
Goodbye to the Yakuza - genieyclo
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/10/goodbye-yakuza/43206/
======
patio11
Anti-organized crime laws are not exactly new to Japan. Go to any bar,
restaurant, or laundry mat, odds are they have a "We don't do business with
violent groups" (which means the yakuza) sign up.

Anecdotally, their influence has been waning in recent decades, or at least
moving from retail level criminality into Chicago-style corruption regarding
public works projects. (That aside, I had a bit of a run-in with two of them a
few years back while they were painting "Pay us our money or we'll kill you"
on a neighbor's house, and I was not left with massive new respect for my
local police department as a result of that encounter. Long story short, but
you could practically hear "If she hadn't borrowed money and not paid it back
then she wouldn't have a yakuza problem now would she" during the middle of my
911 call.)

~~~
donw
To be fair, they're really handling that massive foreigner bicycle-theft
problem.

~~~
patio11
For those of you who were not at the bar and don't understand this in-joke,
Ogaki's finest have detained me multiple times on suspicion of stealing my own
bicycle. Each time, on getting released, I am reminded that either "the
foreigners" or "the Brazilians" are unleashing a biblical plague of bike
thefts on Ogaki and that I should be careful to double lock it to avoid
becoming the latest victim.

~~~
jac_no_k
My response to the JP cops that stop me: "Sumimasen... Nihongo taberemasen..."
(Sorry... Japanese eat can not...)

And other gibbering in a western accent and they wave me past. I usually get
stopped around 2am during my cycling commute home. Makes sense I guess when
the last trains have stopped and lots of bicycles get "borrowed".

~~~
aik
Nice. I've been stopped as well. The most recent time it was raining and I had
just been tossed off my bike at a fast speed. Shortly thereafter a cop stopped
me, and while pondering how I would explain my situation in nihongo, he called
in the bike ID, and as soon as he saw the blood all over me he let me go
pretty quickly.

------
klenwell
I'm reminded of that scene in a later season of The Sopranos where a couple of
Tony's flunkies pay a visit to the new Starbucks opening on the block for a
shakedown and a kid stocking merchandise blows them off saying every last bean
is accounted for by corporate and it's out of his hands. The thugs wander out
in a daze.

Great scene, especially if you wanted to make a case for the benevolent
influence of corporations on society. Power to the bean counters!

~~~
lionhearted
Thanks for sharing, that is a great scene.

"It's over for the little guy" -

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxFQYw_MmAA>

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aaronbrethorst
My immediate reaction to this is, 'what could possibly go wrong?'

> “The new laws will make the price of paying off the yakuza, in loss of face
> and in penalties, much more expensive than the actual cash payments to the
> yakuza."

So what happens when the yakuza raise the stakes and make it even more costly
to not pay them off? (e.g. we'll kill you, your family, etc.)

~~~
archgoon
What sprung to my mind was this article from the economist:

<http://www.economist.com/node/18652037>

The issue is that in India, it's illegal to both accept and give bribes. This
prevents bribe givers from 1) blowing the whistle. 2) Admitting to others who
want to convict the corrupt official that they gave him bribes.

"Kaushik Basu, the chief economic adviser to India’s finance ministry,
suggests that this may be partly because the law treats both bribe-giving and
bribe-taking as crimes. This makes it hard to blow the whistle on corrupt
officials, because the bribe-giver has also broken the law. If he complains,
he risks prosecution or, more likely, being asked for another bribe by the
police. In a provocative paper based on game theory, Mr Basu argues for the
legalisation of some kinds of bribe-giving. His proposal has instigated a
furious debate in India, with television channels even assembling panels to
discuss it."

~~~
blahedo
Which is why it's important that they have this policy:

> _If you go to the police, before they come to you, and tell them that you
> have been working with the yakuza, the police will exempt you from the
> ordinance and help you sever relations._

i.e. whistleblower protection writ large, at the company level.

~~~
dlikhten
Yea, otherwise I threaten you "bribe me or die" on camera. I bribe you, you
blackmail me with that footage.

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thematt
I'm confused by this. I was never under the impression people were paying
protection money voluntarily -- I thought it was always so that groups like
Yakuza wouldn't come back and break your legs or kill your family. This threat
probably won't go away, so the local shopowner is still left with that
decision to make...which will he be more afraid of? Yakuza or police? Seeing
as how there's only 100 officers to enforce this new law, I'd still be more
afraid of the Yakuza.

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mrb
I never understood how organized crime can exist in a society as modern as
Japan (or most western countries for that matter). Most people are against it,
so why doesn't it die off by itself? There is an estimated 100k Yakuza
members. Japan has a population of 127M. That's 1 Yakuza member per 1270
inhabitant. How can they seemingly be so prevalent?

Most likely the Yakuza phenomenon is exaggerated by the media, and for most
people, they are just a thing you hear about on the TV, but that you never see
in real life.

~~~
rhizome31
Actually if you go out a bit in Japan, you'll often hear that such place is
own by Yakuza or you'll be told that such person is Yakuza. The Japanese are
generally quite tolerant with the Yakuza, considering them a normal and
distinctive part of their culture, some kind of necessary evil, which is
something I never understood.

~~~
toyg
The key element of yakuza is that it's organized and somewhat predictable.
It's violent and illegal, yes, but it's also very formalized and fairly
static. Whereas in Western countries criminal cartels are wildly
unpredictable, and more often than not involve innocent parties in their
squabbles, Yakuza families are very conservative, in a very Eastern way, and
value stability above many other things.

Inevitably, in large metropolis, you'll have things like red-light districts.
These places will be full of people who don't particularly value the rule of
law, which means they're going to be hotbed of instability. Policemen have
little incentive to risk their neck for prostitutes and various scumbags. In
comes the yakuza, and order is guaranteed; nobody will make trouble, and if
they do, yakuza will dispatch of them quickly and reliably. Police are happy,
less work for them. They also provide easy cash, something hard to come by in
a very conservative society where banks often lend money depending on your
surname rather than your cashflow. They like finance as much as anybody else.

In a society that (in most cases) still values tradition and stability above
everything else, yakuza provides these elements to the inevitable "dark
underbelly"; as long as they cover that role, rulers are not particularly
interested in going after them for a bit of unpaid taxes. Nowadays it's
fashionable for mainstream media to bash them because they all need scapegoats
for a long-running financial crisis that has no clear culprit (apart from the
usual "generalized greed" and "implicit flaws in the capitalist model", but
nobody wants to really address those two, of course).

~~~
rhizome31
Good overview of the problem. Nowadays the romantic image of the Yakuza who
doesn't bother innocent people seems to be loosing a bit of credibility
though. Maybe people will start to realize that human trafficking actually
involves innocent people.

------
nhangen
More like goodbye to standing a chance as a business owner. So you can't pay
for safety, and instead get your windows broken and your kneecaps busted.

If you do pay, you become a criminal.

Talk about a backwards way of fighting the problem.

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m0nastic
I think that's an interesting take on the problem.

I don't think there is an equivalent law in the U.S. against paying for
"protection", but it might make sense.

My dad ran the racket for Boston's Chinatown/Combat Zone in the 70's-80's and
it was definitely more acceptable at the time to pay up (as the police weren't
interested in what happened there).

~~~
lurker19
Is your father still alive?

~~~
m0nastic
Yeah, "retired" in southern California. Why?

~~~
pontiacred
I think it would be interesting to read about his involvement with the
rackets. You could interview him to jog his memory and ask him to write about
it. Also I know reddit's IAMA subreddit loves topics like these.

~~~
m0nastic
I saw him mentioned in a Discovery Channel documentary when I was in High
School, which surprised the hell out of me.

I don't know how interesting it all is. He basically showed up in the Combat
Zone one day and went from place to place telling them they were going to
start paying him. The guy they were already paying got disappeared, so they
complied.

Over time the territory came to include Chinatown (which abuts the Combat
Zone), and he eventually got hooked up with the non-Irish mob in Providence
(where I guess he was one of their better earners). He also apparently stole a
lot of boats (very easy to steal, very hard to track), which when I found out
helped explain to me why my grandmother was Admiral of the Quincy Yacht Club
without ever owning a boat.

The FBI issued an arrest warrant for him the day I was born, so he fled
(apparently to California). They seized all my mom's assets (in an effort to
get her to cooperate), and tailed her and I everywhere for most of my
childhood.

He ended up getting arrested back in Boston in the early 90's (A few years ago
I worked at the same company as the prosecutor who tried his case, which we
both discovered one night drinking at a company off-site...awkward
conversation).

From what I know, he's now living in Southern California (he had a security
consulting company...which I suppose it somewhat serendipitous considering
that both my brother and I ended up working in information security).

I'm not one of those people who believes that people are "good" or "evil", but
if forced to decide one way or the other, my dad falls pretty squarely into
the "bad" camp. The thought of him participating in an IAMA on Reddit is about
the funniest thing I can think of.

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kemayo
The sheer number of unexplained Japanese words in that article made reading it
lightly frustrating. Convenient example:

 _"All yakuza groups have a coat of arms or crest known as a daimon(代紋) that
represents the group. The Yamaguchi-gumi daimon is often called hishi-gata
because of its shape."_

Sure, he romanized that last one, but that really didn't make the sentence
understandable.

~~~
roel_v
The next paragraphs explains that sentence (daimon, yamaguchi-dumi). 'hishi-
gata' wasn't but from a quick google I understand that it means 'diamond-
shaped'. I admit that I found it frustrating as well.

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ck2
Sounds like they are taking hints from American "law enforcement".

It's a heck of a lot easier and cheaper to go after people who cannot defend
themselves than the powerful. This is why virtually no-one from wallstreet has
been put in prison and corporations have become "people".

Once you give police laws like this, they start hitting the innocent little-
guys with all the power they have and no-one gets how horrible that is until
someday the bystander who says "well if you didn't do anything wrong... blah
blah" gets caught in the trap as well. Then it's too late.

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thesis
Talk about a sensational headline.... goodbye? Give me a break. There will
always be organized crime in every country no matter what.

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known
Why don' you give autonomy to Yakuza?
[http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...](http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/)

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zeteo
This is confusing a set of legislative measures, aimed at the destruction of
an illegal organization, with the attainment of the said result.

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scotty79
That doesn't work for bribes. Why should it work for racket money?

