The Yakuza, Japan’s notorious organized crime syndicates, have long wielded considerable influence over local communities, politics and the criminal underworld. Though they occupy a unique place in Japanese society, their power is gradually waning. Few understand this shift better than journalist Jake Adelstein, who has spent years uncovering the Yakuza’s inner workings – from high-level corruption to personal anecdotes, such as a Yakuza member requesting a photo be altered to conceal his boss’s missing pinky finger. 

His first book, Tokyo Vice, which was adapted into a television series in 2022, offers an in-depth look at the challenges of reporting on organized crime and maintaining complex relationships with Yakuza members. In his second book, The Last Yakuza: A Life in the Japanese Underworld, Adelstein chronicles this decline in power. In the second podcast episode of our series Underworlds with Mark Shaw, the GI-TOC’s director spoke with Adelstein to discuss the book. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

 Mark Shaw: Jake, welcome to Underworlds. It’s really a pleasure to have you on the show. This is a great book, full of 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. How does an American become an expert on the Yakuza?  

Jake Adelstein: Well, the quick answer is that you’re a newspaper reporter and your boss assigns you to cover the Organized Crime Task Force in 1994. Then it’s your job. And one of the things that is very interesting about the Japanese mafias is that they’re very out in the open. So in a sense, studying the Japanese mob is quite possible, academically. I just wanted to show you a few things. This is a Yakuza fanzine [holds up a publication]. This was in publication until about 2018, when they were forced out of business – 30 years. And every issue has the heads of the Yakuza groups in there, with 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. This literally says ‘Yamaguchi-gumi, regular monthly meeting’.  

There are 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. There were some Yakuza who also write books, very much skipping over the actual money-making part and focusing a lot on the nobility, the culture, the gang wars, 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 per cent of the Yakuza (and when we say Yakuza, we’re talking about 20 different crime families, hard-crime groups) are Korean Japanese. When Japan was liberating Asia, as they say (not really liberating Asia, but that’s what they claimed) they annexed Korea, and a lot of Koreans were brought to Japan as slave labour. And after 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 Yakuza have always been a meritocracy, and they were pretty much like, ‘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 per cent of the Yakuza [being] Koreans. Another 20–30 per cent in the old days were Burakumin.  

The Burakumin were the people that slaughtered animals, made leatherwork and were considered ‘unclean’. Like the outcast class in the Hindu world. And it was possible to identify who was a Burakumin by their family registries years ago. So that was another discriminated group. And the Yakuza were like, ‘Hey, Burakumin, you are welcome.’ They used to say that the Yamaguchi-gumi, which is one of the largest factions, was the biggest Burakumin faction. 

Other factions had a large number of Koreans. Why that is advantageous to me is because they are outsiders among outsiders. 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 – 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. I would say to some of the Yakuza I was interviewing, ‘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. Behind our backs, 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 openings open to me.’ They’re like, ‘Oh, you understand what it’s like to be discriminated against’. And that was very good for creating rapport with some of the Yakuza. And also I got to eat a lot of really good Korean food. I like Japanese food, but I think I prefer Korean food. No offence to Japan. 

MS: And it comes through the book very well. In fact, this parallel that the Yakuza come from excluded people, people on the margins of society, is a very common organized crime story. 

JA: 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 of 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 – the Jews, as soon as they got wealthy and made enough money from illegitimate businesses, they became legitimate businesses and they left that world to the Italians. 

MS: These parallels are fascinating. You’ve touched on some of the key dates post-war of the Yakuza, you call it ‘the last Yakuza.’ You know the Global Initiative well, we’re doing all this work on policy and countering organized 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. Just take us through that. Was Japan successful? 

JA: 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. They’re less than a third of what they were. 

MS: And what drove that? Law enforcement, social exclusion… a range of things? 

JA: Like all things, it’s a little complicated, but if you wanted to condense it, for a long time, law enforcement and the Yakuza had an almost symbiotic relationship. It was like, ‘As long as you are only killing each other, that’s okay’. There’s 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. 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. You tell me.’ And he said, ‘Destruction of property.’ And that really captures the Japanese police attitude, 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.’  

In the offices of the Yakuza, especially the Inagawa-kai, there are a list of rules on the board, like 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. The fifth one, or sometimes the sixth one, which is very interesting, is unnecessary contact with the authorities. Unnecessary contact with the authorities implies exactly what it says. Of course you’re going to have contact with the Yakuza. Of course the Yakuza and the police are going to have contact. Of course you’re going to talk to the police. But not more than necessary. And there was a time when the police really did schedule, like in the TV show, raids with the Yakuza. Like, ‘Hey, there’s a warrant out for the arrest of your underling on these charges. We’re going to come by. Would Wednesday work for you?’. ‘Yeah, Wednesday would be fine. What time should we expect you?’. The cops would know, the Yakuza would know, the media would know. It was all a performance. We were rarely surprised when the police raided the Yakuza office because the Yakuza knew in advance, and we knew in advance. It wasn’t air-tight security. But things really started to go haywire when the Yamaguchi-gumi, which is the largest organized crime [group] in Japan, began to challenge the police and intimidate them. And that really starts about 2007, 2008. 

MS: And why did they do that, Jake? What was the reason for doing that? Changing the symbiosis, in a way? 

JA: Well, the Yamaguchi-gumi is the big dog, right? They’re the Goldman Sachs of organized crime in Japan. They’re huge. And the second in command, Takayama-san, he really felt that the authorities were trying to pass a criminal conspiracy law. And he was also arrogant, and he felt like, ‘We don’t need to cooperate with these people anymore. We’re big. We have inroads in the stock market. We’re powerful. We have politicians in our pocket. We don’t need to kowtow to the police.’ So it became a very confrontational and uncooperative relationship. Now, that sounds ridiculous, right? Wasn’t it always confrontational, uncooperative? No, that wasn’t the norm.  

So what the Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai did that was really unusual is they hired a private detective agency called the Galu 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’. 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 and in the middle of the interrogation, the Yakuza would say, ‘Hey, it’s already 5pm, shouldn’t you be home for your daughter’s birthday?’. 

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 Aichi 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 Yakuza offices without an appointment’. But when they did that, they found surveillance photos of their families and their friends. And they were like, ‘Screw these guys. They have gotten uppity. We’re not going to put up with this anymore. When the Yakuza are threatening detectives, this isn’t Mexico. 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 Takaharu, said, basically, ‘Okay, I hear you. We’re not going to put up with this’. So, on September 30th, 2009, at a press conference, he declared war on the Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai. 

So, the National Police Agency, the top commissioner, the top dog, says in a press conference, basically, ‘We are going to war with the Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai’. Not the entire Yamaguchi-gumi, not all the Yakuza. But this particular faction, the ruling faction, this group of 2 000 people among the Yakuza. ‘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 a lot of businesses were refusing to do business with the Yakuza or pay them protection money anymore, the Kodo-kai were throwing grenades into clubs, and severely wounding people and killing them. And the Japanese police were kind of like, ‘What should we do? The Yakuza are intimidating us. They’re attacking civilians. How can we stop them?’. 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 – ‘We’ll never be able to get 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 had some run-ins with Goto-gumi, 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 those clauses basically are that whenever you’re in Japan, when you check into hotels, you join a sports club, you join a gym, you try to rent a car, you try to get a cell phone, there’s a little clause that says, ‘I am not a member of an organized crime group, and I am not associated with any.’ 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 of case. So these organized crime exclusionary ordinances, which first started appearing in 2009, 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 Yakuza protection money.  

And Fukuoka, 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. The implementation of these laws took 2 years. [They started] in 2009, and the last places to have these on the books was Tokyo on October 1st, 2011. 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, ‘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, “so and so corporation is doing business with the Yakuza, 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 that was really effective. And the ordinance has also ‘encouraged’ every business to put these organized crime exclusionary clauses in their contracts. So it created an atmosphere where it was much easier for companies and people to refuse to pay money to organized crime. 

And at the same time, it accelerated the exclusion of these guys from society. If you can’t have a bank account, if you can’t rent a car, or you can’t play golf, or you can’t check into a hotel, life is very hard. And even though there are ways around this, and maybe you can find someone to do these works for you or buy a car in your name, there’s still this risk of getting caught. 

The inconvenience of being a Yakuza, and the fact that a lot of their money is dried up because people don’t want to pay protection money because it’s too risky. The cost-benefit analysis is, ‘Do I pay these people off or and risk losing everything, or do I not pay them and have the small risk that there’s some retaliation from them?’. And most people have chosen to not pay them. 

MS: You take the Italian example, what’s different in Japan? 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 become, sort of, socially toxic. That’s how it seems to me. Is that the case? You start off showing these very interesting comics where there’s people photographing them. So there’s a popular following. But it’s almost like this is viewing people who are separate from us. 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? 

JA: What is very unique about Japan, and one of the reasons the mafia here has been generally better behaved, is that they have a public presence. 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.’ [They claim]: ‘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 Yakuza had great PR. 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. And one of the reasons the Yakuza 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 positions. So you have an institutional memory that’s actually better than the Japanese government. 

There’s a guy who has been there for like 20 years, he goes, ‘I remember the last disaster I went to. People wanted throw-away 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’. They’re the unofficial FEMA of Japan, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They’d say, ‘Here come the Yakuza to the rescue’. So they did buy a lot of goodwill. And by not engaging in street crime, which has basically been no purse snatching, no mugging and no robbing, people felt safe in their neighbourhoods. I have been to the neighbourhood of Kobe where the Yamaguchi-gumi has their office. And there might be some people that are uncomfortable, and they certainly are. But there’s a lot of people that really liked having them there because it’s very safe. 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 neighbourhood, masqueraded as ‘uncle Jack’. I think that, after a couple of years, they realized who I was, but we just pretended that we didn’t know because Japan is good about that. Like, ‘Obviously, we know you’re not the uncle. We know that you’re a reporter. We don’t care because it’s fine, as long as you’re not causing a problem’. 

MS: I was really struck – and I may have this entirely wrong, so please be blunt in your response – that there’s not much on police informers in the book. In this series, I’m reading all these books on organized crime. Inevitably, there’s stories about snitches and people giving evidence. There’s almost nothing, unless I’ve missed it, on this in your book. There are these hilarious scenes of the police engaging – and 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 secret relationship here? The unwritten informers? Where did the police get their information from? Or is this just different to elsewhere? 

JA: 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. And generally not sanctioned. The other thing is that Japan, until 2019, did not have plea bargains. So there is no incentive for someone who is arrested to rat out their other members. The Japanese phrase is ‘Hyakugai atte ichiri nashi’ (‘there’s a hundred damages you can get and not one advantage’). And the reason that is set in place is because the system was, in the old days, 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 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. Or multiple mistresses, depending on what you are. They’re very good about 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 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. 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. 

MS: It’s a fundamentally different dynamic to elsewhere – that sort of secret war on the mafia, the plea bargaining. But it’s been successful. 

JA: Yeah. One of the weird things about all this is that 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 at the top escapes prosecution. But in civil law, there’s the concept of employer liability, so Yakuza bosses can be sued for the damages inflicted by their underlings.  

Tadamasa Goto and the 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. The people that actually committed the crime were eventually arrested and convicted and sent to jail for a very long time. But Goto himself, who 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 it was sort of a last-ditch effort. The family and the police helped them, sued the Yamaguchi-gumi organization. They sued Goto Tadamasa for several million dollars, and in the end, Goto apologized to the family for what his underlings had done. He paid them US$1.4 million, and he fled to Cambodia.  

I think I wrote [about] that in great detail in my third book, Tokyo Noir. But that’s an interesting thing, right? ‘Okay, we can’t convict you for this crime, but we’re going to encourage the family to sue you, and it’s going to cost you US$1.4 million’. That’s very expensive to kill one person. So that is also an impediment to the Yakuza. And 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 BS, and maybe the Yakuza know themselves it’s BS, I actually think there are some Yakuza who actually believe the folklore, who actually believe their own myths. There are those people, too. But that means things like attacking journalists, killing judges, killing cops… that’s a bad one, you can’t do it. 

MS: It’s interesting that you say there’s a prohibition on violence against civilians, but there’s quite a lot of violence in the book, actually. There is a thread of violence through the book, and then there’s this self-inflicted violence. You have this great scene of the main character cutting off his pinky finger, which is very dramatic, actually quite shocking, with a sushi knife, if I’ve got it right. 

JA: It’s a sashimi knife. They’re pretty much the same thing. 

MS: What is that about? The violence that does occur, is this unprescribed? There’s clearly targeted violence. And then the whole cutting off of fingers. You say he has bottles of fingers buried in his back garden, etc. Does this stuff still go on? 

JA: It’s not like they don’t use violence against civilians. They do, but it’s judicious. There’s this Japanese saying, ‘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 a Yakuza. People are roughed up and beaten up by them. But that is usually the last resort. But the threat of violence is what makes them powerful. It is the threat that if you don’t pay them 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. It’s not always the violence, it’s the threat of violence that is their power. I think that there’s 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 bōryokudan, which is literally ‘violent groups.’ And he was like, ‘Violence is our business. If we didn’t have the violence, we’d just be a 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 Goto-gumi, and I think we also depicted this in Tokyo Vice, when someone screws up, he would have the best friend of the guy beat the shit out of him. And that 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 violence keeps order. So there’s the whole idea of yubitsume, which is a very Yakuza thing, 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 cutting board or something on top of it and then hammer it. It’s much harder to sever a finger than you think. Not that I’ve done it myself, but from talking to people who have. 

MS: And what’s the point, Jake? Severing a finger means what? 

JA: The symbolic meaning is that in the days when swords were what people used to fight, 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 dog fight to say, ‘Spare me.’ You weaken yourself. And there’s two reasons you do that in the Yakuza. And they have a term for it, which is interesting. If you sever your finger because you’ve screwed up – and it’s either ‘turn in the finger or get killed or get kicked out of the organization’ (if you get kicked out of the organization how are going to make a living?) – 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 shinu yubi, a ‘dead finger’.  

If you have an underling or a good friend in the organization or a brother, so to speak, in the Yakuza world who has screwed up badly – maybe he’s stolen money from the organization, maybe he has shot the wrong person, maybe he 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 – when 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 underling, please forgive my brother in the organization’, that is called an iki yubi, which is a ‘living finger’, and that is highly respected.  

Obviously, you can’t tell when looking at someone’s finger, whether it’s a ‘dead finger’ or a ‘living finger’. But the Yakuza world is like a giant high school in some sense. Everybody knows everybody. They gossip all the time. If you’ve chopped off your finger to bail out your buddy, everybody knows. Like, ‘Oh, yeah, that guy, he’s chopped off his finger because he’s a good guy, he sacrificed part of his own body to help a brother, so this is a man with courage and conviction’.  

I wrote this article in 2015, about the vice chairman of Japan’s Olympic Committee, Tanaka, who was also the chairman of the Board of Nihon University, being an associate of the head of the Yamaguchi-gumi. There was this picture circulating of the vice chairman of Japan’s Olympic Committee with top-dog members of the Yamaguchi-gumi. 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 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 the way home, and had their knees broken. I didn’t want that to happen to me, so I made sure that there was only a 24-hour 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, I called someone in the Yamaguchi-gumi, way up, 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 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 Tsukasa’s son’s missing finger, because 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 do is, I’ll insert a line that your boss is one of the old-school honourable Yakuza and a great guy, something to that effect’. And he said, ‘That would be very nice.’ And so that’s what I did. I was really surprised with the fact that he was slightly embarrassed by having missing a little bit of his pinky. I guess that was a ‘dead finger’, not a ‘living finger’. I don’t really know the story behind it. 

MS: Jake, that’s hilarious. You touch on the Olympic Committee fellow. Say a few things about the Yakuza and politics, and right-wing politics. This emerges through the book, and it’s fascinating stuff. Because we began saying the Yakuza come from excluded folk, etc. But they were – and not sure about today, please answer that as well – deeply embedded in Japanese politics. 

JA: Part of the secret societies that overthrew the democratic Japanese government and helped create an imperial power, which waged war all over the world, were early Yakuza groups like Kokusui-kai. So they’re gamblers and criminals, but they’re also hiding their axe under the mask of patriotism. It’s a good way to legitimize what you do. And after the war ended, Kodama Yoshio, who was a Yakuza associate before the war and after the war, and a war profiteer, and people like Abe Shinzo’s grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, together they helped create the Liberal Democratic Party with Yakuza funds.  

Now, I don’t want to get into conspiracy theory stuff here, 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 and the left wing to take over. So these 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 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 Yakuza. 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 named Nagamoto, who went all over the country talking to these local Yakuza groups saying, ‘Put your votes behind Abe’ and talking to other organized crime groups 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 Abe 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. You remember when Abe was assassinated, right? Someone asked me, ‘Were you surprised?’ 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.  

To become the prime minister of Japan people 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 covered by investigative journalism. That wasn’t covered by the Yakuza going to the weekly magazine to say, ‘Hey, here’s a story for you.’ Then they named a 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 the Democratic Party in Japan lost power. By using their connections to politicians in the past, they were able to take down an entire administration and put in a new administration. 

MS: Jake, this raises 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 were so much on the back foot with the cops, the strategy, the laws… why didn’t political protection work then? 

JA: Because they were outsmarted. The Yakuza had politicians in their pocket in the national Diet. Local politicians, mayors, lots of people who they had information on, that they could blackmail, people who politically benefited or financially benefited from the association with the Yakuza. And the National Police Agency was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to have local prefectural police 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 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 Yakuza’. I don’t know if that’s true, but it doesn’t strike me as impossible. 

MS: Jake, you tell a fascinating story. As I said at the beginning, you have this unique perspective and a great way of writing. 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? Are there some key criminologists that follow it?  

JA: What’s really interesting is that Hirose-san, who is called ‘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. It was considered beneath us. Scholars didn’t want to write about it because that actually meant associating with Yakuza, and Yakuza are scary. What Hirose-san’s power is that he himself worked in what would be considered an old-style Yakuza group, which is Tekiya, street merchants. And he has been poor, and he has been a juvenile delinquent. 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 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 who will do anything to make money’. I think he has been prescient in pointing that out. 

But, except for him, the number of academics who really studied the Yakuza in their history have been very few. There was a seminal book that came out in the 1960s, it is like 600 pages, and it is full of the history of the Yakuza, 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 [the author] is able to capture and point out that there’s these inherent contradictions in what these people say and what they do. I don’t think there’s ever been anyone even close to achieving the level of scholarly research that this one professor did, except Hirose-san. There’s tons of books written about the Japanese mafia. There’s lots of books written about the Yakuza in Japan as well. I’ve got a library full of them. But an actual, detailed study of the sociology, the make-up, 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 can use. This book [shows Japanese book] is called The Japanese Economy Taboo Textbook, and tries to chronicle the Yakuza inroads into the stock markets and the FX markets and places they never were before. Yakuza aren’t dumb. There was this incident in 2006 where there was a website that was the equivalent of like ‘classmates.com’. It had 3.6 million users. I don’t know how it is in Europe, but generally, through these high-school reunion sites, people end up having torrid affairs or exchanging messages they shouldn’t, 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 classes with at the time. And the Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai took over the organization that ran that. And then one day people woke up in the morning and it would be like the equivalent of waking up and seeing that, ‘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 would the Yakuza want to take over this social networking site, this classmates.com?’. 

And I’m 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, supporting them, because they’re great places to get information. You can make a certain amount of money by shaking down on the prostitutes in your area and having them give you protection money, but you can make a lot more money 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 US$100 million in our front company.’ Which do you think is more financially feasible? 

MS: People listening, I hope, are people who do research or obviously work on organized crime in some way. What advice do you have? You’ve ploughed this very unique career, in my opinion. You say, ‘Well, partly by accident,’ your editor said, ‘Get onto the Yakuza.’ What advice do you have for young researchers looking at the issue of organized crime in different societies around the world? 

JA: 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 honourable, a little bit trustworthy, and then you 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 person they’re sociable with. 

MS: Who feeds them information, who guides them. 

JA: Feeds them information and is reasonable. 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’t make enemies. You cannot make enemies of everyone. 

MS: And this is how you open doors, right? Someone who vouches for you. And you can’t have more than one of these people? 

JA: You can contact lots of people. You just have to be very careful. It’s a small world and these people gossip and your reputation precedes you very quickly. One thing that made, for me, writing about organized crime much easier was in the year 2011, when there were the great earthquake and nuclear disaster. I was the first to write about how the Yakuza 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 they’re just returning a small portion of the money they’ve extorted from people all this time, they’re doing the bare minimum’ – it was a very cynical article – but I did say, ‘Okay, they’re 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, Adelstein is fair. Okay, he’s critical, but he’s fair.’ And that made it much easier to do the work because your reputation is like, ‘Oh, he’s being fair. You don’t have an agenda.’  

In the old days when the Yamaguchi-gumi wasn’t the most powerful, one of the things I learned from the cops is you could pit organization against organization. The Sumiyoshi-kai will tell you what the 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 the Sumiyoshi-kai and the Yamaguchi-gumi are doing, but they won’t tell you what they’re doing. So you can kind of talk to all of them. These are the unwritten rules of Japanese organized crime coverages: You can take information you hear from other groups about other groups, and use that in your stories. You can take the 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. Sometimes, the cops will use you to communicate something they want a certain Yakuza boss to know, but they can’t go tell them directly. 

MS: And you know you’re being used?  

JA: Yeah, you know you’re being used. And then there is a last rule of organized crime reporting– we’re not talking about research. I’ve had some great scoops given to me by the Yakuza, including like savings and a loan that was looted by a rival organized crime group. But they’re not 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. Or 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 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 favour, you’re doing them a favour. And you have to make that absolutely clear. You have to say, literally, like you’re spelling it out to a 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.’ 

MS: And you have this very straight engagement. 

JA: Very straight. Maybe I can get away with it because I’m a foreigner, but I’m like, ‘Let me make this perfectly clear here. You’re not doing me a favour, I’m doing you a favour. If you think it’s something else, then I’ll walk away from the story. Find another reporter.’ 

MS: 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 cut-throat competition, if it’s there, or is it a friendly kind of engagement? 

JA: 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 Atsushi is also very much embedded in that world. Mizoguchi-san said to me once, ‘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 will hold a grudge against me. As soon as I disappear from public view, I might disappear from life itself.’ What can I say to that? There’s some truth to that. I’ve written four books now. All of them have something to do with the Yakuza. I wrote a book about Bitcoin and a Bitcoin caper in Japan that has nothing to do with the Yakuza, 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 Yakuza. We’re so proud of you.’ 

Like, ‘Oh, you can do more than one thing, Adelstein.’ I was like, ‘Yep, you know, I am pleased.’ I don’t think I’ve 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. 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 favourites [holds up book]. This is a Yamaguchi-gumi phonebook 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 a list of rules and regulations and home addresses of their top members. They were so organized that they would have a system where someone would be on call in case a game war broke out to gather the troops and help quickly organize a peace treaty. And I guess this was also used to make sure that you didn’t hurt or intimidate the wrong people because these are groups that are friendly to you.  

I have tons of those things. I have videos. I sound like a Yakuza otaku when I say this stuff. This [shows item] is from a succession ceremony of the Yamaguchi-gumi. This is really nice to have. It’s a little handkerchief with the day and date of the succession ceremony. I got all that stuff. But the point is they’re fading out and I see very little value in writing about them anymore. 

MS: They’re such a chapter in your life, and is it not worth raking over the histories? You’ve got plenty of material. 

JA: I moved from being someone who’s reported on the Yakuza 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, this is what they used to be. This is how they’ve gotten in power during certain periods of time. This is their decline. They’re never going to come back.’ And my sweetheart, Jessie, was like, ‘You’re 55. You don’t heal so fast. You should watch the movie Wolverine (Logan). You can’t afford to go head-to-head with these young kids. 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, Jōchi Daigaku, Sophia University, which is a very good college, who ended up in the Yakuza. He is still in the Yakuza. He got in, he got out. He ran some front companies for them. And we had lunch at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, and he was saying ‘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 until you leave the organization because I don’t want to be associated with you. I don’t want to be at risk.’ And he offered me, ‘Wouldn’t you like to interview my boss? My boss is going to be rising way up in the organization.’ And 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. It’s a world of trouble I don’t need because 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 in doing this now. Thank you, but no thank you.’ 

MS: Jake Adelstein, what a great discussion. There you have it, The Last Yakuza [shows book]. Sounds like it’s your last book on the Yakuza, too… 

JA: 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 the meaning of the title, The Last Yakuza. You won’t see those likes again. 

MS: Jake, thank you very much for speaking to Underworlds, for talking about your book, for talking about the history of the Yakuza, the challenges you have faced. It’s really an excellent read. Much appreciated. 

JA: Thank you, Mark. I really enjoyed being on the show.