblem wasn’t displayed. Some yakuza members have the logo tattooed on their chests; it goes without saying that no one was bare-chested that night.

They came under the cover of night because they didn’t want their donations to become a public affairs issue. Since Takaharu Ando, the head of Japan’s National Police Agency, declared war on organized crime on September 30, 2009, things had been tough for regulated but not illegal organized crime groups in Japan. The Inagawa-kai knew that any high-profile operation, even one with charitable intentions, might invite harsh crackdowns from the police.

Hitachinaka City Hall employees knew who they were. One of them videotaped the delivery, but they didn’t turn down the supplies; nobody else seemed willing to supply them. The main roads had been uprooted and split in half, electricity had been knocked out, and sewage lines had exploded. The historical museum had collapsed, over 1,000 houses were damaged, and, on March 13, over 9,000 people were crammed into sixty-eight shelters in the city.

During the video I was shown, gangsters unloaded blankets, water, instant ramen noodles, bean sprouts, flashlights, batteries, paper diapers, and toilet paper in front of the still-standing city hall. They were loud, but they moved quickly. City officials watched as they nodded at them and then left. The next day, 200 Inagawa-kai members arrived at Kasumigaura City Hall in the Ibaraki prefecture with 100 tons of food and supplies in thirty trucks. They brought twice as many blankets this time. They took two hours to unload their supplies in front of city hall, and then they left.

It was remarkable.

The earthquake shook the country at every level: political, economic, and social. The Japanese government’s slow response to the crisis and the criminally inept response of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) made the nation shake with anger.

Yet while the Japanese cabinet was trying to figure out what to do, spurning U.S. help and failing to use Japan’s de facto army, the Self-Defense Forces, the yakuza were picking up the slack.

In sparsely populated areas of rural Japan, where police were in short supply after the disaster and even before it, they also served as a police force. The reports of the disaster from Japan and abroad were full of stories about the absence of looting, theft, and crime in the wake of the chaos. In reality, that wasn’t entirely true. ATMs were ripped out of empty convenience stores, smashed open, and the money taken. In the large, poorly lit shelters housing the refugees, there were fights, thefts, and sexual assaults.

Technically, yakuza aren’t allowed to commit street crimes. Rape is not allowed either.

The yakuza frown on stealing purses, and on robberies, break-ins, and muggings: all the crimes that make the general populace uneasy. However, blackmail and extortion are generally acceptable. I once asked an Inagawa-kai boss, “Why aren’t blackmail and extortion banned?” His reply was, “If you have something to be blackmailed about by us, you deserve to be punished. That’s social justice.”

Yakuza are brutal peacekeepers on their own turf. That’s in their self-interest, too. If people are reluctant to visit the areas where sex shops, illegal gambling parlors, strip clubs, and hostess clubs are located, the operators lose money. It pays to keep the peace. Yakuza groups in Tokyo, Fukushima, Miyagi, Chiba, and other areas in Japan already had soldiers patrolling the streets, keeping an eye out for criminals, looters, and profiteers. The yakuza were the most visible “police presence” in sparsely populated parts of the Miyagi prefecture.

By sending out 960 members to disaster-affected areas, including Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima, the Yamaguchi-gumi acted as a second police force to maintain order within the shelters and devastated areas. They were referred to internally as the Yamaguchi-gumi Peace-Keeping Forces. To deter the common criminal and/or sexual miscreant, members were asked to show their tattoos and to walk around the shelters, making it very clear that they were yakuza. Yamaguchi-gumi were more prevalent at the shelters than police until March 21. By the beginning of April, officers from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and others were dispatched to disaster areas. It is somewhat ironic that one of the very first roles of the yakuza in the post-quake chaos was to enforce the law.

Every yakuza group began to mobilize to help out: the Sumiyoshi-kai in Tokyo opened their offices to those stranded in Tokyo; the Matsuba-kai rounded up 100 trucks and 121 drivers to carry water, blankets, and other essentials to the stricken areas; and Kyokuto-kai members sent food supplies and went themselves to the areas to provide hot meals.

Matsuyama Shinichi, the chairman of the Kyokuto-kai, said about the rules of being a yakuza, “The most important thing is to help the weak. The second is to fulfill your duties, obligations, and stay true to your feelings. The last thing is not to betray anyone.”

During his three visits to the earthquake zones, a Kyokuto-kai member echoed those words, saying, “We can only do what we know. We’re the guys cooking fried noodles at the festivals. It is tragic to take the equipment and food items we use for happy occasions like the Sanja Festival, and set them up for those mourning their loved ones and their homes. Not a joyful occasion. No words. A hearty welcome seems out of place, as does silence.”

Of course, the most efficient and fast-moving group in the relief effort were the Yamaguchi-gumi, who have a history of post-disaster humanitarian work. Their experience as emergency responders dates back decades.

A third of the Yamaguchi-gumi organization is said to have been mobilized during 1964’s Niigata earthquake to provide food, water, radios, and medical supplies to the area.

In 1995, after the great Kobe earthquake, the Yamaguchi-gumi, which has its headquarters in Kobe, gathered supplies from all over the country and brought them into the devastated city, dispensing hot food from their offices. As they patrolled the streets to prevent looting, they were lauded for delivering supplies to those who needed them more quickly and efficiently than the government did. They provided hot-food stands in the headquarters premises and daily essentials to all visitors. One of their more bizarre efforts was drilling a well on the headquarters grounds and supplying fresh water. In the end, it was a tremendous effort that gained the goodwill of the people of Kobe. It was also an incredible PR campaign.

On July 16, 2007, after the Niigata Chuetsu earthquake that resulted in the TEPCO nuclear accident that preceded the Fukushima meltdown, there was nothing that the Yamaguchi-gumi could do about the radiation, but they did make sure there was no starvation.

The Yamaguchi-gumi sent trucks and people to the area after 3/11 as well. They set up soup kitchens, and provided blankets, water, and food. The local merchant’s associations and emergency shelters, even school principals, responded by sending thank-you notes to the yakuza.

In contrast to many government agencies in Japan, where staff rotation destroys continuity and accumulated knowledge, the Yamaguchi-gumi was able to learn from the mistakes of the past. In the Clinton era, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was still a highly functional agency and a model for emergency responsiveness, one of its senior trainers went to Japan to share the agency’s expertise. He remarked that his efforts were somewhat futile when it came to training Japanese government staff.

“I train staff, and just when they are familiar with protocols and how to respond, they’re transferred to somewhere else. Sometimes they are transferred to an entirely different organization. There is nothing to build upon.”

In that respect, the Yamaguchi-gumi was like a Clinton-era FEMA for Japan.

A Yamaguchi-gumi boss who personally drove two trucks into the Ibaraki prefecture, with tons of water bottles and enough food supplies to feed 800 people, proudly showed me pictures of himself cooking yakisoba for people near one of the shelters. He elaborated on why the Yamaguchi-gumi was able to be an effective first responder.

“You have to know what the people need. Here are things that were lacking: infant formula, diapers—both for babies and adults. There is a huge elderly population there.”

Based on past disasters, the organization made a list of the essentials that were needed: food, water, warm clothing in all sizes, and sanitary napkins. Tampons, too, though most Japanese women do not like them. Allergy-prone children needed not only regular powdered milk, but also special brands. They collected raincoats, down jackets, kerosene heaters, and kerosene. Spring arrives late in Tohoku.

The foot soldiers were told to not just buy from large supermarkets, but to also visit local shops in the area and make purchases from them. They were instructed not to buy so much that the local shops would run out of merchandise. A delicate balance had to be struck.

Yamaguchi-gumi under police scrutiny used kyoseisha (cooperative entities) for much of their work. The gang members who went to help out all took great care to hide their tattoos and their missing fingers, just like the Inagawa-kai. Most of the support was organized by the Takumi-gumi faction’s acting leader, Tadashi Irie, who was a financial genius and a good planner. Yamaguchi-gumi members distributed cushions, first-aid kits, shoes, socks, and garbage bags to stricken areas. The Yamaguchi-gumi Okuura-gumi leader in Osaka chartered several trucks with supplies, sending all 200 of his subordinates to disaster-stricken areas, including allegedly setting up temporary baths in the Miyagi prefecture and providing hot meals. The boss himself cooked food and served it to the displaced.

I asked several yakuza, both low-ranking and high-ranking, “Why are you doing this?” Some answered along the lines of, “Because I was told by my boss to volunteer.” Others had more thoughtful answers. One Sumiyoshi-kai executive, a member of the Kato Rengo faction, and a full-time gangster who was adept at extortion, explained the efforts simply: “In times like this, societal divisions have no meaning. Yakuza and civilians, or foreigners and Japanese, do not exist. We are all Japanese. We live here together. Certainly, there is money to be made down the road. Right now, it’s about saving lives and helping each other. Most yakuza are human garbage. Only 5 percent follow the rules. For now, we’re all doing our best. It’s one of the few times when we can be better than we usually are.”

Even a senior police officer from Ibaraki, speaking on the condition of anonymity, agreed. “I have to give it to the yakuza. They have been on the ground since day one, providing aid where others cannot or do not. Laws can be like a double-edged sword, sometimes hampering relief efforts. Outlaws can sometimes be faster than the law. It happened here.”

Other police officers saw things differently. “There is an element of this that involves fund raising,” an Osaka detective in the Organized Crime Control Division said. “Yakuza members raise money for funerals and other events. They ask all the lower-ranking members of the franchise to chip in, and thus collect large sums of money. This is what they have been doing as well. This is one of the best ways to collect huge amounts of money right under our noses. I don’t believe all the payments collected are going toward relief. Some 10 percent of it ends up in the accounts at headquarters, or in the pockets of some bosses. There’s an element of money-laundering.”

I didn’t doubt it.

The Daily Beast published my article on March 18. It was an enormous hit—far more than I had anticipated. For me, the yakuza’s disaster response wasn’t unexpected, but if you didn’t know Japan, it would have been surprising and a compelling read.

The Japanese media followed up on the story, and the foreign media did as well. I think it took time for some outlets to get confirmation. The police certainly didn’t want to tip their hats to the yakuza. And the yakuza, already on the bad side of the cops and the government, didn’t want to piss them off further by showing they were more competent than both.

One Inagawa-kai boss who had helped me write the article was summoned to Inagawa-kai headquarters by Kazuo Uchibori. Uchibori was angry about the attention that it was bringing, and my source thought he might have to offer up a finger as an apology. I felt terrible. I couldn’t see that one coming. But I got someone to whisper into Uchibori’s ear, “Isn’t this good PR for us? In the end, isn’t this what we’re supposed to be doing?”

And my source, who didn’t give up my name, despite the fact that pretty much everyone knew we were acquaintances, didn’t have to lose a finger. Instead, he gained some rare praise from Uchibori and only a verbal reprimand not to talk to the press too much.

As for me, my article was translated into Japanese by people I didn’t know, and then two versions showed up all over the internet. Tomohiko Suzuki, in the monthly yakuza fanzine, Jitsuwa Jiho, interviewed me and wrote a three-page article (published April 17, 2011) about my reporting on the yakuza coming to the rescue. He even noted my role in getting Tadamasa Goto kicked out of the yakuza—something that I thought would be cut from his article. It was still a touchy subject.

I wasn’t used to being praised in a yakuza fanzine as being a fair and equitable reporter. I’d have to say that the spontaneous translations and the attention from the article changed my life. Both were widely read. I’ve never had more than twenty good sources in or connected to the yakuza in my career. But they all read the article, and they all liked it. Although I hammered home the point that the yakuza were merely returning some of the money they’d squeezed out of the locals over the years, everyone seemed to skip over it. Perhaps even the yakuza are prone to confirmation bias. The bad guys are always the other guys.

On March 20, the one yakuza I trusted the most, the Elder, called me from Osaka. This was two days after The Daily Beast article. At the time, the Yamaguchi-gumi hired people to keep track of what was written about them. No one should be surprised by this. He had been given a translation.

“Good work, Jake-san,” he said over the phone. “We kept a low profile this time, but honestly, the publicity didn’t hurt us. In fact, it helped us.” He laughed at his own joke. “We can’t be considered publicity hounds either … but you might be.” Both of us laughed.

I was thanked for bringing some attention to the good done by the yakuza. I pointed out to him one passage that argued a little differently in the article.

Ninkyo(do), according to yakuza historical scholars, is a philosophy that values humanity, justice, and duty and that forbids one from watching others suffer or be troubled without doing anything about it. Believers of “the way” are expected to put their own lives on the line and sacrifice themselves to help the weak and the troubled. The yakuza often simplify it as “to help the weak and fight the strong,” in theory. In practice, the film director Juzo Itami, who was attacked by members of the Yamaguchi-gumi Goto-gumi because of his films depicting them harshly, said, “The yakuza are all about exploiting the weak and disadvantaged in society, and run away from anyone strong enough to stand up to them and their exploitive extortion.” He was primarily correct, I think … of course, most yakuza are just tribal sociopaths who merely pay lip service to the words.

The Elder just laughed. “Goto was and is a walking piece of dick cheese. He’s the worst of the yakuza. However, you also wrote something thoughtful. You said that we valued giri (reciprocity)—at the least the best of us, and you yourself know that sometimes that is true.”

He was right. The main reason I was still alive because he watched my back. I never asked for it, and he never directly offered such protection, but I understood.

“I do know that’s true,” I said, “I get it. That’s why the article throws you and all the other yakuza a bone.”

As we talked, we discussed the situation in Tokyo and Fukushima. When I told him about my reporting on TEPCO, he was interested. “They are a thousand times worse than we’ll ever be,” he said. This was difficult to disagree with. It crossed my mind to mention my battle with liver cancer, but I decided not to. Chemotherapy was harsh, but it was my burden. Additionally, the whole thing might have been seen as a request to get a new liver, and really, that wasn’t something I wanted to ask for.

He asked me a question, “When are you going to write about TEPCO and the disaster at Fukushima?”

I thought about it for a second, “As soon as I know enough to write something about it. I don’t know anything about nuclear power. I’ll need to know more.”

“Well,” he took a deep breath, “you should know that the yakuza and the nuclear industry here are deeply in bed. And there was a time when TEPCO paid us a lot of money to make sure journalists like you didn’t do their job and write the things they didn’t want written.”

I was intrigued, but, without missing a beat, said to him, “But of course, and no disrespect to your profession, for decades you people were also happy to look the other way in exchange for TEPCO advertising money. Nuclear energy corrupts and spoils everything it touches. Yakuza, TEPCO, corrupt politicians, we’re all part of that dark empire. I hope you can shed some light on it.”

I was certainly going to try.