Japan’s yakuza are being arrested for poaching fish. Are they all washed up?
- A police crackdown has seen members of the underworld, usually associated with violent protection rackets and narcotics, turn to illegal fishing
- Membership is dwindling and the public sees them as an anachronism, with efforts to bust gangsters likely to step up after next year’s Olympics
Yakuza-watchers suggest a police crackdown on the gangs’ traditional sources of income has made poaching one of the final lucrative sectors they have been able to exploit, but a new book focusing attention on their operations in the industry has prompted the police to act.
Police this week announced they had arrested members of a yakuza group after they were found to have been illegally taking fish and shellfish from a site off Nagasaki Prefecture, in southwest Japan. The authorities told Kyodo News the gang members had borrowed scuba diving equipment to collect shellfish and had been poaching in the area for at least three years.
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Police also allege the catch was sold to a restaurant in Nagasaki city that was managed by a relative of a senior figure in the underworld group. The restaurant reported annual sales of Y300 million (US$2.8 million), they added.
Jake Adelstein, a crime writer and author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, said the police had long been aware of gangs’ involvement in the fishing industry but had turned a blind eye until the release this year of Fish and Yakuza: How Organised Crime Cashes in on Poaching by Tomohito Suzuki, which detailed those links.
“The gangs have been involved in fishing for a decade as a result of the police targeting their traditional forms of income, in particular the law that was introduced in 2011 that made it illegal for anyone to pay protection money to a gangster,” he said.
“Overnight, people stopped paying because they could be arrested, which obviously cut off a major revenue stream for the gangs.”
With the underworld suddenly struggling to make ends meet, members had the choice of leaving or diversifying their operations.
Many did opt to leave, with membership of the nation’s various yakuza falling to 34,500 in 2017, a record low, according to the National Police Agency – and a pale shadow of the 184,000 gangsters recorded in 1964.
Others, however, looked to get a foothold in legitimate businesses, although there appears to be a growing refusal in Japanese society to accept the underworld in their midst, even if they do have the trappings of respectability.
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“It’s clear that they have no leeway to do what they used to do with relative impunity and I would even suggest that yakuza gangs are on their last legs as an institution in Japan,” said Mieko Nakabayashi, a former politician who is now a professor of social sciences at Waseda University.
“They have tried to change in order to ‘fit in’ in terms of their ‘jobs’ – but also in the way they look and dress,” she said. Whereas yakuza could previously be singled out by the informal uniform they tended to affect – gaudy shirts, baggy trousers with leather loafers, a large wristwatch, lots of jewellery, sunglasses and the tightly curled hairstyle that became known as the “punch perm” – this is no longer the case.
Today, thanks to the backlash they have faced from the public and the authorities, gang members are keeping far lower profiles and are largely indistinguishable from ordinary Japanese citizens.
Nakabayashi also believes that while older Japanese may still have a degree of fear of gang members, younger people look at them as more of an anachronism whose time has gone. “They don’t fear them any more and I think that attitude will grow,” she said.
Despite the Nagasaki arrests, crime writer Adelstein believes the gradual crackdown that began more than a decade ago is on something of a hiatus to avoid bad international press before Tokyo hosts the Olympic Games next summer.
Once that is over, however, he said the authorities would step up the campaign to “wipe out” the remnants of groups that are officially referred to in Japan as “antisocial elements”.
“Before the Group of Seven summit in Osaka in June, the government, through the police, made it known to the gangs in the city that they did not want any problems in the run up to or during the summit,” Adelstein said. “They did not want the bad press. And that is exactly what happened; there was nothing at all.
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“After the summit, the three gangs that are fighting for supremacy in Osaka have been at each other one again, but the government has now eased up on the campaign against the underworld in the run-up to the Olympic Games next year because the last thing they want is images of yakuza shooting each other or fighting the police splashed across the world’s media.”
Another consideration for the organisers of what will be the largest sporting event ever held in Japan is the construction sector, which is traditionally controlled by the underworld and which provides labourers and equipment – for a price.
“But once the Games are over, the police don’t need to play nice any more,” Adelstein said. “I think they are going to go after the gangs with everything that they have and they are going to do their very best to finally smash them.”
