The court in the southern city of Fukuoka handed down the country’s first death sentence for the head of an organised crime group, even though the evidence against Nomura was largely circumstantial and relied on confessions by his underlings that they carried out attacks on his orders.

Jake Adelstein, an authority on Japanese underworld groups and the author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, said the severity of the sentence underlines that prosecutors and the police are stepping up their efforts to “push the yakuza into oblivion”.

Japan gives yakuza criminal gangs the finger

He conceded, however, that while authorities will try to make Abe another example of their recent crackdown, a death sentence is unlikely.

“The police have been given new powers in recent years to tackle organised crime, but this was one death in a spur-of-the-moment incident when he was drunk,” Adelstein said.

“It is also quite likely that the victim was also a yakuza member rather than a ‘civilian’, like in the Kudo-kai case, which puts the killing into a different category in the eyes of the authorities.”

The Kudo-kai attacks were all premeditated, Adelstein said, and involved the 1988 fatal shooting of the head of a fisheries cooperative, the attempted killing in 2012 of a police officer investigating the gang, a knife attack the following year on a nurse at a clinic where Nomura had undergone a procedure, and a failed murder attempt in 2014 against a relative of the fisheries official.

“I do not think it was a coincidence that the sentencing of the Kudo-kai leader only came after the Games had concluded, and I am sure that we will now see the campaign to destroy the gangs ramp up again,” he said.

The effort has already paid dividends, with the Kudo-kai down from a peak of around 1,200 members in 2008 to just over 400 today. It is a similar story at other underworld groups, with the National Police Agency estimating there were 25,900 gang members across the country in 2020, down 70 per cent from 2010.

Yet Adelstein said it would be a mistake to count the most hardened yakuza out entirely, a belief supported by the thinly veiled threats that Nomura made to the judge who sentenced him to death last week.

“You will regret this as long as you live,” Nomura said to judge Ben Adachi.

Even with the gang leader behind bars, the authorities are concerned that one of Nomura’s acolytes may read his comments as a chance to exercise ‘sontaku’ – carrying out an act of revenge and accepting responsibility to please the leader. Police have assigned bodyguards to the judge, other court officials and individuals who testified against Nomura in court.

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“Those precautions are completely warranted,” said Adelstein, pointing out that the Kudo-kai is considered Japan’s most violent gang and is the only one designated a “grossly vicious group” by the police.

“It’s very possible that other members of the group will choose to interpret Nomura’s words in court as an order to target the judge and take it upon themselves to avenge him,” Adelstein said.

“A ‘sontaku’ order lasts until the person who issued it withdraws it or the target is dead, so I would not personally want to be that judge.”