Aki Tsurumaki says he never felt his life was in danger during the 15 years he has been helping companies escape entanglements with Japan’s yakuza crime syndicates.
However, the 42-year-old lawyer jokes that he does not take any chances, adding with a smile: “I never stand near the edge of the train platform.”
The dark and sometimes dangerous triad of ties among gangsters, businesses and politicians has a long tradition in Japan, which helps explain why a scandal engulfing Japan’s Olympus Corp has stirred up media and market talk of possible yakuza links, despite company denials and a lack of evidence.
Ousted Olympus chief executive Michael Woodford has said he will not return to Japan to meet investigators because of “security issues,” although he declines to spell out his fears. And Facta, a Japanese magazine that broke the Olympus story, says a Cayman Islands firm linked to some Olympus deals had indirect ties to “anti-social forces” — a common euphemism for organized crime.
Olympus president Tsuyoshi Takayama, who took over last month, said on Tuesday that the company had hidden losses for two decades, using a series of unusual merger-and-acquisition deals in the past five years.
SPECULATIONS
As for “anti-social forces,” Takayama has told reporters he is unaware of “any such thing,” but it is not the first time that a corporate or financial controversy has given rise to speculation of yakuza involvement.
“I think it’s a very sad indictment of corporate Japan that that’s the working assumption,” said Peter Godwin, managing partner at law firm Herbert Smith in Tokyo, when asked why the corporate controversies often stir talk about yakuza.
“I can only assume that Japanese people think the yakuza are so intrinsically part of the fabric of corporate Japan that it’s a realistic possibility and it’s their first thought,” he said.
Japanese authorities have been opining about advances by organized crime into financial markets and corporate boardrooms for more than two decades, as yakuza have branched out into legitimate ventures with which reputable firms then do business.
In scandals that rocked Japan’s financial sector in 1991, top executives of Nomura Securities and Nikko Securities quit after revelations that affiliates had had dealings with organized crime, and that the brokerages had compensated favored clients for losses.
Ties between yakuza and financial firms again grabbed attention in the mid-1990s when the government budgeted funds to help wind up failed mortgage firms. Government officials said a hefty chunk of these firms’ bad loans involved organized-crime money.
Two years ago, Fujitsu fired its president for alleged links to organized crime, an allegation he denies and one that has prompted him to take court action to clear his name.
DANGEROUS LIAISONS
Changes, however, might be afoot.
A recent crackdown that targets not just gangsters, but the companies that do business with them could, if strictly enforced, make already-wary managers think even harder about the dangers of doing deals with yakuza or their front companies.
“The risk of doing business with organized crime has gotten massively larger,” said Nicholas Smith, head of Japanese equities strategy at CLSA in Tokyo.
The new laws are “extremely powerful and likely to produce big changes,” he said.
Ordinances that outlaw business dealings with yakuza and those who have close ties to crime syndicates went into effect in Tokyo and Okinawa prefectures last month, the last in a series of similar laws across Japan.
The push by local governments stemmed from a central government directive issued four years ago that aimed to choke off quasi-legal and legitimate sources of funding by organized crime syndicates, said Morio Umeda, a former policeman who helps run an anti-yakuza advice center in Tokyo.
Firms breaking the Tokyo ordinance will get a warning, then have their names made public if they persist, a step that could harm their brand and prove much more costly than a mere fine. Repeat offenders face fines of up to ¥500,000 (US$6,400), and company officials can face jail terms of up to a year.
“Companies need to realize it will be a worse blow to their reputation if they are found to be dealing with yakuza than if an executive is found doing something wrong,” Umeda said.
A common pattern of yakuza involvement in the past has involved firms paying hush money to gangsters or being sucked into shady deals in exchange for yakuza silence about misdeeds.
Umeda and others said hiding corporate misdeeds had gotten harder as employees’ undying loyalty faded with the breakdown of Japan’s lifetime employment system.
“This is an era of whistle blowers,” he said.
CUTTING TIES
The local laws coincide with efforts by industries from banking and insurance to construction and transport to make it easier for firms to cut ties with gangsters by inserting organized crime exclusion clauses in contracts.
Crime syndicate members who sign off on contracts while affirming they are not members of such groups can then be charged with fraud if their membership becomes known.
“A mood against organized crime that has not been seen before has spread throughout society,” former National Police Agency (NPA) chief Takaharu Ando was quoted by Japanese media as telling a news conference before stepping down last month.
“I think this energy will grow,” added Ando, who many say was a driving force behind the recent push.
Just how much impact the latest steps will have remains to be seen, given the crime syndicates’ long history, their ability to adapt to changing times and a lingering view of gangsters not only as a necessary evil but as upholders of traditional values and defenders of the weak.
“It would need some incredibly ferocious enforcement ... to change things in a hurry and I don’t detect that there is a real appetite for it,” Godwin said.
Small-time yakuza families, whose origins stretched back to feudal-era peddlers and gamblers, merged into giant syndicates after Japan’s devastating defeat in World War II, a chaotic period when police and politicians were more than willing to subcontract peace-keeping and other tasks to gangsters.
When share and property prices soared during Japan’s late 1980s bubble economy, crime syndicates diversified from traditional endeavors such as drugs, prostitution and extortion into financial and real estate markets. When the bubble burst in 1990, they found new niches such as bad debt collection.
FRONT COMPANIES
A 1992 law gave police power to designate gangster groups as organized crime syndicates and clamp down on “gray zone” activities such as strong-arm debt collection, but it also drove yakuza to set up front companies through which they expanded legitimate and quasi-legitimate dealings in sectors such as finance, real estate and waste disposal.
“After the 1992 law, gangsters could no longer put up their logos at their offices or make business cards with the logos,” a Tokyo Metropolitan Government official said. “So they created front companies ... and became involved in ordinary economic activities with companies and citizens.”
A report last year by the NPA said companies were often in the dark about possible dealings with crime syndicates.
“As crime syndicates have become very sophisticated in making their activities to acquire illicit funds opaque in recent years, it is quite possible that ordinary companies unknowingly conduct economic transactions with them, totally unaware that counterparties of transactions are crime syndicate-linked enterprises,” the report said.
The new crackdown could make identifying syndicate-linked businesses even harder, pushing their economic activities further into the shadows, experts said.
“They get involved wherever money is on the move in a given era,” Tsurumaki said. “So this law may not be the ultimate weapon that brings them to an end.”
AMBIVALENCE
Authorities still stop short of outlawing crime syndicates themselves, suggesting, critics say, a certain ambivalence about wiping out yakuza groups altogether.
The NPA report listed 22 designated crime syndicates, complete with their logos and addresses of their headquarters. Full and “associate” members totaled 80,900, down from 88,600 in 1990. Almost half were members of the Yamaguchi-gumi, which, while based in Kobe, has spread its influence to the capital in recent years.
“Organized crime groups insist they are humanitarian organizations and under the Japanese Constitution have a right to exist, that they promote traditional values and help deal with street crime, [and] help society in times of need,” said Jake Adelstein, an US journalist and author working in Japan.
“A lot of Japanese people, especially the police, feel that it’s better to have them exist quasi-legitimately so that you can regulate them and keep an eye on them,” said Adelstein, who spent 12 years covering crime at the Yomiuri Shimbun.
RELIEF EFFORT
After the massive March 11 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeast Japan, yakuza were among the first to send truckloads of relief goods to victims, a yakuza boss was quoted as saying at the time in the Weekly Taishuu magazine, which specializes in yakuza affairs.
However, cynics said they were also trying to get an early foot in the door to get contracts for massive cleanup and rebuilding projects.
Playing on tradition, the head of the giant Yamaguchi-gumi syndicate warned in September that trying to eradicate his group could have dire results for ordinary citizens.
“If the Yamaguchi-gumi were to dissolve now, public safety would become much worse,” crime boss Kenichi Shinoda, who goes by the alias Shinobu Tsukasa, said in an interview with the Sankei Shimbun in September, arguing that his group provides a place for those who fall through society’s cracks.
By making life tougher for crime syndicate members, recent moves could encourage known groups to hide their organizations, complicating police efforts to control them, said Kensuke Nishioka, a freelance journalist who writes about yakuza.
“The crime syndicates might officially dissolve and go underground, becoming like the Mafia,” Nishioka said.
“The police are just making it harder for themselves,” he added.
Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) led a bipartisan delegation to Taiwan in late February. During their various meetings with Taiwan’s leaders, this delegation never missed an opportunity to emphasize the strength of their cross-party consensus on issues relating to Taiwan and China. Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi are leaders of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Their instruction upon taking the reins of the committee was to preserve China issues as a last bastion of bipartisanship in an otherwise deeply divided Washington. They have largely upheld their pledge. But in doing so, they have performed the
It is well known that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) ambition is to rejuvenate the Chinese nation by unification of Taiwan, either peacefully or by force. The peaceful option has virtually gone out of the window with the last presidential elections in Taiwan. Taiwanese, especially the youth, are resolved not to be part of China. With time, this resolve has grown politically stronger. It leaves China with reunification by force as the default option. Everyone tells me how and when mighty China would invade and overpower tiny Taiwan. However, I have rarely been told that Taiwan could be defended to
It should have been Maestro’s night. It is hard to envision a film more Oscar-friendly than Bradley Cooper’s exploration of the life and loves of famed conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. It was a prestige biopic, a longtime route to acting trophies and more (see Darkest Hour, Lincoln, and Milk). The film was a music biopic, a subgenre with an even richer history of award-winning films such as Ray, Walk the Line and Bohemian Rhapsody. What is more, it was the passion project of cowriter, producer, director and actor Bradley Cooper. That is the kind of multitasking -for-his-art overachievement that Oscar
Chinese villages are being built in the disputed zone between Bhutan and China. Last month, Chinese settlers, holding photographs of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), moved into their new homes on land that was not Xi’s to give. These residents are part of the Chinese government’s resettlement program, relocating Tibetan families into the territory China claims. China shares land borders with 15 countries and sea borders with eight, and is involved in many disputes. Land disputes include the ones with Bhutan (Doklam plateau), India (Arunachal Pradesh, Aksai Chin) and Nepal (near Dolakha and Solukhumbu districts). Maritime disputes in the South China