A journalist's deep dive into Japan's yakuza, tracing their roots in feudal outlaw bands through the postwar occupation years and into a modern criminal class 80,000 strong, with billion-dollar reach into business and politics. Built on nearly two decades of interviews, from street hoodlums to godfathers themselves.
Organized crime does not stay on the street; given time it moves its money into legitimate assets. Japan's syndicates began as bands of medieval outlaws and became billion-dollar investors in real estate, big business and art. In this way criminal enterprise can infect the very heart of a modern capitalist economy.
A single well-placed fixer can join the underworld to politics. Japanese gangs rose to power under one man who was at once godfather, kingmaker, millionaire, imperial adviser and spy. Through figures like him, organized crime gains a hidden backstage hold over political influence.
A criminal class can be tolerated by ordinary citizens to a degree that would shock outsiders. In Japan, gangsters numbering about eighty thousand, more than four times the size of the American mafia, operate with a public acceptance that lets them grow far larger than gangs in places that shun them.
Organized crime gains its strength by tying corporations, government and the public together in one system of corruption. Each link protects the others, so the network is harder to remove than any single crime. The authors document this web as a systematic feature of the world's second-largest economy, not a set of isolated scandals.