
Yakuza - danso
http://stewardmag.com/yakuza/
======
patio11
_One of main sources of income they had was debt collection. They would
actually go and buy entire loan databases and pay off the money people owed.
Of course, after that happened, those debts were just transferred over to the
yakuza. ... Here too there was unspoken pressure._

Yeah, when I called the police regarding the two gentlemen who had just spray
painted "Pay us our money or die" on my neighbor's house, as far as I know no
words were actually exchanged between the two gentlemen and the 60 year old
woman who was best known in the neighborhood for feeding stray cats.

Every criminal society has a rich culture with fascinating history. The ones
we don't grow up with sometimes even sound romantic. They're thugs, pimps, and
murderers. Don't _ever_ forget that.

~~~
tomjen3
Yeah, that is true. And it is really, really weird because it is so out of
character for Japan to have those criminal gangs.

Japan is so orderly, so safe. It just makes no sense.

~~~
geuis
It's not out of character at all. Yakuza is an ancient tradition going back
centuries. Remember that Japan has only been the democratic, peaceful society
we know since WWII. They have a civilization that is very, very old and
customs that go back very far. Their governmental forms have changed over the
many years, but at heart they've always maintained their core of being
Japanese. They may be a democracy in 50 years, or an empire in 200, but they
will always be Japanese.

The Yakuza have a special place in Japanese society. While they certainly can
be classified as a criminal element, they are not wonton criminals. In times
of crisis, they do help where they can. When I was in Tokyo a few years back,
I always felt safe anywhere I went, even when visiting some shady areas of the
city. I would never want to get on their bad side, but I never felt threatened
by them.

~~~
cdavid
You felt safe anywhere in Japan most likely because you are of no value to
them. I lived for 6 months in a burakumin area in Kyoto, and I never felt
threatened either, but that would change quickly if I had any business in
Japan (e.g. a bar, club, etc...). Many foreigners like to live in those areas
because they are much cheaper and not always badly located in the cities (e.g.
Namba/Sakuragawa in Osaka, which is right in the center of the city). As soon
as you are a potential source of money, things change. There are many stories
of foreigner having to pay a 'protection tax'.

Yakuza are actually likely more powerful than e.g. mafia in the US, both in
numbers and activity. The links with politician are also very strong. The
grand-father of the former prime minister J. Koizumi was most likely a yakuza,
and the LDP (party who maintained power over Japan most of post WWII) was
founded with yakuza money.

Someone else cited tokyo-vice, this interview by his writer is interesting and
sheds some lights on the evolution of yakuza:
<http://boingboing.net/2010/03/18/jake-adelstein-expla.html>

------
danso
This was the most fascinating bit of the interview for me:

> _I was extremely nervous. Since they are gangsters, I thought I should be
> very careful, in case I shot something I wasn’t supposed to see. But this
> actually upset the gang. They saw my nervousness as disrespectful. I
> remember one time early on this guy pulled me aside and said, “You are here
> to take pictures. Act like a professional.” It turned out they respected me
> if I was really aggressive about getting a certain shot. To not take photos
> was a sign of weakness._

The much-less-scary situations that I've photographed...police scenes, county
fairs, fashion shows, sports game...it is almost always the case that acting
like you're supposed to be there will work out in your advantage. The amount
of outright aggressiveness is up to the individual photographer, but I imagine
that this is why photogs are among the most aggressive in an average newsroom.

The same principle probably applies to every kind of business and human social
scenario.

------
hieronymusN
Just to nitpick, the bit at the end about tattoos contains a lot of BS. You
can't burn them off with hot coals (unless you want to take your skin with it
via 3rd degree burns), and it takes more than 100 hours to get a body suit.
Just sayin. Sounds like the guy was fed a line of BS and bought it. Go with
Jake Adelstein's writings on the matter as he lays it out pretty bare.

------
joewee
Yakuza kill people on a regular basis. Like most well organized criminal
organizations they avoid injuring "civilians" only because of the attention it
would draw to them.

This past weekend a man was beaten to death in one of the larger clubs in the
foreign nightclub area. 10 guys walked into a bar with baseball bats, two
minutes later they get into a van and drive away. They will never be caught.
[http://japandailypress.com/man-beaten-to-death-in-
roppongi-c...](http://japandailypress.com/man-beaten-to-death-in-roppongi-
club-by-10-others-in-masks-0310946)

To understand how brazen this attack was, its the equivalent to walking into
McDonalds in the middle of Times Square with baseball bats and mask and
beating someone to death. There are police all over this area. The nearest
police station is a 3 minute walk from where this happened.

~~~
danso
According to the source material, this attack was not believed to be from an
established Yakuza gang, but from a gang that has filled the void of gang
violence, apparently:

 _The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department Investigation Division One 警視庁捜査一課
(Homicide and Violent Crimes) is investigating the case as a homicide. On
December 14th, 2011, a group of twenty men burst into a Roppongi Cabaret club
and assaulted four members affiliated with the Yamaguchi-gumi Kokusui-kai
(山口組国粋会), with beer bottles and blunt weapons, injuring one of them severely.
The police suspect there may be a possible link to the two cases. The assault
in December was believed to have been carried out by members of the Kanto
Rengo (関東連合) a loosely networked gang different from the traditional yakuza,
and not a designated organized crime group. Kanto Rengo is known for extremely
violent assaults and because they are not a designated organized crime group,
they are subject to less restrictions than the Yamaguchi-gumi and other crime
groups._ [http://www.japansubculture.com/10-men-beat-one-guy-to-
death-...](http://www.japansubculture.com/10-men-beat-one-guy-to-death-in-
front-of-300-people-at-roppongi-club/)

~~~
joewee
In Japan Yakuza members must register with the police, and the Yakuza families
are treated like corporations. Kanto Rengo has more than 3,000 members and
operates in alliances with traditional Yakuza.

I guess it depends on the definition of Yakuza, if you mean the officially
registered organizations with registered members then no they aren't. But if
you mean a large criminal organization of Japanese people, I think its safe to
say they are.

Its also not uncommon for Yakuza groups like Yamaguchi-gumi to "acquire" a
"gang" like Kanto Rengo and turn them into their regional office.

------
jakeadelstein
Yakuza or the traditional organized crime groups may not be hackers but they
know how to hire them and they are very much interested in "information
technology." In 2007, a Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai boss took over Japan's
equivalent of classmates.com called Yubitoma in a leveraged buy-out. It had
3.5 million user at the time. This year it was reported that a yakuza
connected private detective agency had been buying phone records from SOFTBANK
a huge telecommunications provider for millions of dollars. The debtor
database has been utilized in large operations like the Goryokai loan sharking
empire. Social gaming sites have also allegedly been bankrolled by the yaks
for years. They are Japan's largest private equity. If extortion and blackmail
are your bread and butter, it pays to have information.

------
doktrin
The pictures are nice, however I could take or leave the op-ed here. It
doesn't contain anything particularly novel, and ranges from glossed over to
downright naive ("hot coal tattoo removal").

Having lived in Japan for a number of years, I can attest to the fact that the
remarkably low incident of street crime is often attributed to the Yakuza
presence. It's a notion the gangs themselves actively promote and does
contribute to the public's continued tolerance of their presence.

------
stcredzero
_> Most modern portrayals of organized crime have presented mobsters as a
group of horribly dressed sociopaths, and rightfully so. I’ve never expected
those concerned with the moral life to make a career of creatively goring
people with ice picks._

Actually, people whose job involves violence and killing often take great
pains to portray themselves with moral systems also called "codes of honor."
(The actual morality of their activities is another question entirely.) Many
crime organizations descend from feudal systems of government. The Yakuza and
the Sicilian mob are prime examples of this.

 _> ...Shoichiro, the street boss, told me “We can get the most money out of
the economy.”

One of main sources of income they had was debt collection. They would
actually go and buy entire loan databases and pay off the money people owed.
Of course, after that happened, those debts were just transferred over to the
yakuza._

There was a highly successful US company in the 90's that bought lots of debt
from delinquent debtors for pennies on the dollar and made a huge profit
getting people to pay. (But they did this by being nice and winning the
debtors over, not through threats.)

I suspect that much of organized crime in the US has evolved in a similar
fashion to Japanese organized crime. I also suspect that the resulting
corruption is a major component of our current political and fiscal woes.

 _> The gang made its recruits attend week-long orientations at a fishing
village. I went along for one of these. There was bodyguard training, how to
defend from a knife attack, stuff like that. But these recruits also rose at
four in the morning to meditate. They helped local fisherman with their haul,
cooked together at the end of the day. They learned how to handle samurai
swords. There was something very ceremonial about it. It was strange, having
these helpful and violent things happening side by side that illustrated how
yakuza saw themselves…bad people doing good things._

The Yakuza are the last remnants of the old Bushido order. Bushido, for all of
its aesthetics and philosophical value, has no place in modern life where
competition between nations is economic and where the democratized tools of
killing make violence the last resort of the marginal. Swords are no longer
the tools of state. The scope of violence has shrunk to criminal life.

------
gallerytungsten
If you want to learn more about the yakuza, I recommend "Tokyo Vice" by Jake
Adelstein.

~~~
w1ntermute
He also contributes to the JSRC[0], a blog about crime in Japan. It seems to
me like this photographer had very limited exposure to the activities of the
yakuza. They are most definitely violent. Adelstein's family was at risk as
well because of his reporting on the yakuza, so anything about "honor" is
definitely not true. People need to stop romanticizing criminals.

0: <http://www.japansubculture.com/>

~~~
Hari_Seldon
I think you're right that this guy was being shielded from the violence but I
don't understand your objection to the Yakuza being referred to as honorable.
Is it not possible to be both violent AND honorable? No one is suggesting that
they are nice people, just that there seems to be an agreed upon ethos to
which (it seems) everyone adheres.

~~~
mhurron
That agreed upon ethos usually says when your family is targeted for your
actions, those targeting them are not honourable.

They are violent and target innocents, the Yakuza should never be mistaken for
honourable.

~~~
Hari_Seldon
You are right of course, thinking this through - it is obvious that if
innocents are targeted there is little honour in all of this.

------
Tycho
I thought this was going to be about a javascript library.

The part about peoples debt being transferred _to_ the Yakuza was terrifying
though. There's a movie plot in there somewhere.

~~~
petercooper
_I thought this was going to be about a javascript library._

Probably because, yet again, a moderator saw fit to change the helpful
descriptive title the original poster used to the single word that it is now.
Sigh.

------
cicloid
The contrast from a Yakuza to the day to day reality of the mexican cartels is
astounding.

If I remember correctly there is a very strict weapons control in Japan, has
this guided the development of the Yakuza?

~~~
Paul_S
It's like a difference between a rapist and a murderer. I'm sure you can argue
either side but I'd rather have them both locked up.

~~~
dschobel
Per the article, it's more like the difference between a violent criminal and
a white collar criminal.

~~~
wahnfrieden
They extort via threat of violence, and they do follow-up if they're not paid.

------
aw3c2
Some of the images can be found in
<http://www.antonkusters.com/category/yakuza/>

~~~
danso
And the book! I didn't even have time when reading the OP to click through to
the photogs website...he sold out the first limited edition more than a year
ago and seems like he has had some already well deserved success.

------
rickdale
Spent the summer of 2002 in Japan working for the World Cup stuff aka bar
tending. I lived in a pretty shotty apartment, but two buildings away down the
same alley there was always crew of dudes with Mercedes Benz that all had the
licenses plates: 1, 11, 111, 1111 ... etc. I would see the cars out at the
bars and clubs on the weekends. There were times when I could see them opening
the door to their building: All you could see was a huge fish tank. It was
cool to see, must have been one of their neighborhood gathering spots.

~~~
Hari_Seldon
friend of mine went on holiday to Tokyo (UK resident) a few years ago, he told
me that the Yakuza seemed to have a corporate head office, a modern building
with receptionists, typists etc, is this true?

------
gnufs
The photographer has a TEDx Talk about this project:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y4GCM60Vak>

------
morphar
Whatever one might think of the Yakuza - this is an amazing and interesting
article, that really should get you thinking - it has gotten me thinking
anyways...

I am not saying you should change your mind on any subject - but the fact (no
sources, only ekianjo statement and a few others I have spoken with over the
years), that "The yakuza also acts as a form of local police" and better /
more successful than most "authorized police" do, is a really interesting
thing.

I know that it's not the smartest thing to let police, police themselves -
especially when their income is through criminal actions. But maybe it would
be interesting to dig out, why their ways seems to work better than many
police forces. Which, by the way, also seems a corrupt at times.

A couple of things I think is interesting to think about:

What is corruption? Would if it was o.k. for a police officer to cover over
his partners (minor) wrong-doings? Then it wouldn't be corruption... Family
maybe?

What makes the Yakuza better at policing than police? A harder and better
hierarchical structure? The concept of honor, but in a strong "family"-like
context?

Is it just the plain old simple reason: people are... lets put it nicely:
eager to not cross the wrong path?..

------
chrischen
I see these organized crime groups as like a political party/faction/gov't
that simply aren't in power, at least not publicly.

Arguably, the Chinese gov't can be the equivalent of Yakuza in China, except
they're publicly in power.

The US gov't also does extrajudicial killings, but is probably much more
democratic than the above two groups (probably because of larger public
presence).

~~~
flyinRyan
>The US gov't also does extrajudicial killings, but is probably much more
democratic than the above two groups

Why would you assume that? Did you miss that Obama has assassinated US
citizens?

------
james4k
This is so fascinating. I had to go look for the guy's book, and luckily it
still seems to be in stock: [http://www.antonkusters.com/the-2nd-edition-of-
yakuza-i-heed...](http://www.antonkusters.com/the-2nd-edition-of-yakuza-i-
heed-your-call/)

------
antonioevans
What does this have to do with hacker culture? Another repost from reddit.
Great piece though.

~~~
danso
FWIW, I stumbled upon this link because it was in the sidebar of another story
I was reading. I submtted it to r/photography but saw that someone had posted
it a few days before to a smaller sub reddit...

What does it have to do with hacker culture? It's about two businesses -
organized crime and documentary photography - in which successful people have
similar qualities and strategies of those in hacking and in any
entrepreneurial business

~~~
davidw
> in which successful people have similar qualities and strategies of those in
> hacking and in any entrepreneurial business

Yeah, there's a great article by 37 signals about how to break your
competitors kneecaps so that they'll be crippled for the rest of their lives.

~~~
danso
How much is the hacker ethic about disruption? In order to disrupt an
industry, it is important to understand how the established entities become
established. in this case, the Yakuza, manage to retain power even though they
have a reputation of criminality. According to the OP, it's through a mix of
well hidden criminality and the implication of criminality, among other
things, but _not_ through outright gang warfare and ninja executions, as pop
culture would have you believe.

Now as a hacker/entrepreneur, you attempt to start a competitor against what
seems like a backwards thinking, complacent established company. You think
your product and strategy is so obviously going to win because you _think_ you
know why your established competitor succeeds, and you believe youve one-upped
them.

And yet you fail. Do you sit around doubting your skill? Do you accuse the
competitor of doing something outright illegal and evil? Or do you accept that
there might be things under the surface that you hadn't considered (some of
which may be illegal but not to the point where it would cause actual, game
changing prosecution)?

To say that the abstracted takeaways from here don't apply to anything a
hacker does, even a pure coder, is an extremely narrow mindset, and is
probably the kind of mind that thinks Steve Woz would be a billionaire if he
never met Steve Jobs (and even Woz knows that isn't the case).

Hacking is more about literal code and computers. If HN encompasses
entrepernurial strategy, then not everything about being a successful hacker
can be found on github.

~~~
davidw
Organized crime is actually not very complicated or creative, which I think
most good hacks are. It tends to run like this (but is obviously not limited
to this line of business):

"You have a nice family/business. I'll hurt or kill them if you don't pay me
money."

It's pretty easy because parents, wives, children or businesses are fairly
soft targets. You can't _always_ be looking over your shoulder.

Organized crime is less than a zero-sum game, it's a negative sum game: the
more prevalent it is, the more resources it sucks out of society, and the more
resources society must dedicate to defending itself from parasites.

In my mind, creative hacks are the polar opposite of that: they make something
from nothing, or are a clever way to eliminate a lot of dreary work.

~~~
danso
> _Organized crime is actually not very complicated or creative_

I was going to respond, "Well, neither are most established businesses" but I
think you misunderstood me. The disruptors, in this case, are not the Yakuza.
They are the _established_ entities. How much actual power they have is up for
debate, but not terribly important to the point. The point is that they have a
seemingly rooted place in Japanese society and the question should be: How can
a presumably criminal enterprise still exist in a lawful society?

The answer, according to the OP, is relatively benign; it's not "because they
utilize ninja stealth and James Bond-like technology". I think if you step
back from the specific context of criminality and ask the question of why
_any_ established enterprise/institution still has power/recognition, the
reasons are likely to be depressingly uninteresting than intriguing or
complex. Exhibit A: Most political entities and regulations.

------
grandalf
There is no significant difference between criminal gangs, governments, and
corporations. Each has some legitimate aspects and some ahady ones.
Governments do things like genocide and rendition, corporations do things like
bribery, and criminal gangs participate in black market and gray market
activity (often illegal simply because governments declare a legal monopoly,
as in gambling, arms dealing, prostitution, vengeance killing, etc.)

All are institutions and create the institutional fabric of society. A society
that is trending toward greater human rights will observe certain trends in
all three kinds of institutions... as will one that is trending toward
decreased human rights.

------
scoith
Why the hell was this posted on Hacker News anyway?

~~~
scoith
You. Yes. YOU. The guy who down-votes this post. You are what is wrong with
HN.

~~~
TheAmazingIdiot
I down-modded all your posts here on the yakuza story.

If you feel this much hatred about why this was posted, click the pretty X in
the upper corner of the window and don't come back here.

We do not need your bile. I quite enjoyed it, and wouldn't have found it
unless it was posted to HN.

------
scoith
You are a faggot. I hope you'll lose a finger or two to yakuza.

~~~
prodigal_erik
That was completely uncalled for, especially from someone who has shown
healthy concern over signal/noise.

~~~
scoith
Oh, you're making me cry. I'm leaving HN anyway, since it's already in a
downward spiral. Sayonara.

~~~
jrockway
Could you be contributing to that? You do have -28 karma and have only been
around for a few months.

