Welcome to Underworlds from the global initiative against transnational organized crime. My name is Mark Shaw, and in today's episode, I talked to Jake Adelstein, who has written a book, the last Yakuza, about the rise and fall of organized crime in Japan. It tells the story of the life of an individual member of the yakuza, and literally the ups and downs they experience as the yakuza begin to fragment as the state applies pressure. It's an unbelievable read. Over to our discussion.
Welcome to Underworlds. It's really a pleasure to have you on. And this is great book was filled with all sorts of detail and interesting angles and pretty funny in places. I have to say, as a reader, to begin with, you have a pretty unique perspective. You're an outsider, arguably, that's become an insider. I mean, how does an american become an expert on the yakuza?
And for people listening who don't know Jake's work, he has another great and also very funny book, I have to say, which tells of his life as a. As a journalist in Japan. How did you become an expert on the yakuza? Well, the quick answer is that you're a newspaper reporter and your boss assigned you to cover the organized crime task force in 1994. Then it's your job. One of the things, of course, is we'll talk about this. That is very interesting about the japanese mafias.
They're very out in the open. In a sense, studying the japanese mob is quite possible, like almost academically. I just wanted to show you a few things. So this is a yakuza fanzine. This was in publication until about 2018, when they were sort of forced out of business 30 years. And, you know, every issue has the heads of the yakuza groups in there.
When their names, the organization, who's rising, sometimes there's even a chart articles about the organization, sometimes articles about how they make their money. Pictures of the gang leaders going to the monthly meeting, which I always thought like this, literally, says Yamaguchi gumi, regular monthly meeting. There's reporters from the fan magazine out there taking photos of these guys coming in and out. Of course, the yakuza know that they're there.
And there were some yakuza who also write books very much skipping over the actual money making part and focusing a lot on the nobility and the culture and the gang wars and past and tales of glory and violence. But because the yakuza were so omnipresent and so part of japanese society and so darn organized, studying them was easy. And one of the things also is that. I think this is pretty well known by now, is that about 30% of the yakuza.
And when we say yakuza, we're talking about 20 different prime families, hard crime groups are Korean Japanese. So when Japan was liberating Asia, as they say, not really liberating the Asia, but that's what they claimed. They annexed Korea, and a lot of Koreans were brought to Japan as slave labor. And as the war ended, not really having any other place to go, many of them stayed.
But very quickly, it became apparent that if you didn't nationalize as a Japanese, you were going to be discriminated against. And they were in many, many ways. And so the Akuza have always been a meritocracy. And they were pretty much like, well, if you're willing to do the crime and the time and follow the rules, you are welcome. And so you ended up with 30% of the Akuza are Koreans. Another 20, 30% in the old days were Burakumin.
And Burakumin is a leftover from a period of Japan in japanese history. And the burakumin were the people that slaughtered animals, made leather work, and considered unclean. So kind of like the outcast class in the hindu world. And it is possible, or it was possible, to identify who was a brakamin by their family registries years ago. So that was another discriminated group. And the yakuza were like, hey, Burakameen, you are welcome.
They used to say that the Yamaguchi gumi, the Yamaken gumi, which is one of the largest factions, was the biggest rakumin faction. Other factions had large number of Koreans. And why that is advantageous to me is because they are outsiders among outsiders. So Koreans in Japan, even though they look japanese, and many of them speak Japanese, and a lot of them don't even speak Korean anymore. They get blamed for everything. They get blamed for crime. They get blamed for rising prices.
There's a lot of conspiracy theories involving Koreans that are accused of having special privileges in jealousy or whatever it is, because sometimes Koreans are very successful business people because they're driven. So I would say to when somebody. Because I was interviewing like, oh, you and me, you're like the Jews of Japan, and I am an actual jew. So actually, we have a lot in common. We look like the people that we come from, but we're not quite accepted to that.
Behind their back, people whisper terrible things about us. So you and I, we get along. You may be yakuza, but I know how you feel. And that was remarkably effective because it was like, okay, first of all, you understand the circumstances a little bit of why I chose the yakuza, because there's not many job opens, openings open to me, and it's like, oh, you understand what it's like to be discriminated against. And that was very good for creating a kind of rapport with some of the yakuza.
And also, I got to eat a lot of really good korean food, and I like japanese food, but I think I prefer korean food. No offense to Japan, but. And it comes through the book very well. In fact, this parallel that the yakuza comes from excluded people, people on the margins of society, is very common. Hogan's Kraal story. In fact, without getting into great details, I have a relative who is considered one of the last living jewish mafia members. He was the right hand man, Meyer Lansky.
So I am not unfamiliar with the fact that, yes, there used to be a jewish mob, except that unlike the Italians, I'm paraphrasing something one of my relatives told me, unlike the Italians, you know, the Jews, as soon as they got wealthy and made enough money from illegitimate businesses, they became legitimate business, and they left that world to the Italians. Jack, these parallels are fascinating. Just tell people a little bit the story. You've touched on.
Some of the key dates, post war of the yakuza. You call it the last yakuza. And I was wondering, reading the book, you know, the global initiative, well, so we're doing all this stuff on policy and wanting to organize crime all around the world. But this looks like a success story for a variety of reasons, including, presumably, law enforcement of the eradication or reduction or reduction of the influence or impact or harm of a mafia style group. And just take us through that.
Was Japan successful? Japan has been tremendously successful in the last decade. The numbers kind of tell the story. In 2010, there were 84,000 yakuza. It is now 2024. And the number of yakuza is 24,000. That's a significant reduction. I mean, I've never been very good math. They're less than a third of what they were. And the causes and what drove that law enforcement sort of social exclusion were a major thing.
Look, like all things, a little complicated, but if you wanted to condense it for a long time, law enforcement and the yakuza had a sort of almost symbiotic relationship and was like, as long as you are only killing each other, that's okay. There is this terrible police joke that someone told me once when I was asking why they weren't investigating what obviously appeared to be the murder of a yakuza boss as a suicide, why aren't you investigating as a murderer?
And after much argument, the response to me was, hey, what is the crime when a yakuza kills another yakuza? And I'm like, I don't know. Tell you, tell me. And he said, destruction of property. And that really sort of captures the japanese police attitude towards, like, okay, you guys, you can have your gang wars, and we don't care, as long as you are only killing each other. Once you hit a civilian, then we have a problem.
And, you know, in the offices of the akuza, almost every group, especially the Inangawa Kai, there are a list of rules on the board, like on a placard in the office that will tell you, these are the things that will get you kicked out of the yakuza. Those include theft, robbery, sexual assault, buying and selling drugs. And the fifth one, or sometimes the 6th one, which is very interesting, is unnecessary contact with the authorities.
So unnecessary contact with the authorities, it implies exactly what it says. Of course you're going to have contact with the yakuza. I mean, of course the yakuza and the police are going to have contacts. Of course you're going to talk to the police, but not more than necessary. And, you know, there was a time when the police really did schedule, like in the tv show, police really did schedule raids with yakuza.
It's like, hey, we're gonna, you know, there's warrant out for the arrest of, you know, your underling on these charges. We're gonna come by. Would Wednesday work for you? Yeah, Wednesday would be fine. What time should we expect you? You know, the cops would know, the yakuza would know, the media would know. It was all performance.
I mean, you know, we were rarely surprised when the police arrayed to the yakuza's office because the yakuza knew in advance, and we knew in advance wasn't airtight security. But things really started to go Haywire when the Yamaguchi gumi, which is the largest organized crime in Japan, began to challenge the police and intimidate them. And that really starts about 2007, 2008. And why did they do that? Take, what was the reason for doing that? Changing the. The symbiosis in way?
Well, you know, the Yamaguchimi is the big dog, right? They're the Goldman Sachs of organized crime in Japan. I mean, they're huge. And the second in command takes, you know, he really felt that the authorities were trying to pass a criminal conspiracy law. And then he was also arrogant, and he felt like, we don't need to cooperate with these people anymore. We're big. You know, we have inroads in the stock market. We're powerful. We have politicians in our pocket.
We don't need the kowtow to the police. So it became a very confrontational and uncooperative relationship. Now, that sounds ridiculous, right? Like what? You know, like, wasn't it always confrontational, uncooperative? No, that wasn't the norm. So what the Yamaguchi Mikodo Kai did that was really unusual, is they hired a private detective agency called the Garu agency to go to SoftBank, which is a telecommunications provider.
All this is well documented if people are interested and said, get us the phone numbers of the cops that are investigating us. So once they had those phone numbers, they used the phone numbers to track down where the cops lived. And then they started taking photos of the guys families and collecting information on the police officers. And so you would have a detective who would be interrogating a yakuza.
You know, in the middle of interrogation, the yakuza would say, hey, you know, it's already 05:00 p.m. shouldn't you be? And obviously, that's like, okay, I know you have a daughter. I know that it's her birthday. I know a lot about you. Do you really want to screw with me? And, wow, did that not go over well with the japanese police? And the IT prefectural police did something absolutely unprecedented at the time. They started raiding a bunch of offices without an appointment.
Now, that's kind of funny. I mean, it is sort of humorous. Like, oh, my God, the police are raiding aka's office without an appointment. But when they did that, they found surveillance photos of, you know, of their families and their friends, and. And they were like, screw these guys. Like, they have gotten, you know, uppity. Like, we're not going to put up with this anymore. When the Yakuza are threatening detectives. This is in Mexico. We. This is unacceptable.
And so those complaints went all the way up to the national police agency and the head of the national police agency at the time, Ando. Takuharu. I think it's Takuharu, or it might be Tokuharu. Ando said, basically, okay, you know, I hear you. We are not gonna put up with this. So on September 30, 2009, he, at a press conference, declared war on the Yamaguchi and Mikoto Kaidenhe.
You know, the national police agency, the top commissioner, the top dog, says in a press conference, basically, we are going to war with the Yamaguchi Mikodokai, not the entire Yamaguchigumi and not all the yakuza, but this particular faction, the ruling faction, this group of 2000 people amongst the yakuza, amongst these 86,000, because they're aggressive, they're uppity, they don't cooperate with us. They are doing things that are unprecedented.
It can hurt the economy, and they are threatening police officers, and we are going to remove them from public society. Now, he didn't just say, destroy them, get rid of them. He said, we're going to remove them from public society. Meaning you won't be able to see their presence. They will be gone. And that is really the beginning of the end of the yakuza.
And at the same time, in Fukuoka, where they were, you know, where a lot of businesses were refusing to do business with the Akuzar, pay them protection money more. The kudokai was throwing grenades into clubs and severely wounding people and killing them. And so the japanese police were kind of like, what should we do? We know we've got these. The Yakas are aggressive. They're intimidating us. They're attacking civilians. How can we stop them?
And so there was a discussion within the national police agency, which basically designs policy but doesn't actually have a police force. Imagine the FBI with all the bureaucracy, but none of the power to actually do anything directly. They're like, how can we get rid of these guys? How can we finally put them out of business?
And the consensus was, and I talked to one of the officers in the planning division at the time, on the record was, we'll never be able to get a law that will, a national law on the books that will prohibit paying off the yakuza. We'll never be able to get that done at a federal level. But they were consulting with a lawyer named Igari Toshiro, who was a former prosecutor who really disliked the yakuza and had some run ins with Gorogumi, which was one of the most vicious of the factions.
And he was the guy who came up with this brilliant idea of getting rid of yakuza by putting clauses in contracts called organized crime, exclusionary clauses. And what those clauses basically is, whenever you're in Japan, when you check into a hotel, you join a sports club, you join a gym, try and rent a car, you try and get a cell phone. There's a little clause which says, I am not a member of an organized crime group, and I am not associated with that.
But if you are a yakuza and you do sign that, then you've committed fraud, then you can be arrested. But if you don't sign it, you can't have a bank account, you can't rent a car, you can't rent an office. And that's very problematic. In the consultation with the national police agency, the conclusion that they reached was, what if we created ordinances? And ordinances are very weak laws, but local laws that essentially took this exclusionary clause and turned it into the law.
So these organized crime exclusionary ordinances, which first started appearing in 2009, these ordinances made it a crime to pay off the yakuza. So if you do business with them, if you associate with them, if you provide them money or you hire them for their services, you would be a criminal. Now, it was a three step process to get in deep trouble for doing that, but it was a clear indication that it was no longer acceptable to pay the occasional protection money.
And Fukulka, which had the most violence, was the first place to pass that ordinance. And they knew that there would be a lot of resistance. So police were sent all over from Tokyo, from Osaka, from Nara, and with the implication of these laws, and it took two years from 2009, and the last places to have these on the books was Tokyo on October 1, 2011. And then everywhere in the country, it was illegal to pay off the yakuza.
And that really hurt their business because a lot of businesses said, you know, I'm sorry, we're not going to pay you off anymore. We're not giving you protection money, we're not going to use your leasing services, because that will make us criminals.
And if we get named as someone that is doing business with you, if the police put out an announcement, you know, so and so corporation is doing business with the Alkaza, they have been warned, then we lose our banking, we lose our bank accounts, we probably lose our lease, we aren't able to do business anymore. So, sorry. No, thank you. And man, that was really effective.
And the ordinance is also encouraged in quotation every business to put these organized crime exclusionary clauses in their contracts. And so what that has done is it created an atmosphere where it was much easier for companies and people to refuse to pay money to organize crime. And at the same time, it accelerated the exclusion of these guys from society.
And, you know, if you can't have a bank account, if you can't have, you know, if you can't rent a car or you can't play golf or you can't check into a hotel, you know, life is very hard. And even though there are ways around this and you can find someone to, you know, you know, maybe you can find someone to do these works for you or sign it up, you know, or buy a car in your name, theres still this risk of getting caught.
And so the inconvenience of being a yakuza and the fact that a lot of their money is dried up because people dont want to pay protection money because its too risky, right? The cost benefit analysis of do I pay these people off, or do I pay these people off and risk losing everything, or do I or do not pay them and have the small risk that there's some kind of retaliation from them, and most people have chosen that to not pay them.
Is this, I mean, if you take the italian example, what's different in Japan? I mean, clearly, this is a very strong state. Firstly, the state responded and was unchallengeable, as you describe it. And there's these very funny scenes of police yakuza engagement. But secondly, the yakuza becomes sort of socially toxic. That's how it seems to me. Is that the case? I mean, you start off showing these very interesting comics where there's people photographing and showing.
So there's a following, there's like a popular following, but it's almost like this is viewing people who are separate from us. I mean, is there anything specific to the japanese state, japanese culture, which made this more successful, you think, than other attempts at mafia harm reduction, for want of a better phrase? Well, I mean, one of the reasons, you know, what is very unique about Japan is this.
And one of the reasons the mafia here has been generally better behaved is that they have a public presence, right? They have a public face. They have offices, they had the fan magazines. People know who they are, and they're claiming to be humanitarian groups. They're not claiming we're criminal syndicates creating profits by illicit business. We help the weak, we fight the strong in times of trouble. We are there to provide relief and supplies at great personal risk to ourselves.
And that is true. The yuccas have had great print. When there was the Kobe earthquake, I think in 2005, they were much more efficient than the japanese government getting hot water, hot food, hot blankets, diapers, essentials to the people that needed them. And in many disasters until recently, they have been very good about that. One of the reasons the yakas are so much better about helping out at disasters is they have a huge amount of wealth to tap into without any red tape.
And the other thing is, unlike the japanese government, people don't rotate out of their position. So you have an institutional memory that is actually better than the japanese government. There's a guy who has been there 20 years, and he goes, oh, I remember the last disaster he went to. People wanted throwaway diapers instead of washable diapers. So we need to bring diapers, and we need to have special trash cans to put the diapers in. We're going to need a generator to make the hot water.
And it's like, okay. It's like there's sort of the unofficial fema of Japan when you need them. The Federal Emergency Management Agency. Here come the yakuza to the rescue. So they did buy a lot of goodwill. And by not engaging in street crime, which is basically bending, no purse snatching, no mugging, no robbing, you know, people felt safe in their neighborhoods. I mean, actually, people.
You know, I have been to the neighborhood of Kobe, where the Amaga chiguribi has their office, and there might be some people that are uncomfortable, and there certainly are, but there's a lot of people that really liked having them there because it's very safe. And in Kobe, at least the headquarters, they did things like have a rice making festival at the beginning of the year, and they had lavish Halloween parties for the locals.
I used to go with an indian family that lived in the neighborhood masquerade, as you know, Uncle Jack. I think that after a couple years, they realized who I was, but we just pretended that we didn't know, because Japan is good about that. Right? Obviously, we know you're not the uncle. We know that you're a porter. We don't care because it's fine as long as you're not causing a problem. Take it on this back a bit.
But covering what you're covering now, the sort of visibility of the yakuza, I was really struck, and I may have this entirely wrong. Right. So please be blunt in your response. There's not much on police informers in the book. Right.
You know, and in this series, like, I'm reading all these books on organized crime, inevitably, the stories about snitches and people giving evidence, there's almost nothing, unless I've missed it on this, in your book, there's these hilarious scenes of the police engaging. I mean, can you write them extremely well? And your characterization of the cops is just brilliant, I have to say. I don't know Japan well at all. But what's with the sort of secret relationship here? The unwritten informers.
Where do the police get their information from? Or is this just different to elsewhere? Well, first of all, one thing that you have to understand about the nature of police work here is that undercover work is extremely difficult, extremely limited, generally not sanctioned. The other thing is that Japan until 2019 did not have fleet marketing, so there is no incentive for someone who is arrested to rat out their other members.
And in fact, you know, the japanese phrase is there's a thousand, there's like a hundred damages you can get and not one advantage. And the reason that there's that is set in place is because the system was in the old days, is you do the crime for your organization. You do the crime, you do the time. But when you get arrested, they send a lawyer to represent you, and that lawyer takes every statement that you've made back to the main office. So if you're ratting out your bosses, they know.
And if you keep your mouth shut, then the organization looks after your family, and that includes your mistress as well. There are multiple mistresses, depending upon what you are. They're very good about not just like, not just your orthodox family, but the other family. And then when you get out, you get a bonus, usually a substantial amount of cash and a promotion. But if you do rat out the people above you, you don't get a lighter sentence. It can't be guaranteed.
Maybe the judge might take into account the prosecution saying that you were cooperative, but that's not guaranteed. And the organization knows that you ratted them out of. So when you get out, you leave with nothing. And there's a good chance that if you caused enough problems to the organization, after you leave prison, they just disappear. It's a fundamentally different dynamic, actually, to elsewhere. The sort of secret war on the mafia, the plea bargaining, it's just.
It's a. But it's been successful. Yeah. So one of the weird things about all this is that, you know, you don't have plea bargaining, and it's very hard to hold the person at the top responsible criminally for actions committed by the others, by their underlings. It's very hard to prove that the orders were given, and often the boss is the top escape prosecution. But in civil law, there's the concept of employer liability.
So yakuza bosses can be suede for the damages inflicted by their underlings. So Karamazagoto and Goto Gumi wanted a piece of property, I think, near Shibuya that was worth several million dollars. There was a real estate agent named Nozaki san who was blocking that deal, and he was stabbed to death in the street. Now, the people that actually committed the crime were eventually arrested and convicted and sent to jail for a very long time.
But Goto himself almost clearly gave the order, never was charged with that crime in criminal court, probably because the person who directly received the order from him was assassinated in Thailand. So as sort of a last ditch effort, the family and the police helped them. Sued the Amaga Chikhir organization. They sued Gototara Massa for several million dollars. And in the end, Goto apologized to the family for what his underworings had done. He paid them $1.4 million and he fled to Cambodia.
I think I wrote that in great detail in my third book, Tokyo Noir, which is coming out. It's already out in Australia. I have no idea when it's coming out in Europe. Maybe in July. But that's an interesting thing, right? Okay, we can't convict you for this crime, but we are going to encourage the family to sue you, and it's going to cost you $1.4 million. That's very expensive to kill one person. So that is also an impediment to the yakuza.
I think that one reason the japanese mafia is so different from the italian mafia, the mexican mafia, is you have this public image, right? And even though we may all know that it's B's, and maybe the actors know that themselves, it's B's. And I actually think there are some who actually believe the folklore, who actually believe their own myths, though. Are those people, too? But that means things like attacking journalists, killing judges, killing cops. No, that's a bad one you can't do.
But it's interesting that you say there's a prohibition on violence, I guess, against civilians. But there's quite a lot of violence in the book, actually. There's a sort of thread of violence through the book, and then there's a sort of self inflicted violence. You have this great scene of the main character cutting off his pinky finger, which is very dramatic, actually kind of quite shocking in its. With a. With a sushi knife, if I've got it right. So sashimi, naive.
They're pretty much the same thing. What is that about? The sort of the violence that does occur is this sort of unprescribed. There's clearly targeted violence and then the whole cutting off of fingers. You say he has bottles of fingers in his back garden, buried, etc. So does this stuff still go on? Well, so first of all, you know, it's not like, they don't use violence against civilians. They do, but it's judicious. There's a japanese saying, ichibatsu Yakai Nishikazu.
Like, one punishment is better than 100 laws, so violence is used. People have been killed by the yakuza. The mayor of Nagasaki was assassinated by yakuza. People are roughed up and beaten up by them. But, you know, that is usually the last resort. Even of the akaza. It's like, okay, but the threat of violence is what makes them powerful.
It is the threat that if you don't pay them the extortion money, not only may they expose your secrets, but they might kill you, or they might beat you up severely, or they might beat up your family members. So it's not always the violence. It's the threat of violence. It is their power. I think that theres a famous interview with Watanabe san, who was the fifth generation leader of the Yamaguchi gumi, and he was asked, what do you think about how the police call you?
Which is Boryokudan, which is literally violent groups. And he was like, well, violence is our business. If we didnt have the violence, wed just be the Kiwanis Club, which is a recognition of the fact that violence is a tool in the arsenal of money making, and it is also a tool of discipline in the godogami. And I think we also depicted this in Tokyo ice. When someone screws up, he would have the best friend of the guy beat the shit out of him.
And that sort of random, horrible violence, you're beating up your best friend because your boss told you, shows that basically the boss is all powerful. Your friendships mean nothing compared to the violence, and that violence keeps order. So the whole idea of Yubi Zume, which is a very yakuza thing to do, where you chop off part of the finger, and usually it's the pinky. I think it's often depicted wrong in movies and stuff, where people have the palm down.
Usually it's the palm up, and then you need a tremendous amount of force to chop off that little finger. Usually it's like a knife, and then someone takes a, you know, like a cutting board or something on top of it, and then a hammer. You know, it's much harder to sever a finger than you think. Not that I've done it myself, but talking to people who have and what's. The point of it, Jake? I mean, what's the severing a finger means?
What the symbolic meaning is that in the days when swords were what people used to fight is when you cut off your pinky. At the top of your pinky, you weaken your grip, and thus you are less of a swordsman. So it's much like a dog exposing their neck in a dogfight to say, okay, spare me. You weaken yourself. And there's two reasons you do that in the akaza, and they have a turn for it, which is interesting.
So if you sever your finger because you screwed up and it's either, you know, turn in the finger or get killed, or get kicked out of the organization, or you get kicked out of the organization, how are you going to make a living? You know, you've made a mistake that's so great that the only way you can atone for it is to chop off part of your finger and offer it to your boss or to the person you've wronged. That is called a shiny yubi, a dead finger.
But if you have an underling, or a good friend in the organization, or a brother, so to speak, in the akuza world, who has screwed up badly, maybe he's stolen money from the organization, maybe he has shot the wrong person. Maybe he's left a bag of money in the subway when he should have carried it back to the office.
There's lots of things that can happen, but you chop off your finger for that person, for your friend, for your brother, and then you offer it to the boss to say, please forgive my entrepreneur. Please forgive my brother. Brother. In the organization, that is called an ikyubi, which is a living finger, and that is highly respected. Now, obviously, you can't tell when looking at someone's finger whether it's a dead finger, a living finger, so to speak.
But the yakuza world is like a giant high school in some sense. Everybody knows everybody. They gossip all the time. And so you've chopped on your finger to bail out your buddy. Everybody knows, like, oh, yeah, yeah, that guy, you know, he's chopped off his finger because, you know, chopped off fingers because he's a good guy, because he's, you know, he sacrificed part of his own body to help. To help a brother. So this is a man with courage and conviction.
One of the strangest things that I have experienced that I've had is I wrote this article 2015 about the vice chairman of Japan's Olympic committee, Tanaka, who's also the chairman of the board of Nihon University, Nichitaeagaku, being an associate of the head of the Yamaguchiumi. So there's this picture circulating of several pictures, actually, of the head of the vice chairman of Japan's Olympic committee, top dog members of the Yamaguchi gumi.
And so, you know, I don't know why the photo began circulating. I think it was circulated because there were people unhappy with the vice chairman of the Olympic Committee sort of switching yakuza backers because he used to be tight with another yakuza group. Anyway, the previous reporters that had tried to write the article had been ambushed on their way home and then their knees broken. So I didn't want that to happen to me.
So I made sure that there was only a 24 hours period between when I asked the vice chairman for a comment and when the article came out, so that I could run away because I need my knees. But because this is Japan, and this will sound very strange to maybe not strange to you, is I called someone in the Amaguchi gumi way up in the top, I guess, in the top 20 who I have a social relationship with, a cordial relationship.
And I said, look, I'm writing this article about the vice chairman of the Olympic committee and your boss being friends and being associates. I have the photo. You know, that it's circulating and it's going to be printed in Vice news. I'm not asking for permission, and I'm not asking for your consent, but as a courtesy, I am telling you.
And, you know, there was a slow, I mean, there was a short pause on the phone, and he was like, okay, I understand, but can you crop the photo so that we don't see, you know, Tsukasa's son's missing finger? Because he's a little, you know, he's a little embarrassed by that. And I said, I cannot do that. I can't alter the photo in any way. But what I can't do is I'll insert a line that your boss is one of the, you know, old school, honorable yakuza great guy, something to that effect.
And he said, well, that would be very nice. And so that's what I did. You. Know, and they know, it struck me. He's like, wow, I didn't, you know, I was really surprised with the fact that he was slightly embarrassed by having. Missing a little bit of his pinky. And I was like, you know, I guess that was a dead finger, not a living finger. I don't really know the story behind it. Yake, that's hilarious.
I mean, you touch on the Olympic committee fellow, say a few things about the yakuza in politics and right wing politics. This emerges through the book, and it's fascinating stuff. I mean, because we began saying the yakuza comes from excluded folk, etcetera. But they were, I'm not sure today, and please answer that as well. Deeply embedded in japanese politics.
Yes. I mean, part of the secret societies that overthrew the democratic japanese government and helped create an imperial power which waged war in all over the world were early yakuza groups like the Kokusui kai. So theyre gamblers and criminals, but theyre also hiding their action under the mask of patriotism. Right. Its a good way to legitimize what you do.
And after the war ended, Kodama Yoshio, who was yakuza associate before the war and after the war, and a war profiteer and people like Abe Shinzo's grandfather, Kishi Nobosuke, together they helped create the Liberal Democratic Party with yakuza funds. Now, I don't want to get into conspiracy theory here stuff, but it's also true that the CIA helped fund these guys.
They gave them money because the idea at the time was that you don't want Japan to become a communist country in the left wing to take over. So these right wingers, militaristic right wingers are a better bet. So the us government helped support these guys. Afterwards, you read reports regretting strongly that they did this in the first place.
But Japan's ruling party, which has been essentially ruling unchecked except for a short period from what was it, 2009 to 2012, the Liberal Democratic Party was founded by the yakuza with yakuza money. The structure of it is like the yakuza. They talk like the akuza. And for many years there have been times when the yakuza were able to topple prime ministers or help get them crowned. When Shinzo Abe was running for prime minister.
And that is determined basically by first getting the votes within his own party. There was a yakuza consigliere to the Yamaguchi gumi name Nagamoto, who went all over the country talking to these local yakuza groups, saying, hey, put your votes behind Abe. And talking to other organized crime groups and saying, tell your local LDP representative that they should support Abe in his bid to become the prime minister in 2007. And so they were very helpful in getting I'll be a prime ministership.
And of course they expected some kind of rebate in the sense that either he wouldn't put forth stronger laws regulating them, or that there would be some financial rewards, or that he would ensure some public contracts were given to yakuza groups. In fact, you remember when Abe was assassinated, someone asked me, were you surprised? No. I said, no, I wasn't surprised. Because in 2000. Some yakuza threw Molotov cocktails into his office in his home. He made enemies.
He made enemies because he made a deal with the local yakuza. To destroy a political rival. And then he didn't pay them everything that he was supposed to pay. So these guys, people who become the prime minister of Japan. Were very happy to use the yakuza. And they have caused the downfall of entire administrations. The beginning of the end of the Democratic Party of Japan. Was when Tanaka Keishu, who was the minister of justice. Was outed by the Inagawa kai.
As someone who was a close associate of the group. Who had received money and support from the organization. And that wasn't uncovered by investigative journalism. That was uncovered by the yakuza. Going to the weekly magazine and say, here's a story for you. Then they named the second minister, the minister of finance, as a yakuza associate. Then stuff about Noda, who was the prime minister at the time. And his yakuza associations began to come up. And Noda called a snap election.
And Democratic Party of Japan lost power. So, in a way, by using their connections to politicians in the past. They were able to take down an entire administration. And put in the new administration. And this raises sort of the point. You've described very well. The decline the police response when the police are threatened. Was there no political protection stepping in at that point, the yakuza was so much on the back foot. That in fact, the cops, the strategy, the laws.
Why didn't political protection work then? Well, I mean, because they were outsmarted. So the Yakuza had politicians in their pocket in the national diet. Local politicians, mayors, lots of people who were. They had information on. They could blackmail. Or people who politically benefited. Or financially benefited. From association with the yakuza. And the japanese police force was like, fine, all right. We're not gonna. We're not. I mean, in a way.
I don't know whether this is subversive or what this is. But the national police agency was like, okay, we're going to have local police. You know, local prefectural police. You know, go to the local diets and get these ordinances passed. And I believe that the police were very forceful in doing that. This is anecdotal because I can't confirm this. But I was told that the governor of Saitama was basically told, you either pass this.
You either pass these organized crime exclusionary ordinances in Saitama. Or we're going to bust your ass for this public works project that you had associated with the akaza. I don't know if that's true, but it doesn't strike me as impossible. You tell a fascinating story, and as I said at the beginning, you have this unique perspective and a great way of writing. I was really interested. You mentioned, for example, a particular professor who's known as Professor Yakuza.
What's japanese scholarly, academic, journalistic writing on the yakuza like? Clearly you have read all of this stuff, you have an insight. What's it like? What's it about? How much of a debate is there? You know, are there some key criminologists that follow it? Give us a sense.
Well, first of all, what's really interesting is that, you know, Hirose san, who is, you know, we call Professor Yakuza, was I think, one of the first modern scholars to really write about them sociologically, historically, do field interviews, write books that are both a mixture of academia and storytelling. And it was considered like beneath, you know, beneath us to, you know, scholars didnt want to write about it because that actually meant associating with yakuza. And yakuza is scary.
So what Hirose sans power is that he himself worked in sort of what would be considered an old style yakuza group, which is a Tekiya street merchants. And he has been poor and he has been a juvenile delinquent. And so he basically put himself through school and began studying the yakuza academically. He was one of the first people to say, look, if you are going to try and get rid of yakuza from ordinary society, you're going to have to reintegrate them. You're going to have to do that plan.
You're going to have to find them jobs, you're going to have to get them socially adjusted, or you're going to wind up with a bunch of ex yakuza who are now criminals, will do anything to make money. And he has been, I think he has been prescient in pointing that out. But except for him, the number of academics who really studied the akazetta history have been very few. There was a seminal book that came out in the sixties called Bjori Shudan no Kozo.
And Bjori shudan means like pathological group and structure pathological groups. It is like 600 pages, and it is, you know, full of the history of the akuza, a study of their psychology, of their sociology, and it is still, hands down the best book that has ever been written. About the mob, because he's able to capture, you know, and point out there's these inherent contradictions in what these people say and what they do. And, you know, there was.
I don't think there's ever been anyone even close to achieving the level of scholarly research that this one professor did who wrote the book, except Hiro Seisan. So, you know, there's tons of books written about the japanese mafia. There's lots of books written about the yakuza in Japan as well. I mean, I've got a library full of them, but an actual detailed study of the sociology, the makeup, the history. It's few, very few, and very few that talk about, okay, how do these guys make money?
How did they make inroads into the financial world? Which is funny, because there's actually a wealth of material that you could use. This book is one of the few that actually is called the japanese economy taboo textbook, which tries to chronicle the yakuza inroads into the stock markets and the FX markets and places they never were before. I mean, yeah, because aren't dumb. There was this incident in 2006 where there was a website was the equivalent of, like, classmates.com.
it had 3.6 million users. And, you know, I don't know how it is in Europe, but generally, these high school reunion sites, people end up, like, having torrid affairs or exchanging messages they shouldn't because it's talking to your high school sweetheart or the girl that you really wanted to be with in high school but didn't have any money or didn't have any class at the time. And the Yamaguchi Mikodokai took over the organization that ran that.
And then one day, people woke up in the morning, and it wouldn't be like, the equivalent of waking up and like, oh, Facebook is now owned by the russian mafia, and all my information is now in their hands. And that was a shock. And people were like, why were the Yakuza want to take over this social networking site, this classmates.com? and they're like, because it is wonderful material to blackmail people.
And this is why they don't run the hostess clubs but often are in the background sort of supporting them, because they're great places to get information.
I mean, you can make a certain amount of money by shaking down all the prostitutes in your area and having them give you protection money, but you can make a lot more money of finding out the secrets of a company president who's having an illicit affair and saying, okay, we'll either talk to your wife or get you fired, or you can invest $100 million in our front company. Which do you think is more financially feasible? Take it.
People listening, I hope, are people who do research or obviously work on organized crime in some way. I mean, what advice do you have? You've sort of plowed this very unique career, in my opinion. You say, well, partly by accident, the editor said, get onto the yakuza. What advice do you have for young researchers looking at issue of organized crime in different societies around the world? I don't know if this is the most ethical advice, but I'll give it anyway.
There's a yakuza saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So you can make a sort of alliance in the underworld with someone, hopefully with someone you consider honorable, a little bit trustworthy, and then you sort of have a hands off relationship with that person. And I don't know any Yakuza writer who has been doing this for a long time who doesn't have one particular, let's not say a sponsor, one particular they're sociable with. Who feeds them information? Who guides them?
Feeds them information. Yeah. Is reasonable. And, you know, if a story about this guy came across my radar and it was a huge scoop, I'd let it go. It's just not worth it. You can make enemies. You cannot make enemies of enemy. You cannot make enemies of everyone. And this is someone who opens doors, right? Who vouches for you know who. And you, can you contact more than one of these people? You know, you can. You can contact lots of people. You just have to be very careful.
You know that it's a small world, and these people gossip, and your reputation precedes you very quickly. One thing that, for me, that made writing about organized crime much easier was in the year 2011, when there was the great earthquake and nuclear disaster. I was the first to write about the Akas that were actually going to the scene of the disaster, going to the nuclear areas, or taking supplies to people.
And even though I said, look, basically, theyre just returning a small portion of the money theyve extorted from people all this time during the bare minimum. It was a very cynical article, but it didnt. But it did say, okay, theyre doing this, and some of them are doing it with good motives that got rewritten in a Yakuza fan magazine. And suddenly the reputation was, oh, Edelstein is fair. Okay, hes critical, but hes fair.
And that made it much easier to do the work because you have reputation as like, oh, being fair. You don't have an agenda. In the old days, when the amagoshigami wasn't the most powerful. I mean, one of the things I learned from the cops is you could kind of pit organizations against organization. The sumiyoshikai will tell you what Yamaguchi gumi and the Inagawa kai are doing, but they won't tell you what they're doing.
And the Inagawa kai will tell you what their, you know, what the Sumiyoshikai and the Yamaguchi gimme youre doing, but they wont tell you what theyre doing. So you can kind of talk to all of them. You can also talk to the cops, but you can never. These are the unwritten rules of japanese organized crowd coverages. You can take information you hear from other groups about other groups and use that in your stories.
You can take information you hear from yakuza to the cops and hope that they do an investigation, and then you get the scoop. But you cannot take information you get from the cops and give it to the yakuza. Because then you can be blackmailed, and then the cops are very angry at you. The only time is that sometimes, and then we're talking, like, departed.
Level of complications here is that the cops will use you to communicate something they want a certain yakuza boss to know, but that they can't go tell them directly. And you know you're being used, or. That you, you know you're being used. You know you're being used. And then the last rule of organized crime reporting is, so we're not talking about research, but reporting is.
I've had some great scoops given to me by the Yakuza, including, like, a savings and loan that was looted by a rival organized crime group. But the thing that you have to clarify to them, because they're not giving you, they're never giving you this information out of the goodness of their heart, because they want an injustice corrected. They're always giving it to you because they have an ulterior motive. It's destroying a rival.
If it's not destroying a rival, it's going to help them move up in the business world. Or they're very upset that someone didn't pay them the extortion money that they hoped for. So the other rule of this is, if a yakuza gives you information that is valuable and can be turned into a story, you have to let them know that they're not doing you a favor, you're doing them a favor. And you have to make that absolutely clear. You have to say, like, literally, you're spelling it out to child.
I want you to know that I'm grateful for this information, but if it turns into an article, I don't owe you anything, because I know you have a reason for wanting this out. So I don't owe you. You owe me. And if you think it's different, then that's fine. There are a hundred other stories I can write. I will just let this one go find another reporter. And you have this very straight engagement. Very straight. I mean, maybe I can get away with it because I'm a foreigner, but I'm like.
I'm like, let's make. Let's make. No, you know, let me make this perfectly clear here. I'm not doing. You're not doing me a favor. I'm doing you a favorite. If you think it's something else, then I'll walk away from the story. Fine. To find another reporter. Jake, do you have competitors in the field on the journalistic side? So a couple of people all positioning themselves around reporting on the yakuza who have different sources.
And is that cutthroat competition, or if it's there, or is it a sort of friendly kind of engagement? It's always been very friendly. Generally speaking, Suzuki Tomohiko is a really good writer about the yakuza. He used to edit one of the fan magazines. Mizoguchi Yatsushi is also very much embedded in that world. Mizuki Jisan said to me once, he said, you're lucky because you can leave. You always have the option of going home to the United States. If things get too heavy, I'm stuck here.
He said, I have to keep writing, because if people forget who I am or forget what I'm writing, then people hold a grudge against me. As soon as I disappear from public view, I might disappear from life itself. And, you know, I can't really. What can I say to that? There's some truth to that. But, you know, I think, I mean, I've written three books now. You know, all of them have. I written four books. Actually, all of them have something to do with yakuza.
I wrote a book about bitcoin and a bitcoin caper in Japan that has nothing to do with Yakusa in France, which was nice. People came up to me in France and were like, oh, you wrote a book that has nothing to do with the yuccas. We're so proud of. You can do more than one thing, Adelstein. I was like, I am pleased, but I don't think I completely exhausted the subject, but I'm not really interested in writing another one on it. The average age of a Yakuza now is 55, and I am 55.
So these guys are fading out, and as they fade out, the news value diminishes. I feel kind of bad about it because I've spent so much time doing research. I have these wonderful materials I've collected over the years that don't have much value. This is one of my favorites. This is a Yamaguchi gumi phone book directory of all their members in the areas that they controlled with phone numbers to call in case there's a gang war that breaks out.
And list of rules and regulations and home addresses of their top members. Not to mention it's embossed with this lovely thing which tells you the west. What is it? The eastern Japan friendly organ organizations that are friendly with Yamaguchi gumi. And the directory, I mean, I was like, wow, you guys are so.
They were so organized that they would have a system of, like, someone would be on call in case gang war broke out to, you know, to gather the troops and help quickly organize a peace, you know, a peace treaty. And I guess this was also used to make sure that you didn't, you know, hurt or hurt or intimidate the wrong people, because these are groups that are friendly to you. I mean, I've liked tons of those things. I have videos. I mean, I sound like a yakuza otaku when I say this stuff.
Well. You know, this is from a succession ceremony, the Yamaguchi gumi. This is really nice to have. You know, it's little. It's kind of a little, like, handkerchief with the day and date of the succession ceremony. You know, handed these out at the. At the thing. I mean, all that stuff. But what was. But the point is, they're fading out. I see very little value in writing about them anymore.
The shots, a chapter in your life, and there's not worth sort of raking over the histories, and, I mean, you've got plenty of material. I mean, I feel like, more. Okay, so I moved from being someone who's reported on the akuza and seeing what a terrible threat they were to the economy, to the general people, to becoming someone more as, like, a historian of, like, okay, you know, this is what they used to be. This is how they got in power. There's certain periods of time. This is their decline.
They're never gonna come back. And, you know, and my sweetheart Jesse was like, you're 55, you know, you don't heal so fast, you know, like, you should watch like the movie Wolverine, Logan, like you, you can't afford to go head to head with these young kids, and it's time for you to pull out. You've done your time. Let someone else take over. And there's some truth to that. Weirdly enough, I have a friend from my college, Jochi Diagnosopho University, which is a very good college.
He ended up in the Akuza. He is still in the Akuza. I mean, he got in, he got out. I think he ran some front companies for them. And we had lunch at the foreign correspondence club, and he was kind of sort of saying, like, when are you going to have me over to your house? And I said, I am never going to have you over to the house. I am never going to have you over to the house until you leave the organization, because I dont want to be associated with you. I dont want to be at risk.
And he offered me, wouldnt you like to interview my boss? My boss is going to be rising way up in the organization. I was like, I appreciate the offer, but no, because if anything goes wrong with that interview, or I misquote him, or I quote him correctly, and then he gets a lot of heat from the people above him, then it's a world of trouble. And it's a world of trouble I don't need, because I'm not in that. I'm not in that world anymore. So thank you very much.
You and I, we can meet occasionally, but until you leave the organization, you're not coming over to the house. And you and I are keeping a proper distance. And I don't want to interview your boss, because I've interviewed bosses before, and I don't see any advantage to doing this now. Thank you, but no thank you. Jake Adelson, what a great discussion. There you have it, the last yakuza. Sounds like it's your last book on the yakuza. Two, if I'm interpreting.
No, no, you should never say it's the last of anything, because it'll come bite you on the ass. I do believe that the number of yakuza who actually lived up to the ideals they profess, whose words and deeds matched, are almost completely gone. So that is sort of the meaning of the title of the last yakuza. You won't see those likes again. Jake, thank you very, very much.
To speaking to underworlds, to talking about your book, to talking about the history of the yakuza, the challenges you have faced. It's really an excellent reader. Much appreciated. Thank you, Mark. I really enjoyed being on the show.