Author’s note

This book is based on the lives of several yakuza bosses and is meant to tell the history of the yakuza in the last century in Japan: why they came to power, why they were tolerated, how they began, and how they have changed over time. Many people involved in the writing of this book—including lawyers, yakuza, police officers, prosecutors, and journalists—shared with me details of their lives, above and beyond the call of duty, and sometimes against their own self-interest. They told me about the history of themselves, their organization, and their friends in great detail. They talked with me about crimes they had committed or investigated, and regrets they had, gave me access to confidential information about their work, and some turned over their private videos, photographs, letters, documents, faxes, hamonjo, and emails. In doing this, they took incredible risks. Many of them violated codes set up by their organization that forbade them from speaking to the press without permission; and possibly, in speaking to me, they broke the law. If they had been caught cooperating with me, or the full contents of what they disclosed was known, they could have faced not only the loss of their jobs but possibly their lives or liberty.

In 2010, Japan repealed the statute of limitations on all capital crimes (death penalty offenses), and extended the statute of limitations for other felonies by up to twenty-five years. The civil servants’ laws are strict in Japan, and leaking information can result in criminal prosecution. The State Secrets Law, which came into effect on December 10, 2014, punishes those who leak information with up to ten years in prison. The vagueness of those laws also theoretically allows journalists to be sentenced to up to five years in prison for “instigating leaks.”

When I began researching this book, the statute of limitations revisions and the State Secrets Law were not even on the horizon. The ideal for me would have been to use only real names and not to alter any descriptions or chronologies, but in consideration of the risk that my sources face, I have done the best I could.

In exchange for my informants’ cooperation, most made only one request: that I not use their real names as long as they were alive, and that details be obscured so they would not face criminal prosecution. Individuals who went on the record and said they would allow their real names to be used later recanted and asked to become anonymous.

Consequently, most names in this book have been changed, and many personal details have been altered or obscured, to protect the innocent and the not-so-innocent. A few events have been reordered chronologically or tweaked to make them less discernible to the people involved. This was not done for “narrative momentum,” but to ensure the safety of everyone involved, including myself. Saigo is primarily based on the life of one yakuza, but his personal details were merged with others to protect him and them.

No one likes to deal with angry yakuza or pissed-off cops. And also, despite those who say, “It’s all on the record unless the person says otherwise at the start,” most sources spoke to me in good faith or in the mistaken assumption that they could no longer be held criminally responsible for their actions. Accordingly, I have decided to protect their identities as much as possible.

Covering the yakuza and writing about them is always a challenge. First of all, many of them are pathological liars, and if even they’re not lying, they greatly embellish their tales to make themselves or their organization look better. Triangulating something they tell you is an arduous task. I’ve used biographies, court records, newspaper articles, hundreds of hours of interviews, yakuza fanzines, and police materials to do so. If I were an academic, this book would have footnotes galore. As it is, I’ve kept the footnotes to a minimum.

The nature of the yakuza is to pick a fight and then to demand compensation. It’s one of their primary money-making methods. In Japanese, this is called innen wo tsukeru. It is one of the practices prohibited by the organized crime-control ordinances that were passed nationwide on October 1, 2011, and was also banned in the first anti-organized crime laws that came into effect in 1992. The laws initially had little effect.

Dealing with the yakuza and former yakuza is always like walking through a field of land mines after imbibing too many cups of sake. The only thing worse than cranky, lying yakuza are disgruntled entertainment journalists with a chip on their shoulders and too much booze in their gut. I fully expect that if this book is successful, at least one or two of the people I spoke with will try to shake me down. That’s how the yakuza work—that’s their nature. If you were to say “Good morning” to the wrong yakuza, in fifteen minutes he would be making you apologize for saying you were glad his mother had died that morning—on this so-called good morning—and you’d be paying him a few hundred dollars to show your repentance and sincerity. A few weeks later, another of his buddies would blackmail you for paying off the yakuza, which is now a crime. If you were very lucky, maybe it would end there.

As an investigative journalist, trouble is my business.

For yakuza, troublemaking is their business.

However, from over thirty years of reporting on organized crime in Japan, I have decided to take those risks in publishing this book because I feel the story of the yakuza in Japan and their ultimately negative influence on society is something that, even now, people should know about. There are some yakuza who have followed a rudimentary code of ethics, who, within the context of the underworld, are “admirable” people. There are few of them left, if any at all.

The influence and power of the yakuza has waned dramatically. There were nearly 80,000 in 2011, but, according to the National Police Agency, there were only around 24,000 or fewer active yakuza as of 2021. If you only include full-fledged members, that number drops to 12,300. Any way you look at it, the decline is steep, and shows no signs of slowing down.

The Yamaguchi-gumi split into two factions on August 26, 2015, marking the tenth anniversary of Shinobu Tsukasa taking the throne. The new faction was led by Kunio Inoue of the Yamaken-gumi, and called itself the Kobe-Yamaguchi-gumi. Retired gangster Tadamasa Goto put up the seed money. A third faction calling itself the Ninkyo aka Humanitarian Yamaguchi-Gumi emerged in 2017. The three groups have been engaged in a bloody battle for dominance for years now, but until there are civilian casualties the Japanese government is happy to just watch the war of attrition.

The Kobe-Yamaguchi-gumi has already lost the war, but refuses to surrender. The Yamaken-gumi split apart from them, and in 2022 the Takumi-gumi, led by its well-respected boss, Tadashi Irie, declared independence. By the time you read this, the Kobe-Yamaguchi-gumi may even be gone.

The yakuza were allowed to exist until the 2020 Olympics (held in 2021) were over. The criminal conspiracy bill that would have put them out of business never became law in a way that could dismantle them permanently. Additional laws are unlikely to pass so long as the major yakuza groups still have political capital and a few politicians in their pockets.

If you doubted that the yakuza still had power, the cherry blossom viewing parties held by prime minister Abe (when he was alive) and his henchman Yoshihide Suga, which yakuza bosses quietly attended, showed they were still pulling strings behind the scenes. The cabinet decision after that scandal, to declare that there was no actual definition of yakuza (anti-social forces), was a new low point in Japanese politics. I’ve come to feel that the only difference between Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party and the yakuza are two things: the yakuza have different badges, and some of the yakuza have a code of ethics.

I write about the yakuza less and less. I can’t say that this bothers me. In a few years, I think if I’m writing about the yakuza at all, it will be as history, not as news.

People ask me if there is anything good about them. Well, you can learn some valuable life lessons from the best of them. If there are any lessons to be learned from the Inagawa-kai, specifically the Yokosuka-ikka, they are these:

Pay back the kindnesses bestowed upon you.

Every promise matters.

It’s good to have a code.

Be ready to be betrayed, but don’t be the betrayer.

This book is dedicated to Coach; my father, Eddie Adelstein; and Takahiko Inoue, a yakuza boss and Buddhist priest, who tried his best to convince the yakuza around him that there is one law that can never be thwarted: the law of karma.

One would hope that is really the case.