What happens when mobsters want to abandon their criminal ways and go straight? For American wiseguys, the options are limited: run and hope for the best, or fink on your cronies and join a witness protection scheme, always remembering to check under the car hood every morning.
In Japan, which boasts an estimated 80,000 full-time gangsters, things are even worse. There's no police help, and leaving often requires an offering to appease the offended honour of an oyabun (boss): your little finger.
Of course, this being the criminal underworld, cash will do just fine. But few junior hoods have much money. So, the options are: sleep with the fishes or say goodbye to your golf grip.
If it's the latter, the preferred tools are a sharp knife, a spotless white handkerchief and a manly grimace as the gangster amputates his pinkie at the joint - an honour sacrifice known as yubizume. A colleague provides a piece of string to stem the blood, and the hood is off to his new life, via the hospital. Then the problems start. Nobody wants to hire, marry or even sit next to an ex-gangster with a missing pinkie. That's where Yukako Fukushima comes in.
A sort of high-tech Florence Nightingale of the underworld, Fukushima is one of the world's leading makers of personalised prosthetics, and she's used them to help more than 500 yakuza gangsters go straight, often for little or no profit.
Sitting in her small office in Osaka city (the yakuza capital of Japan), surrounded by scarily realistic body parts, Fukushima explains the trials and tribulations of the average reformed hood and why she helps them.
'Many former yakuza want to go back to work, but without their pinkies nobody will take them on,' she says. 'They're often not bad people at all, although they can get very angry and scary sometimes. Some of them can't bring their kids to the swimming pool or be seen with their children in public because the other kids will bully them. So I help them out.'