Japanese mobsters driving flash cars purchased with bank loans. Executives bowing in apology for loaning millions to those underworld figures. And high-level officials promising to squash the crime syndicates, known as yakuza.
Japan Inc is engulfed in its worst mobster scandal in years and it is shining a rare light on the links between big business and shadowy organized crime groups usually known for low-brow ventures like extortion and loan sharking.
Yet with membership falling as police ratchet up a crackdown, experts say the yakuza are branching far outside their traditional business into everything from insider trading to funding business startups.
“Insider trading has become huge — you can make much more money manipulating stocks” than extorting businesses, said Jake Adelstein, a crime writer whose bestselling memoir Tokyo Vice is set to become a Hollywood movie.
Adelstein, a former reporter at Japan’s top-selling Yomiuri Shimbun, likens the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s biggest organized crime group, to “Goldman Sachs with guns.”
Many mobsters — forever associated with full-body tattoos and lopped-off pinky fingers — have now ditched that tough guy persona in favor of tailored suits and a clean-cut look that could pass in any boardroom, Adelstein said.
“They’re savvy investors,” he said, adding: “They like to gamble.”
The yakuza occupy a grey area in Japan’s usually law-abiding society.
They are both feared and loathed as social outcasts, while they are revered in equal measure through film, fanzines and manga cartoons.
Like the Italian mafia or Chinese triads, the yakuza engage in activities ranging from gambling, drugs and prostitution to loan sharking, protection rackets and other illegal ventures often run through front companies.
However, unlike their foreign counterparts, yakuza are legal groups with offices in major Japanese cities, and they have historically been tolerated by authorities, although there are periodic clampdowns on some of their less savory activities.
In fact, the Yamaguchi-gumi helped dole out food after a major quake in the western city of Kobe in 1995.
However, Tokyo is now under intense pressure from abroad to clamp down on yakuza and their money laundering, as the US Department of the Treasury works to freeze the overseas assets of top Japanese crime groups, which it says make “billions of dollars annually in illicit proceeds.”
The crackdown at home has intensified after Mizuho Bank said in September that it had loaned money to organized crime members, an admission subsequently repeated by at least four other major lenders including Japan’s biggest bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.
Sometimes loans were legitimately used by gangsters to buy foreign sports cars or other expensive items, while in other cases the vehicle was quickly sold on the black market with the loan never paid back.
The scandal at Mizuho worsened after it initially said top executives knew nothing about the loans, only to backtrack on that claim as a company-commissioned report blasted its laissez-faire compliance.
Mizuho later said more than 50 executives would be punished with its chief executive foregoing pay for six months.
However, the latest admissions are not a first for the country’s banks, a big source of concern among police wary of sharing details of investigations with mob-linked firms, experts say.
“It is baffling that Mizuho board members failed to act,” said Toshihiko Kubo, professor of financial law at Ritsumeikan University.
“Once they learned that loan recipients were related to the mob, they should have taken immediate action,” Kubo added.
Major lenders are routinely approached by those with links to organized crime looking to raise money, said an anti-yakuza campaigner in Tokyo, echoing calls from Japanese Minister of Finance Taro Aso, among others, to tighten banking rules.
“Crime syndicates ... are out to make money, and they’ll use whatever means available,” said the campaigner, who asked not to be identified.
“Many companies are trying not to deal with organized crime ..., but it’s difficult to filter everything because their methods are also becoming sophisticated,” the campaigner said.
Earlier this year, the Japan Securities Dealers Association launched a database to help keep those with mob links out of the country’s now-sizzling stock market.
The pressure on Tokyo to clean up the problem is set to intensify as Japan looks to host the 2020 Summer Olympics.
On paper, the police crackdown appears headed in the right direction with yakuza membership down by about 28 percent to 63,000 last year from a decade ago, according to police data.
Still, yakuza links run deep in Japan and some credit their tough presence for keeping street crime low.
Their place is so deeply rooted that senior politicians are sometimes found to have mob ties, including ex-justice minister Keishu Tanaka who resigned last year following reports of his association with mobsters.
“There are lots of politicians that, in some sense, owe their positions to yakuza support back in old days, so clearly their influence is not non-existent,” Adelstein said.
“It’s still a bizarre system because Japan’s organized crime groups are legal entities. They are regulated but not banned,” he added.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s officially declared wealth is fairly modest: some savings and a jointly owned villa in Budapest. However, voters in what Transparency International deems the EU’s most corrupt country believe otherwise — and they might make Orban pay in a general election this Sunday that could spell an end to his 16-year rule. The wealth amassed by Orban’s inner circle is fueling the increasingly palpable frustration of a population grappling with sluggish growth, high inflation and worsening public services. “The government’s communication machine worked well as long as our economic situation remained relatively good,” said Zoltan Ranschburg, a political analyst
RSS