Inside the Yakuza | Jake Adelstein | Ep. 375

in the Japanese Underworld. This is probably the best. I mean, I would say it is the best English language book about the Yakuza. You guys should go and check this one out. And his follow up to Tokyo Wes Tokyo Noir, which kind of continues Jake's own story in Japan in and out of the out of Japan's Underworld. I hope you guys will check this one out also. So, Jake, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

and oglows and uh yeah, it's a great play. And they made it into a movie too. And I asked him to be the showrunner and HBO was like yes, And so it's great to work with your high school money. And he was very good about listening to what I had to say ninety percent of the time.

and you ended up working as a reporter in Tokyo. Uh well, in like the early to mid nineteen nineties, Like tell us that whole trajectory from point A to point B, how that came about?

medical examiner. So I grew up listening to lots of stories about crime and murder and accidents, and that was kind of always dinner conversation. And in high school I got kind of picked on a little bit. I got in a fight with the school bully, and my teacher, instead of expelling me, told me I needed to take karate lessons to channel my anger. And from there I

got interested in Japan. And so my first year since student at the University of Missouri, I noticed that they had an exchange program, and I thought, what a wonderful opportunity to go to Japan. And lucky for me, it was a time like when the Japanese economy was booming and Japan seemed very expensive. So we had no one

going from the university. We had twenty people coming from Sophia University, which is the university where I was going to go as an exchange student, and they relaxed the rules and let me go after only a year of Japanese under my belt, and a couple of months after I got there, I ended up living in a zen Buddhist temple. It's that really weird story. I mean, there's kind of one coinstance after another, and I'm still friends

with the chief priest. I mean, you know, and you read the book where now he's my end master, which is kind of a weird thing to say.

kay Cokuchi. So I wrote this essay. It was like, if you're serious about an internationalized thing, and you really you know, and you know you're giving us the topic of foreigners, you should hire a foreigners so you have a different perspective on things. And they took me up on that. So to their credit, you know, they knew exactly what they were doing. They did have They did

it just like in the TV shows. There's have some questions on whether me being nominally Jewish would be an obstacle to be.

those days off. And then as I rose up in the company, sometimes you would be on the night shift and you'd be following a formula to mark your labor hours. So I went once in the company, I hadn't I hadn't been like in the office for three days working on a story, manning the phones, and I marked myself into like in the middle of a vacation, because that's what the manual said.

so you're interacting with the police and eventually organized crime. You're starting to learn sort of like where the fault lines in society are, Like, like what was that like and what were you learning as a young guy working that job at the time.

I mean, that was a really weird thing that I realized is is that the rules of engagement as a journalist, especially covering organized crime, were like this. You could get information from the akaza and you could pass it on to the police, and that was okay. You just had to make sure that the akada were these these mafiosas understood that you understood that you were doing them a favor, and it wasn't the other way around. And then but you could never take information you got from the police

and give it to the akaza. And so everyone has these kind of sort of rules and they're not written out, and you sort of warn them as you go along, and you don't want to screw up, and and and what makes being a police reporter in Japan really hard is the cops cannot go on the record because the Japan criminal because the japan Public service laws makes it a crime for a police officer to speak about something

that's confidential. So if they get caught, they can get fired, they can even be prosecuted, which is why you have to have this intensive You and I are just drinking and we both got so drunk. No one remembers what happened last night, so of course you could have told me anything about a breaking case.

the homicide cops want to do it. Well, there was one case where they the homicide cases homicide cops took over case from the organized crime squad involving the murder of a low life journalist actually I mean one of our own in a sense, but basically he made his money by blackmailing people. He got paid by not writing articles. So this you know, yakuza kills him. The police started an investigation. First the organized crime cops do it. Then the homicide guys step in and they said, we're going

to do We're going to do this. So the homicide cops send like low level rookies to arrest the guy. But the suspect has a gun, right because he's the yaka. Is only theaka that have guns in Japan unless so the cops, And so when the cops show up to rest him, not knowing what's going on, he pulls the gun on him and he holds the hostage in a car for a couple hours a stand off. He shoots

himself on the head. He survives. It's a huge scandal, but it's just the whole thing is screwed up because the homicide guys had so much hubris that they wouldn't listen to the organized crime cops, and they didn't tell the rookies going to arrest him the possible danger that he had a gun. So I thought, this is a great story. Here's where police rivalry results in, you know, nearly a death and a hausted situation. It could have

been avoided. And so I wrote up the article and I showed it to my boss, and what do you think happened? Said nope, no, no, He said, hold on, this is a great story. So he went to talk to the head of the investigative division, like the chiefs of the detectives, and they made a deal that we would have a scoop on any major crime story for the next six months, and in exchange, we would bury this story. We bury the story.

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and they tended to be pretty nutty themselves. And because like as I told you, the pretense is right that this is just a friendly drink between buddies, right, so you cannot take notes, you know, you cannot take out a pen and paper. So you drink, you know, for a couple of hours. Maybe maybe you eat something too,

and you always try and bring something with you. And then we had taxis that we could use a company cars because of course peopn't want to get arrested for drunk driving, so you'd have to write down everything as fast as you can before you pass out. Our loves is still in your head. I mean, it's great training for remembering conversations because you can't take notes. So there's one cop I really liked named Iso Bassan, and you know he's retired now so and he doesn't have a

problem to mention his name. And when I go to easta Basons, the first thing he would say was like, would you like a beer? And that's very common advantage. You start with a beer, and then we would drink some Japanese sake and he was really into the sake soap he would tell me where it was from. And whether it was dry or whether it was sweet, and you know what its name was and why this was

a good sake. And then after the sake, sometimes his wife would make his dinner and we would have some wine with the dinner, and if it was winter, he'd give me a shot of whiskey for the roape because it was cold outside. And so my notes from my visits to his house would always like start with very nice, you know, fine print and details, but by the third page office started trailing off as I'd pass out. That was kind of fun.

for you.

the serial Killer. I got assigned to cover Endo Makoto and his driver Walkuisan and in the course of in the course of that investigation, I started dating and those mistresses and Sigo was in the same organized crime group, the Ena Galachai, and at one point, uh, you know, I think he actually came to her house or something.

We had this sort of discussion of the fact that you know, wasn't appropriate for me to be with the his brothers and the organization's mistress, and I was like, you know, the guy is probably dead and I should be awarded. I should be rewarded for taking care of the mistress because there's no one to look after her. And he just thought that was a lot of Chuck's

butun very fun. And then we just stayed in touch until about two thousand and eight, when I was put under police protection because I pissed off this yak as a boss and he was kicked out of his organization because he owed a bunch of money to them, And so I asked him, you know, would you be my bodyguard and my driver because I need both and he said.

they have business cards, they exist in the public. Actually, I've got a fan magazine around if you'd like me to pull it out. I could show it to you, Yeah, just to show you how crazy that is.

outlying some of their criminal activities. I mean, I laughed, because it's like, it's not like you're born in Yakaza. You do have some choice there. Who is the so this is? This is it?

people who love true crime. And there are probably some women readers who read it as well, so it's very male oriented.

And he also didn't take very good care of himself. So he needed a liver transplant, and the best place to get a liver transplant is in the United States. And in order to get that liver transplant, because he was on a blacklist by the FBI, of course, the United States isn't going to let in a known criminal of his nature in. He made a deal with the FBI that they would provide him a visa to go into the United States and get a liver transplant at UCLA.

UCLA found him a liver or the FBI didn't find him, didn't find a deliver, but he did that and he ratted out his buddies to get that deal. Or the FBI was kind of wanted intelligence about organized crime within the United States. The Japanese police and the National Police Agency would not cooperate with the FBI for reasons I've never understood. They wouldn't share their list of members with the FBI, and the FBI wanted that list.

is that I had heard about this. I'd heard about the fact that he got a liver transplant while covering this huge story about a loan chark who made like over hundreds of millions of dollars with his coloff a loan sharking operation which included laundering money at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. I mean, really like movie thriller kind of stuff. And on following that story for years, I heard that Goto had made a deal to get

into the United States and get a liver transplant. It took me a long time to figure out that he made a deal with the FBI to do it, And so when I started to write about it. Someone routed me out to him, and you know, I was hearing murmurs that that he was very unhappy with what I was working on. And then the National Police Agency told me to come to the office and said, well, you know,

you're under police protection. Apparently there's a contract out on you and you know what exactly are you up to?

And so that was very awkward too, because it's kind of like, you know, I didn't really want to give up my sources, but they were quite aware of the fact that this deal had been made with the FBI and happy about it, so maybe they wanted this story out as well.

kind of strange. I've always been strange to be so can you imagine like the Crips and the Bloods sending Christmas cards to each other, not really no, but in Japan that's totally the way that you have all these different organizations. You have the Sumiyo Skai, you have the amumi, and to some extent you can have you can be an in and you can be a blood brother with a member of someone in the Sumiokai. So you have these alliances that transcend organizations. So it comes very complicated.

Who knows what? And one third of the akas are Korean Japanese, and because Koreans in Japan are subject to auto discrimination, so there's a substrata of people in the akasa groups who know each other as like, well, you're a fellow Korean, and even though we're in different organizations, we have this in common. And I was kind of like navigating that labyrinth of connections between the organizations to

get information because it's reporter. Information is what you want, right, That's what gets you a scoop.

and they weren't allowed to work normal jobs. So like the kind of the system sort of created this underworld at the time.

Was just telling me there's an Enegalachai meeting tomorrow. They have meet monthly meetings, and you can watch all the cars line up in front of their office and raponki across from Riz Carlton.

watching them come in and out of the meetings. And sometimes there's still some reporters from the weekly magazines there to photograph the meetings. So that's always surreal. But back to your point. So World War two ends and you know, these guys come back from the war and it's total chaos. Right. The Japanese police force exists, but they have a limited ability to police things, especially what are called third party nationals.

Third party nationals are people who were under the Imperial Japan, the Taiwanese and the Chinese and the Koreans technically Japanese citizens, but not really. So after the war ends and Japan starts rebuilding, these people don't fit in. Like if you're a Korean Japanese, even if you nationalize, you know, the jobs open to you are basically Korean barbecue rafel Leve Hotel owner, Pachinko parlor, pachinko Parlo being kind of like

a gambling pinball machine place. And so the Akasa, though, we're a meritocracy, so if you could do the time,

and you could do the crime, they would let you in. And there's a other weird outcast class in Japan called Barackomene are people who traditionally worked with leather where butchers dealt with animals because that was considered unclean to kill an animal. And the Akasa welcomed these people and didn't care what your ethnic background is or whether you were part of the Baracomine class, and that was one of the reasons that they did so well. And they also

have this code. I wouldn't even call it a code of honor. It's a code of conduct which is certain things would get you kicked out of the ax especially in the early days, which is petty theft that'll get you kicked out. Robbery. Robbery is taking things with violence, right, you know, like mugging someone on the street, dealing and using drugs. Of course, sexual assault because you know that is not acceptable and that would get you kicked out.

But everything else, extortion, racketeering, threatening people, that was all okay. You can do all those things.

It's like, okay, you know, you have these things that you do and you make your money that nobody else wants to do, and we're fine with that. But once you step out of those lines, then you're just common criminals.

You know this is Japan, right, the vice chairman of Japan's Olympic committee photographed and clearly friends with the head of Japan's largest organized crime group. Was a minor issue, and that was a nice scoop for me. But before I published the article, I called up someone in the Amachigumi and said, like, basically, I'm writing this article. You know I'm not the only one that could write it

as a professional courtesy. I'm letting you know. And the only thing that was said to me was could you crop the photo so that we don't see itscassa as missing as middle is a little picky there because he's very sensitive about it. I said, I can't do that, but I can't include a line in the article that your boss is honorable because I did so. First, we'll

get to this the little the little finger thing. Uh. In a time when Japanese people use sorts, right, if you cut off this finger here, you weaken your sword drip. So it is a sign of appeasement. By offering up part of your finger to the person you wrong, you're showing that you are sorry, and you're weakening yourself, just like a dog shows its neck right in a dogfight, to say, like, if you want to take me out,

take me out, you know, let me live. So when yaka the culture, there's two reasons you cut off your finger, and usually it's just the tip of your pinky, right, you know, because you know you don't want to cut off this much, this much If you screwed up and you're chopping off your finger, so that you can stay in the organization or make amends or not pay a debt. But you owe that is called a shinny UVII. That is a dead finger. But if you do it on behalf of so your brother or your your friend in

the organization who is done something wrong. Maybe he's stolen money from the organization, maybe he's maybe he's cooperated too much with the cops, maybe he's fallen asleep on his job as a bodyguard. Anyways, screwed up. And you do that on behalf of him, then that is called an ecup, which is a living finger, and that is considered very honorable to sacrifice part of yourself, are getting a part of yourself or somebody else, That is an honorable thing.

And even though if you and I look at someone's finger, all et is a missing finger right in the opposite world which I which is like you know, Tokyo Junior High School, everybody knows that that finger is either a dead finger or a living finger.

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or enduring great pain on behalf of somebody else. And in the fifties and sixties it sort of became like a cool thing to chop off a finger, like people who look for excuses like Mike, you know, what can I do to justifying chopping on my face? Years so I looked like a tough guy. Uh. I don't know if I mentioned this in the book, but people don't like to say yakaz Jefpanes's polite society because it's you know, it scares people, right, it's you know, it's you know,

it's not it's not said lightly. So often instead of saying yakaza, they do this, and that symbolizes a cut across the fai. So in the Akasa world, it used to be, especially in the days when you're having lots of gang wars, that instead of killing you, I would slash you across the face to show that I let you. And amongst the Akasa that sort of became kind of a cool thing. But it's like, wow, I've been in a deadly sight, which I survived. So some of them

started doing it to themselves, so that became. That's still the mark of the well.

The skin is almost burnt sometimes, you know, it never returns to its tense, like you can't feel any warmth. It's like the skin is dead, like somebody's burned there in the evening. They call it mom, which literally means endurance. So a tattoo shows one that you have separated yourself from normal straight society, right, You've branded yourself I'm an outlaw. The other is I am tough. I have my toughness can be seen on my tattoo, the density of the

tattoos on my skin. Sometimes the boss will pay for your tattoo, in which case you have to have the boss's name and the organization's emblem engrave on your chest. So that's like corporate branding taking and it's you know, to the ultimate level. Right, you are part of the Enangalachi for ever it's on your chest. And another thing

is it shows you have money. It's like a rolex, right, the deeper the you know, the deeper the tattoo, the more colorful it is, the more finite it is, and the more of your body it covers, it shows that you have patience, endurance, and money. It takes hundreds of hours to get a full body tattoo, and all of those things make the tattoo very lower to the end.

Fukushima where the nuclear accident happened. They have power based there semi national, but not in Okinawa and not very powerful in Kshu. The sumiyos Kai, it's mostly located in Tokyo in surrounding areas. Ginza is their territory, so they get a lot of money and revenue from the hosts, clubs and clubs in the Ginsa area, which is a very rich area, and some of their mostly Tokyo based.

The Matsuba Kai is sort of Yuma area. And then you have things like the Kudo Kai which is in Kshu, which is a very powerful, very violent group, actually the most violent of the actual groups. Is fudo kai. They're the guys that throw grenades into the bars of people that won't pay money. Most act of groups are a little better about cultivating good relationship with the public. If you throw grenades into a host as far that won't pay you money, the cops are going to come down

you on. The people aren't going to look at you as benevolent out outlast.

in the neighborhood, because that's bad for business. You want people to go to the red light district and spend their money without worrying about getting mugged or whether we're worrying about getting robbed or having their credit cards stolen.

So you know, some levels, even the police considered them anecessary evil because they limited their activities to certain certain activities, which were collecting money from construction companies, bid rigging, you know, racketeering, gambling, and you know, making pornography and other things that have always been on the sort of the outside of Japanese life. And you know, everybody paid the money, and that was kind of the revenue stream there. It's like you ran

a bar, you paid the money. If you were building an apartment building in the neighborhood, you paid the money, and in return for that, they kept you know, a minimum of trouble out. And also at a time when there weren't enough lawyers in Japan. This is a very weird but truth true thing, and it needs to be very hard to pass the bar in Japan, so there

was a shortage of lawyers. So if you had a civil dispute with someone, right, someone didn't pay you money, or someone cheated you on a construction job, it might take you years to get your case into court and win the court battle, in which case the court wouldn't necessarily enforce the settlement, but if you went to the Yakada, they would handle it. Immediately and they would give you half of what you were owned, which is better than none.

So for a long time, the yakada played a huge role in start selling civil disputes, car accidents, damages to property was expensive and time consuming to go to a lawyer. You went to the local yakaza and they took care of it for you. So as the number of lawyers in Japan has increased, the number of yakuza had also decreased.

I can't say whether there's a correlation, but one lawyer I know who specializes in dealing with the yaka, you know, he was always saying, yeah, you know, one of the reasons the acada declient is because there's more lawyers here, so their services aort I needed.

to follow a code. You know, sounds like absolutely the kind of guy you'd want to have a few drinks with.

Yakaza do not bother ordinary people. Yakuza do not steal, they do not rob, they do not engage in sexual assault, they do not engage in decency, they don't use drugs, they don't bother civilians.

They hear the leader of the Chihara Kai student Scotta, has been around so long and he's been in so many Akaza movies that he knew kind of how he knew the individual that he's essentially playing a TV version of which I thought was fascinating, and that was one of the reasons I think they was so good at

the role. It was if you put two pictures of them together, they look similar. They have the same vibe.

to that as well. What is said is that people like the coach in recent years and and also a result of increasingly harsh legislation, have sort of disappeared. So the age where you know, the ri yaka who said, we won't do this because it's unethical, we won't do this because it's against the code, those guys have all faded out because you know, it's so hard to make

a living. And then Nagalakai, you know, a lot of the people who were ethical, who insisted on following the old code have been kicked out because it's all about the money, you know, honor and no nobility. And you know what they called Nino the way of chivalry that the as supposed to his spouse, that's just an obstacle to getting things stuff.

to do it and they're not very successful. And then they, you know, try and do it with the cutting board and that isn't very successful, and if you know, you have to turn over the finger to do it, and it's just a bloody buddy mess. And at one point, one of his henchmen, who used to be in the band with him, you know, as they're dealing with this, finally chopping off the finger and getting this new and wrapping it in you know, what are they going to do.

And it's this very dark moment in the household where there's blood all you know, there's a I don't think there's actually she said there wasn't a lot of blood. But you've got this finger, you've got the cutting board, you've got to wrap it up in things. Is that he takes the finger and he puts it in his nose and sort of shakes his head around with it to make everybody laugh, which they do. That's just you know,

it is. It is bizarre. But I guess if you're there at the moment, there is something very comical about how hard it is to chop boxer chap. I think they're actually books written to show you how to do it the right way.

they're given kind of an allowance. But Sigo started as a basically a motorcycle gangster running a motorcycle gang created his own right wing group that sort of functioned as a group shaking down local merchants and asking them to pay money to join his right wing organization or buy the periodical that the right wing organization was putting out.

And when he decided to join the Innigala Chai because he had a dispute with another gang boss, he you know, he was entered like at a high level, like the equivalent of going to West Point right instead of starting as a private and working your way up, you know, from a listed you know, he'd already established his own organization. They welcome him. So he came in at like a captain memo.

were up to the ladder. You know, the Eni al Kai is a very bureaucratic organization, so everybody wants to rise to the top. And at one point they had

ten thousand organizations. So he became like an executive director, which is a very high position, and he was doing, you know, pretty well in the organization until a violent shooting in his neighborhood involving another yakaz member really brought down the police hard on the whole organization where he lived, and money started to dry up as people just said

they wouldn't pay protection money anymore. And one of the things, you know, one of the reasons you're you join the Yakaza, right, is it's like a franchise, so you're paying basically for the rights, like nope. So the amaguchigubi here right, the name the organization, the symbol of the organization. It gets you money, it gets you power. If you don't have

that organization. Marty Eric McDonald's about the Golden arches, and that costs money, and that costs everywhere anywhere between one thousand dollars a month to twenty thousand dollars to stay on good terms. The higher you rise, the more money you have to pay. And he wasn't able to pay the money. And when you're not able to pay your dues, they kick you out. And also he didn't answer his phone for a couple of days as well, which is

a real bad one in the acaza. What is it like in the military if you're like on duty and you are on vacation, you don't answer your phone, you get in big trouble.

out of a job. And at the time, if you read Tokyo More, I'm doing these due diligence work, right, so I've got a nice steady stream of money doing these corporate investigations coming in. And I also realized that he, you know, doesn't like go too Tatamasa, that he's not a big fan of him, and I'm like, you know, this is probably synergy. So we have a meeting at my house and I basically say, look, you know, you don't have a job and I need protection and I and also you have a car. I don't have a

driver's license. What do you say? And so sort of reluctantly, but also because he didn't have much of a choice, He's like, okay, I will be your bodyguard and I will be your driver. But I have one condition. And I'm like, what is that condition? He said, I want you to write a book about my life and about the actors of because I am proud of who I am and what we've done. I want my son to

know who his father was when he grows up. And so, you know, I agree with him on the condition that I get to write the truth about the aakaza and not another book talking about how there are these noble outlaws, you know, fearless men fighting for you know, traditional Japan. And he was okay with that, and that was the start of that book, was hiring him as a as

a bodyguarden. He wanted me to write this this story about about the actada and his life and you know, what are the akasa and there you know what he saw as their decline from being principal people to just money grubbing organization.

do not harm this journalist. And also, because I'm not an idiot, when I was writing the articles for the Washington Post, I went to one of his rivals in the organization in the same Amaguchi gum. Right, because it's the amagu Me is factional, right. I don't know if people understand that, Like it's not like the army, and it's not like it's not like the navy. It is a group of organized crime groups under the umbrella the Amaguchigumi.

But even within that organization there are conflicts between the factions. So they Aamaguchi Gumi, the tatguomi Me and the hana busagumi. They all may be fighting for the same territory and revenue streams, even though they're under the same umbrella. And amongst these yachta, the bosses, they don't all get along, right. So you've got you know, sixty or seventy organizations within the amakachu me. So I thought of the one yachta to the boss who really disliked God and probably would

like his turf and territory. So I went to him and I asked him for a comment for the Washington Post article. First I had to go to a tenant, and then I spoke directly to the public big boss. And as we were speaking, I also felt that there was this kind of communication between it which was like, you know, as they say in the yaka the world,

the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And I was basically saying to him without saying it bluntly, is keep me alive and let me write my article and this will result in the downfall of your rival, and that church and Charryty is yours. And that seemed to have worked out very nicely because there was no contract on me after the Washington Post article came out, but the police still kept me under protection for another five years in total.

face very slowly, so less stars. And a few years later in nineteen ninety nine, I think around nineteen ninety nine, the director allegedly committed suicide by jumping from the top of a building just as he was making another film that had connections to Tokumi. But one of Godo's guys named Mikuni told me you know on the conditions, on the conditions that I couldn't tell his name unless ten years have gone by for the time he told me, he said, yeah, well you know that director. He told

me it didn't kill himself. He was taken to a roof and they put a gun in his face and they told him you could either jump and you might live, or you can stay here. We'll go off your face and they'll definitely die. And I assumed that he could. He told me that because he was hoping that would be his insurance policy. But he's been missing now for five years and nobody knows where he is. I mean, easy yaka that you can find his name in the newspapers,

you can find his name in the yakasavand magazines. But he's gone now. Is he in hiding? Is he in the bottom of a building in Tokyo, buried in the cement base when they're a foundation of the building. I don't know. But sometimes yaka that really do fade away, like where did this guy go? And there's a lot of them. I mean, there used to be eighty thousand yachta to Japan. Now there's nineteen thousand, Like, so where did those others sixty sixty one thousand Yakas I ad

vantaged to do they find new jobs? Are they in prison? What are they doing now?

a gift counter. You can get a gift or you can get sort of an exchange card, and you can go outside of the patinko parlor to another place and get it turned into cash. So that is sort of legalized gambling in Japan. Pachinko was something that the Korean Japanese did after the war, and it was a big amusement thing. But it looked like the Japanese government was

going to outlaw them all together. So, you know, most of the Japanese dollers quit, but the Koreans kept kept running the patinko parlors and the Patica powers are still a big part of the gambling landscape today, even though it's you know, semi legal gambling. But remember Korea splits into Korea, South Korea, North Korea, and the Koreans left in Japan have to choose an alliance going to a lion. You know, am I going to claim citizenship in North Korea? Am I going to change?

the homeland. And so for many years, pachinko industry has been one of the sources of North Korea's revenue.

doing cracking, hacking cryptocurrency exchanges in Japan. I think they've done too now. I mean that it has been traced in North Korea. North Korea is really good at hacking, and they seem to be really good at hacking Japanese from the currency exchanges like bitcoin, d and man and there was another one just really recently. And I think North Korea, while it still makes math amphetamines, it's hard to get them into Japan. And they moved on to cyber crimes, which brings a lot more revenue.

the drug of choice in Japan. So they're producing the drugs, they're selling it to the akada. The conduit between the Yamagumi and the North Korea and North Korea was an ome sort of high free named Mudai. And you know, as the police are investigating home Chuinity kill and looking at what they're doing and getting a sense of these people are maybe producing nerve casts, they are going to

plan a huge terrorist attack. Uh. One of the organized crime cops who was working on the connection between Mhini kill in and and the Akasa UH discovered that they had purchased a helicopter and that they and that they were planning to use it for something nefarious. Uh. Unfortunately, I think that they managed to make sure that the

that they were never put soidning gas on the helicopter. So the sidning gas attack ended with these paper bags full of siding gas being put on the subways all around Ibia, which are then poked with holes and uh and and it could have killed thousands of people. Fortunately they didn't do the helicopter and disperse it over Tokyo. I don't know how successful that would have been.

of their problems. And they were like, there's so many Jews in New York that we should spread sun gas there using a helicopter to you know, to change the new world order. So that was amongst the crazy things that they had planned. And they you know, they have purchased helicopters from Russia, so you know, if they hadn't been stopped early on, they might have tried it. I think we were lucky that we ended up with the smaller number of casualists that we had, But these guys

were crazy. Have you remember the series Millennium with Frank with Lyles Hendrickson, Ye, The X Files. Yeah, okay, so there's there's one episode, maybe the second episode called Jehenna, which was modeled after O Machinikill where you have people, they're telemarketers working for this strange cult and there's a scene where someone is microwave to death. Well, OLM Schiniko did that. They built a giant microwave. One of their dissenters they put in the microwave and they like fried

him a lot. Yeah, these guys were insane, and they were working hand in hand with organized crime. And when, you know, when it was revealed that Ome had planned, you know, had was responsible to the sating gas attacks, and that they had tied the Amagikumi, you know, that's not good for the public image of the group. Right. So Murai, who was ahead of the one of the executives of OLM Schinko, was coming out of a press conference and he was stabbed to death by this you know,

so called right winger. And the right winger, of course, turned out to be a yakuza, a Korean yakaza. And you know, you know, he always claimed that, you know that he did it out of patriotic out of patriotic reasons. But when Joe, which is the name of the of the person who assassinated were I When he got out of jail after serving his time for killing this home leader who had connections to the go to Gumi. Guess who he went to work for.

talking about America. Like there aren't any actual Jewish people other than you maybe in Japan. So like, where the hell does this notion come from?

and the Japanese. So the one I had this kind of Japanese santasy world in which they admire like the way that this minority group is, you know, gained so much power or done so well financially, and there's so many sort of geniuses, or the way that they that they know that they consider the Jewish family structure very similar to a Japanese family structure. And that even you know, in this book postulating the Japanese or the Lost Tribe of Israel, all that crazy stuff, you know, it doesn't

make any sense to me. So there's an admiration, and there's a fear, and and and one of the weirdest stories of World War two is that there was this idea that amongst the Japanese elite, some of the generals that they couldn't trust Germany because they weren't white, and at some point the Germans would turn on them. So they smuggled a bunch of Jews out of Shanghai into Kobe and gave them safe passage so that when when it came time to deal with Germany, that they would

have Jewish power on their side. And that whole plan to smuggle them out of of you know, of German territories into Japan and Shanghai. It's called the Fugu plan because Fugu has you know, it's this poisonous blowfish, which if you handle properly, is a delicious delicacy. If you mishandled, can kill you. So, you know, the Japanese fascination our fear of Jews is never made any sense to me neither.

But on my way on my way to the airport, there was a book like in the you know, best sellers, which was like, you know, how to succeed in business like the Jews, And I'm like, really, you're still putting this out in the book in five.

last names are more important than your first names. He sees one of these fands, he decides to get a penis enlargement proced you're done. So he's getting done, and his nurse noticed that he's wincing, and she says to him, look at you with all those tattoos all of your

body that are so painful to reproduced, and you can't take a little prick and she I set him and he's really really angry about it. So later his man attempt to kill her, and one of the reasons he was originally given a death sentence which I think was changed to life imprisonment on appeal was for the attention murder of this nurse. Oh my god, because he couldn't take it that he couldn't take the pain of the penis margin procedure.

really happening. And so I had, you know, I knew people in the State Department, so I would pull aside stories that I worked on, or stories were the Japanese press that showed, you know, because Japan didn't have any real laws prohibiting human trafficking or punishing the traffickers would only punish the women. That you know that there was a huge failure to deal with this problem even addressed.

It's a problem, and I think one of the last things I wrote at the newspaper before I left was the International Labor Organization did a huge study of human trafficking in Japan, which the Japanese government paid for, and their conclusion was that Japan wasn't dealing with the problems.

They were punishing the victims immediately deporting them, and the traffickers knew that they could get away with it, and that Japan was turning a blind night of the problem and needed to put serious legislation down on the books. Here's the thing that the Japan government told the IOLL, you cannot release the report, but we paid for it,

but you can't release it. So I got a copy of it and we ran an article on it on the front page of the paper summarizing the main points of it, at which point, since the cats out of the bag, then they released the report and I also got a copy of it to the State Department. So after I had left, the newspaper and was back in

Missouri to go to law school. The US State Department, which was under George Bush, had decided that they really wanted to pressure Japan into deal with the human trafficking problem on a serious level, and the only way that was going to happen was is if they could shame

Japan into doing it. So they decided to do an investigation into the methodology of human trafficking in Japan, and they wanted plausible deniability, so they farmed it out to a nonprofit organization called Charitood International, which then farmed it.

have a positive impact on the world. And the other thing that I liked about the offer when it came to my way was that they told me I didn't have to submit expense reports. Is that they didn't want any receipts because they didn't want to know how I got the information.

state department. Sometimes that I you know, it went directly because you and I both know the fastest way to get information about criminal activity is to pay a criminal. And this is where knowing THEACASA is helpful because in this world in which these people consider themselves the good guys, right, what is the lowest to the low. There's pedophiles with

child pornographers as human traffickers. So if you talk to someone who's a yakada of any moral fiber at all, and you say look, dude, I want to know who in who in your outfit is running these kind of operations, and uh, and I could pay you. There's a lot of people raise their hands. There's some people who are like, I don't need any money, Like you know, these these people are awful, you know, like prostitution is one thing, but enslaving someone not paying it for their sex work,

that's just awful. That's slavery. So that was, you know,

an interesting job to have. And it turns out that one of the people who was receiving money and political favors from basically a lobby of human traffickers was so one of the ways that women were being trafficked into Japan at the time was the use of an entertainment FISA, right, So they would men is allegedly as entertainers and they get there, their passports would be taken away and they would you know, be threatened, you know, like we know where your family is, You work, and you do this

job and it wasn't a job that they were that they that they signed up for, and then at some point they would be sent back. So there was this group called the Zen gay Ran, which was an association of entertainment groups, and basically they were a human trafficking lobby. And this group was having their annual meeting at the headquarters of the Liberal Democratic Party, which is the ruling party.

So it would be like the Republican Party or the Democrat Party having a convention of human traffickers at their headquarters. And one of the politicians they were particularly friendly with and giving donations to was Shinzo Abbe, who later became

the Prime Minister of Japan twice. And these were the kind of things that I was giving the State Department in my reports them, you know, after I left the newspaper while working for while working for them on this project, and so you know, there were a couple other politicians who were definitely receiving money to turn the other way in block legislation that would stop which was a profitable industry.

and I think that the sort of backdoor deal. And I'm not privy to what actually happens behind back doors on this, but my feeling was that the United States said to Japan, We're going to rank you as low as North Korea unless you get serious about this problem, and you also need to clean up the problems that are then Gooya immigration because there was definitely one immigration office in which the girls were being trafficked through, like you know, with you know, they they clearly made no

attempts to screen the girls to see if they were really in Japan on entertainment visas, and the restrictions for entertainment visas became very severe. So, you know, by two thousand and nine, I feel like Japan as a destination place for human traffickers had really sort of fallen off the map. So yeah, I definitely think could came out

of it. And sometimes, you know, in that time, when Japan cared about what the world thought of it, they didn't want to be shamed and didn't want to be listed as like, you know, next to North Korea in terms of how they dealt with human trafficking. So of the things that the Bush administration did, you know, their efforts to curb human trafficking and to get you know, at least Japan to think it seriously, you have to give them a padle in the back. Well done.

the stock markets. The yakaza had moved so much into the financial markets that in a white paper put out at a national police agency around two thousand and sixty two thousand and seven, they pointed out that the axisa made these huge inroads into the financial world and said, you know, the incursion of organized crime aka the yakata into Japan's financial markets threatens the very foundations of our economy.

And so they really began looking at the links of yakuza like setting up front companies and doing stock market manipulation, are being basically venture capitalist and creating companies like our powering companies like Goodwill Corporation, which was one of the largest labor dispatch companies in Japan. And they also decided that they weren't going to give foreign banks or foreign

investment companies, you know, a free pass. So one of the things that happened around two thousand and four is they basically took away City banks private banking license because they were involved, you know, in handling act of the money and they had either either no one in compliance or they had people in compliance and they were still

doing business. And so that was kind of a warning bell to all these investment companies that were in Japan, big banks like like Lehman Brothers and Gold and Sachs that they needed to get their shit together are the financial services the agency would come down on them and

maybe take away their licenses. And so as all this happening with this one investment bank and then later another one reached out to me and said, like, you know, we hear that you are someone who is well versed in this world and that you could spot what is called a front company, meaning a company that is you know, illegitimate or is running a fraudulent operation, or sometimes there are companies that are actually successful but using yakaza like

tactics like blackmail and insider trading or getting seed money from organized crime. And so I was like, sure, you know, it sounds interesting to me. It sounds like what I've been doing is a reporter for many years. And so I started taking on these jobs. And not only was it pay very lucrative, it's really interesting to sort of, you know, learn to spot what is a front company, learned to see what is a company that is really

run by organized crime. And that sparked the gamut from you know, coffee shop chains to pride octopus ball places to massage powers and sometimes they were running accounting firms, database companies. Uh. There was even this firm called you You Betoma, which was kind of Japan's Classmates dot com and a yaka is a boss from the Kodoka. I took it over. So why do you think a boss

would want a yaka? The boss would want to take over classically Japanese equivalent of Classmates dot com, extortion, blackmail, Yes, exactly right, I mean, you know you've got the site had three million users, three million people, you know, and you know how people tend to misbehave a high school unions.

I'm not me, but you know other people, it's kind of it's such a fertile fertile there's probably communications going on between people and these websites that they should definitely not have, and and that was very attractive to the e.

so they know what to bring. They bring blankets, they bring food, they bring tents, sometimes they bring generators. They bring everything to the scene that people need. And when the Fukushima disaster happened, I was pretty sure that they would be very, very They would be the first responders because they know what is needed and they've got no

red tape. So I was stranded in the United States when the nuclear accident and the meltdown and the tsunami hit, but I was in touch with people back in Japan, and so you know, I was asked him, what are

you doing? And the Daily vis also contacted me and said, could you write something about what is happening in Fukushima, And I said, I can write you about what the Yakata are doing, which is interesting because they are going into dangerous areas with food and shelter and no protection, and so you know, I was like, well, you know, I don't don't think the Aakas are a positive force for Japan, but you have to give the devil as due.

So they were certainly very active in going there and trying to bring peace and comfort to people in the time of need, and so but I also don't trust them because you know, they're yakuza. So I made them send me films and in you know, video of them up downloading supplies and receipts and other things so I

could be comfortable with writing it. And we wrote it up for The Daily Beast, and that story went viral, and I think that also changed my relationship with some of the Akuza bosses as well in a very positive way.

So the Ya because a labor dispatch has always been one of their businesses, and so the nuclear power plants are supplied by the workers that are supplied by the acas are they always have been because they can find homeless people, They can find people who want to disappear, They can find people who will work for cash who you know, who don't have ID or who don't want to be identified because they're on the lamp. And that has been a sort of symbiotic relationship.

like these are legitimately dangerous jobs.

And I've spoken to people at the National Police Agency like like you know, basically Japan's equivalent of the FBI, and ask them like why don't you do background checks? And and very honestly, these guys have told me, you know, of course we should do background checks because these guys are criminals and it's not a good idea to have them. Next two materials that could be used to build a

dirty bomb or or do something nefarious. And if we do institutionalize them, you know, and if we and if someday we really do background checks on these people, that would be a good thing. And you know, what do you think would be the natural follow up to the question for that?

they're not designed to do that. I mean, Fukushima is such a disaster that everyone thinks it's over, But if you don't pour water into that nuclear core, you will have nuclear fission again. Like every day they're pouring water into the nuclear reactor and Shima, they've retrieved almost none of the core materials yet, and if they stop pouring

water into it, you get basically another nuclear reaction. And so every day japanque's pumping water into the Fukushimi reactor core and every day that polluted water goes out into the ocean. Probably we're for thirty forty years ago.

the pipes are gone, are cracked and but busted. And you know, all the data indicates that it was a nuclear and there was the earthquake itself which caused that nuclear accident and one of the reactors. The story that the TEPCO Total Electric Power Company has, you know, insisted on is that there was an earthquake, then the tsunami came in twenty twenty five minutes later, and then that water knocked out the electric goods and that's why you had a nuclear mouthout. That is true for some of

the reactors. Reactor number one, it was the earthquake itself which destroyed the piping, the forty year old piping in this reactor, a reactor that they had been worn many times before, was shouldn't have been decommissioned. And and what's scary is that all of Japan's new, you know, safety regulations for nuclear actors are predicted on the idea that it was a tsunami that caused the nuclear actor, not the earthquake himself.

insulated from going to jail. And he and he took the offer, and you know, as someone who had left but then faced you know, the usual discrimination that all

yaktas have faced even after they leave. I mean, I can't blame him, you know, I mean, honestly, if I was him, and I had a choice of being you know, the driver and bodyguard for me, versus being a yachta the boss and having someone open the door for me and drive me around being treated like a pig shot, I mean ethical considerations as hide I'd probably say yes. I mean, you know, well, it was disappointed and we sort of had a falling out about it, but we

made we mended, so we stayed in touch. And you know, I try and stay in touch with his son, you know, who's like all kids, he's really hard to get a hold of. But at least she's not his doing well good. And as for Godo, the last I heard with it, he is still still alive, getting a little senile. The United States listed him as a crime lord as late as twenty fifteen, even after he supposedly left the ACTUTA

and become a Buddhist priest. But you know, we don't we don't interact, and you know, I can't say I wish him well, but at least he's not in my life anymore.

provided protection of other things. I see them never completely fading out because if you completely get rid of the yakasa, there's so many cops who don't have a job, right, so they want to kind of keep them at this level of you know, of being powerless, but not completely fading away.

colleagues at work asked me to go. I was trying to write a story and it was a Soto's then Buddhist funeral, and I figured it would be really you know if to talk to the family so I complete the story. It would be great to have an introduction via the priest that officiated the funeral, So I went to see Joe Ginson, who is my zen master, and I explained the situation to him. I said, like, I'm working on this article about death by overwork. That's something

that happens in Japan actually far too often. And I asked for an introduction to the priest who had officiated the funeral, and as we were talking catching up, he said to me in his Cravilie voice, like, you know, maybe it's time you stopped being a daredevil man whore and put your life in order and followed the noble path that you once were on when you were a student. And I was like, you know, maybe that's not a

bad idea. And so we had this very long conversation and he basically said, like, you know, I don't have a disciple because I'm so cranky that no one can deal with me. And I don't have a son either, and you are the closest thing that I have, and it would be wonderful if you followed in my footsteps. And I said, after much discussion, I will think about it. And I said if I were to do this, like when would we do it? And he said you should

pick a date that's significant to you. I said, well, we could do it on my birthday, which is March twenty eighth, and he would like, that's amazing that you know your birthday is Mark twenty eighth, And I said why and he said, because that's when I took my Buddhist priest vows. And I kind of gave him that look like, yeah, you like you're full of shit, but you know, I mean not in a sort of friendly,

friendly way. And so he went up to his room and he pulled down this photo album of him when he was fifteen, and I looked at the year was the year show Off forty four, which in Western years, nineteen sixty nine, and I said, oh, like, wow, you became a Zen Buddhist priest on the day I was born. And he said, no, no, no, no, no, you were born on the day I became a Zen Buddhist priest. So it's karma, so you're meant to follow in my footsteps. And so I agreed. So so I took the vows

and I'm still learning the ropes. This is very military, I guess. If you don't in my case, if I don't advance to the next level of spiritual development, if I don't rank up in the in my zend with just pretranking. By twenty twenty seven, I get kicked out either rank up or you are you lose. And next year I have this giant test in which I have to solve this metaphysical riddle and and and defend my thesis in front of what, in front of whoever wants to come to the temple. It's really hard, and so

I'm learning to do that. And uh, you know, I can cook just vegetarian food. I can officiate some ceremonies. I'm very good at the one where you chase away hungry ghosts. So if you know someone who is plagued by hungry ghosts because there's someone in their life who hasn't moved on to the other world, I can handle that. I'm very good at that one.

a French guy named Mark Carpalis. It's really unusual. French guy really loved loved Japan, loved cryptocurrency and basically what was the epicenter of the cryptocurrency world, Like, if you wanted bitcoin in twenty fourteen, mon Cox was the place to get it. But it's also just a chronicle of the history of bitcoin and how and how basically criminal activity made it what it was.

You know, this guy who created the cryptocurrency that's not worth billions of dollars. Newsweek identified him as this man named Dorian Satoshinakamoto living in California, and my editor at The Daily Beast, you know, called me up right, the editor chief called me up and said, if this is true, Newsweek has a tremendous scoop. But if it's not true, please kick their ass. And those two events sent me into four years of covering bitcoin. And it's such a

crazy story. And what's fun about this book is it becomes a sort of personal memoir because not that I ever intended to be. Because as I was working on this story about this the theft of half a billion dollars worth of bitcoin, it turns out that there was someone else in the United States investigating this case who couldn't get any help from the Japanese police, and I was asked to smuggle the database of this exchange to the FBI in San Francisco. And that's one of the

weird parts of the story which I did. I don't know if that's if that's a journalistically ethically okay thing to do, but you know, as I was working on the story and I began to think that maybe some of the people who accused were innocent, I felt like

that was the right thing to do. It's such a fun book to write and also to read, because even if you don't know anything about bitcoin, you'll sort of be fascinated by how it evolved and how basically the Silk Road, which was an underground market where you could buy any any drug you wanted online, propelled it from nothing to a billion dollar current.

only connection they have. The triads and the actors that don't work very well together, except for this one period of time when carmakers in Japan needed to ah, it's not what it's not listy and batteries. There's a part of the the electric vehicle. It's a rare metal that is needed to make like a prius and stuff. There was a time when there was a shortage of that, and the Triots and the actors that were working together to smuggle that material into Japan. That's the only case

I know. I'm not an expert on the Triods unfortunately, but they're working wlationship with the minimal. All Right, we got a couple more.

His Japanese is amazing. The only thing I didn't like about the TV series portrayal of me is that there's a scene where I'm doing meth with Yaku's a fan magazine writer, and I would never do meth, at least not knowingly. It's really bad drug, which in general, I'm not If people want to do recreational drugs. I think that that's fine with them, but I don't want to do them.

I you know, this isn't really answering the question. I have so much material on the Akasa, Like I have their phone directories, I have comic books I have, I have, you know, some of the embroidered outfits they have, like

the sake bottles that they use for their ceremonies. Like I've got all this stuff that I've collected over the years, like in a warehouse in my second home in Kioto, and I'm like, what should I do with this because it's you know, thirty years of Yakaza fan magazines like like no, I mean, I guess kind of opening Yakasa Museum if Japan will let me.

honor than other groups. And and you know, and mostly their sociopaths, but some of them might at least respect to living up to the ideals that they profess. It's like, you know, a tiny fraction of them, but that is something that I think is unique about about the Japanese mafia. And also some of them write really great poetry. I like the poetry and the Acuda fan magazine sections is really funny and sometimes quite poignant. Who would have guessed?

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