2013 - Yakuza membership shrinks to record low

It is tough to be in the organized crime business in Japan. The latest figures provided by the National Police Agency (NPA) show that core membership of the 21 largest yakuza groups has fallen steadily in the last three years, but the decline was more marked in 2013.

According to the NPA, there were 58,600 registered gang members in 2013 - 25,600 identified as full members of recognized groups and 33,000 classified as "associate members."

That total figure is down by 4,600 from the previous year and the lowest since the Anti-Organized Crime Law first took effect in 1992, while arrests of gang members was put at 22,861 over the year, down 1,278 from 2012.

The law has been updated several times in the last 22 years, points out Jake Adelstein, author of "Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan" and an expert on Japan's underworld groups. The most significant change came on October 1, 2011, when it became a crime for anyone to pay protection money to a gang member.

Down from 80,000
"Membership was hovering around the 80,000 mark for years and years, but the law that criminalized paying protection money has really hit them hard," Adelstein told DW.

"Traditionally, a lower-ranking yakuza earned his money from protection in his neighborhood," Adelstein said. "He earned an income, paid his dues to the group, had the right to use the organization's name in his 'business' and generally terrorize people.

"But when these people could no longer pay their dues, they were no longer part of the gang and - like any corporation - they went out of business." And life for these relatively unskilled and unqualified members of Japanese society - some indelibly marked with the tattoos and missing fingers that single out members of the Japanese underworld - is subsequently tough.

Adelstein says his research indicates they often end up in the construction industry or driving trucks, but many eventually resort to crimes that are taboo in the yakuza world, such as theft and robbery. Many end up in prison and the suicide rate for former gangsters is higher than in general Japanese society.
Japanese gangs are also facing a challenge to their monopoly on the market here, with groups from China, Korea, Russia, Iran and elsewhere making inroads into their traditional heartlands.

Foreign crime groups
Some groups, such as those from Vietnam and Pakistan, specialize in stealing cars and jewelry and then ship their loot abroad. Others focus on importing heroin through Malaysia and other narcotics from Africa.

But another factor imperiling a segment of society that has always been considered a fact of life among the Japanese public are the nation's well-documents economic and demographic problems.

"It's a two-tier labor market and we're seeing the same thing in contractions in Japanese schools and corporations," said Jun Okumura, a visiting scholar at the Meiji Institute for Global Affairs.

"It could be argued that the yakuza were at the forefront of the downsizing movement here in Japan, turning to more irregular, part-time workers to complement their work force," he said.

And that means that income for the lowest level of gangsters is so pitifully low that the gangs are attracting fewer recruits. Combined with a falling birth rate, leading to a smaller pool of potential employees, the outlook for the underworld appears bleak.

New business opportunities
One possible way out is for gangsters to look overseas for opportunities. One of the most popular new areas they are examining is casino operations, in Macau, the Philippines and Cambodia.

"In Cambodia, there is no mafia presence, the entire political structure in the Philippines is corrupt so it's just a case of making sure you pay the correct people, while the underworld groups in Macau are not very strong," said Adelstein. "Others are setting up investment companies in Hong Kong and Singapore to manipulate stock market prices and make money in that way," he added.

As well as Asia, the yakuza's tentacles stretch as far as shell companies in the British Virgin Islands and Amsterdam, while one group is so brazen in its operations that it has little hesitation in sponsoring its own golf tournaments.
Overseas operations are, however, full of potential problems for crime syndicates that have previously focused their illegal intentions on the relatively easy domestic market. The most obvious threat to any business setting up in a foreign market is upsetting the local operators, as well as the need to carve out a new market for whatever sector that organization is working in.
And despite a history that stretches back to the 17th century, the yakuza are even fading in significance and influence in Japanese society. "When was the last time we saw a movie that glorified the yakuza?" asked Okumura. "That says something about this society. The yakuza just don't sell any more and maybe that is a result of social pressure not to glorify these people."

DW.de

The Japanese Fight Industry

IMPRISONED in a Japanese hotel room with a Beretta 9mm pistol pressed against his temple, a grim calculus of life and death began to play out in the mind of Australian businessman Miro Mijatovic. Death, as he saw it, was a possibility but not a certainty.

"I am 6'6" [1.98m] and I was pretty sure they were going to struggle to deal with getting a body the size of mine out of the hotel," he recalls.

The hours rolled by as Mijatovic sat slumped in a chair in a corner of the room, the air filled with cigarette smoke from the chain-smoking yakuza - as Japan's mafiosi are known - and the sour scent of his own fear-induced sweat. "Every now and again [their leader] would just explode and start screaming, 'You don't know what you are up against!' and thumping the table," recalls Mijatovic.
For three days the martial arts fight promoter was held like this while the yakuza demanded he relinquish his role as "power agent" in the booming fight industry. It was only when he agreed to sign his fighters over to the yakuza that he was released unharmed on the proviso that he flee the country for good. Instead, Mijatovic, who at one time looked after swimmer Ian Thorpe's interests in Japan, went to the police and launched a probe that resulted in the collapse of the hugely lucrative Japanese fight game.

After several years spent in hiding with a contract out on his life, Mijatovic is finally prepared to reveal how he took on the yakuza and exposed one of Japan's largest sporting scandals. "The two yakuza groups involved in extorting me have now been broken up," Mijatovic told The Weekend Australian Magazine when he arrived at The Australian's Tokyo bureau to tell the story of his abduction. As he sees it, a concerted campaign from law enforcement is hurting the gangs and that has encouraged him to give his personal account.


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/fight-club/story-e6frg6n6-1226532019774

Deconstructing the Olympus Scandal

Former Olympus CEO Michael Woodford’s flight from Tokyo in October and request for police protection in London was prompted by suspicions of yakuza involvement in the optics manufacturer.

Woodford claims his fears sprang from some lurid allusions in a FACTA magazine article published in late September to Cayman Islands-registered funds that had owned shares in three obscure, money-losing Japanese companies bought by Olympus: Altis, a medical waste disposal firm; News Chef, a maker of microwaveable plastic containers; and cosmetics firm Humalabo.

One of the Cayman funds was called Dynamic Dragon II. FACTA traced its origin to J Bridge Corp., an investment firm listed on the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

“This company is suspected of having a relationship with anti-social forces and is shunned by the capital market,” FACTA warned in its story.

“Authorities are still watching the movements of the former president, Toru Masuzawa, who ‘fled’ to Singapore,” the magazine claimed.

‘Anti-social forces’ is a Japanese euphemism for the yakuza.

The current CEO of J Bridge, which changed its name to Asia Alliance Holdings in 2010, is Kotaro Takamori. He strongly denies that J Bridge has any criminal connections or that it set up Dynamic Dragon, but confirms his company might have invested in the same special purpose vehicle (SPV) as Olympus.

“SPVs like Global Target or Dynamic Dragon have lots of sub-funds, so may be we invested in Dynamic Dragon sub-fund A, but Olympus used sub-fund B,” Takamori told me.


Some executives of J Bridge and the companies into which it has invested have committed crimes. However, an investigation I undertook for Asiamoney magazine did not uncover any mob ties to J Bridge.

Former J Bridge chairman Hidetaka Noda was convicted in 2009 of cross-border insider trading in J Bridge shares in 2006, using an account in Singapore.

The former CEO of News Chef, Kenichi Nishimura, was convicted of fraud in 2007. Yukihide Goto, the president of TransDigital, a failed computer systems developer, was convicted for transferring company assets to a creditor before filing for bankruptcy in 2008. J Bridge had sold its stake in TransDigital in 2006.

There is evidence to support the claim made by FACTA that J Bridge had “preyed on a group of companies that were driven into a difficult situation.” It is also unclear how J Bridge/Asia Alliance has been able to fund its investments and remain in business.

In an email to me, Takamori stated that since joining J Bridge in 2007, “the company had never made profit, we had only impairment loss and realized loss.”

The Olympus scandal is about a world-famous Japanese optics maker that lost almost ¥100 billion through zaiteku financial speculation and then tried to cover it up. That may sound simple enough, but the actual means of concealment, laboriously picked apart in a 200-page investigation report commissioned by the embattled company, can be mind-bogglingly complex.

‘The Singapore route,’ for example, involved Olympus making substantial deposits at the Singapore branches of two European banks, as collateral for loans to shell companies and funds registered in the Caymans. Olympus then used these Cayman conduits to buy Altis, News Chef and Humalabo at vastly inflated prices. The excess was then channelled back to help settle the original losses from speculative investment.

Around 1998, the report states that former Japanese banker Akio Nakagawa, who was helping Olympus disguise its losses, introduced Olympus executives Hisashi Mori and Hideo Yamada to Commerzbank International Trust in Singapore. There they met an employee identified in the report only as ‘Chan,’ who provided invaluable help.

When ‘Chan’ left Commerzbank in 2000 and moved to Société Générale, Olympus shifted its time deposits from the German to the French bank in Singapore. In 2004, ‘Chan’ branched out on his own, and managed a Cayman-registered fund, set up in 2005, in which Olympus invested ¥60 billion.

Takamori, who used to work for Orix in Hong Kong and Beijing before joining J Bridge, said this person was Chan Ming Fong. Chan, who was of Taiwanese extraction, had graduated from a Japanese university and worked at Wako Securities before joining Commerzbank, he said.

One of Chan’s colleagues at Wako Securities in Japan was Masuzawa, who later joined Chan at Commerzbank International Trust in Singapore, but left after just one year. Commerzbank head office declined to give any reason for his departure. Masuzawa joined J Bridge in 2004, the same year that Chan left Société Générale.

J Bridge emerged from the merger of a spinning company and a warehousing business in Nihonbashi, the old commercial and financial heart of Tokyo.

Nihonbashi means ‘Japan bridge,’ which Noda and Masuzawa took for the new name of the company after joining in 2004.

J Bridge soon embarked on a blizzard of acquisitions, divestments, and capital raisings.

A 2005 company filing said its objective was to “invest in, manage, rehabilitate and restructure undervalued or underperforming companies and businesses in order to enhance and maximise their values.”

Ethan Penner, a pioneer of mortgage-backed securities who made a fortune for Nomura Securities in the U.S. in the late 1990s, briefly worked for J Bridge.

“I once agreed to join an advisory board for a company called J-Bridge when a former employee of mine, Yuichi Hirayama, who remains a friend to this date, asked me to do this as he was involved in the leadership of J-Bridge and had great plans for the company. His plans ultimately were not realized and he left the company shortly thereafter and my involvement ceased,” Penner, who is now an executive managing director at CNB Richard Ellis, told me. “The entirety of my relationship/involvement amounted to attending a few meetings with the media and a meeting or two with Hirayama-san and others in management at that time."

J Bridge targets varied from operators of bicycle racetracks and multi-storey car parks, to makers of soybean foods and heavy construction plants.

But in several cases J Bridge’s targets weakened considerably after its participation. Kosugi Sangyo, a maker of golfing wear, filed for bankruptcy in 2009, two years after J Bridge sold its stake. Restaurant operator Tasco System was delisted from the Jasdaq and ceased operation after J Bridge sold out in 2007. Osaka property firm Reicof filed for bankruptcy in 2008.

In 2010, J Bridge acquired a Japanese hospital only to sell it for a loss of about ¥1 billion soon afterwards, saying it was withdrawing from the medical and healthcare business.

Another flop was J Bridge’s 2005 takeover of Singapore building materials maker Rotol.

Masuzawa was installed as chairman and executive director of the company 2007, but J Bridge sold most of its stake in Rotol in 2008 to Mulpha International, and reported a ¥430 million loss on the investment.

Mulpha is a Malaysian conglomerate headed by Lee Seng Huang, who also chairs Sun Hung Kai Financial, an investor in J Bridge/Asia Alliance.

The Singapore Exchange delisted Rotol last year; the company had been on its watch list since 2008 after three years of pre-tax losses.

While Rotol was bleeding money, Masuzawa was building an award-winning house in Singapore’s exclusive marina resort, Sentosa Cove, which has since been sold. A much smaller villa on Ocean Drive is now on the market for S$38 million (¥2.3 billion).

Masuzawa is still “based in Singapore, but he keeps coming to Japan,” according to Takamori. Masuzawa did not respond to an interview request.

Until recently, the top investor in J Bridge was Sun Hung Kai & Co., established in Hong Kong in 1969 as the financial arm of Sun Hung Kai Properties, now the world’s biggest property developer by market value.

Allied Group, the Malaysian conglomerate founded by Lee Ming Tee, in 1996 bought a controlling stake in Sun Hung Kai & Co. from the family of one of the Sun Hung Kai founders. Lee Ming Tee, the father of Sun Hung Kai & Co.’s CEO Lee Seng Huang, was sentenced in Hong Kong in 2004 to one year in jail for falsifying accounts.

Akihiro Nagahara, chairman of Sun Hung Kai & Co. consumer finance subsidiary United Asia Finance, has been a J Bridge board member since 2007. Nagahara, who did not respond to written questions, also chairs the Hong Kong Licensed Money Lenders Association.

Asia Alliance Holdings announced on November 29 a “drastic reconstruction of the company’s management” and a shift to investment opportunities in China, especially in “pre-IPO companies”.

Takamori says Asia Alliance’s top shareholder will be a fund of Malaysian-Chinese investors put together by the company’s next president and CEO, Yoshinori Funato, who is set to be confirmed at an extraordinary general meeting in February. He has worked at Nomura Securities, UBS, and Merrill Lynch in Tokyo.

According to the Asia Alliance website, the chairmanship of the company is to be shared between Yang Zilin, chairman of China Bohai Bank and former head of
the Ex-Im Bank of China and the Hong Kong office of Bank of China, and retired Japanese diplomat Akitane Kiuchi, a former private secretary to the late Kakuei Tanaka, who normalized relations with China in 1972.

Shinsuke Shimada loses suit against Shukan Gendai over gangster coverage

TOKYO (TR) – The Tokyo District Court on Tuesday ruled against former television celebrity Shinsuke Shimada and his agency in a suit filed last year against publisher Kodansha for libel, reports the Sankei Shimbun (Oct. 30).

Agency Yoshimoto Kogyo and the 56-year-old Shimada sought 165 million yen in damages for an article about the former entertainer’s associations with organized crime that appeared in the October 15, 2011 issue of weekly tabloid Shukan Gendai under the headline that read: “Shimada, you are a gangster.”

One claim within the article was that Shimada utilized organized crime members to negotiate real estate transactions.

“The content of the report has high credibility,” said presiding judge Tomonari Honda in offering an explanation for the rejection of the suit by Shimada.


http://www.tokyoreporter.com/2012/10/31/shinsuke-shimada-loses-suit-against-shukan-gendai-over-gangster-coverage/

Yakuza under siege from new zone laws

JAPAN'S mafia - already in turmoil because of strict new local laws - now face the prospect of arrest for even minor offences under new nationwide anti-mob legislation.

The laws came into force yesterday against a backdrop of ongoing violence from members of some yakuza syndicates and embarrassing headlines after a minister in the national government was linked to a leading crime group.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/yakuza-under-siege-from-new-zone-laws/story-e6frg6so-1226506953622

Ministers Falling Due to Yakuza Ties

It was reported last week that the newly appointed Minister of Justice Keishu Tanaka (Democratic Party of Japan) had strong ties to the Japanese mafia. This Thursday, Japan’s respected weekly news magazine, Shukan Bunshun, ran an article on how Japan’s Minister of Finance Koriki Jojima, was supported by a yakuza front company during his election campaign. Minister Tanaka is expected to resign Friday (Japan time). If he does, he’ll be the second Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) appointed cabinet minister since 2009 to resign after exposure of yakuza ties. Not a good thing for the DPJ, which came to power as “the clean party.”

Last Thursday the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho was the first to write that Minister Tanaka had long running ties to the Inagawa-kai. The Inagawa-kai, Japan’s third-largest crime group, was founded as Inagawa-Kogyo circa 1948 and their current headquarters are across the street from the Ritz Carlton Tokyo; they have 10,000 members. According to the police, since 2007 the group has been under the umbrella of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest yakuza group in the country, with 39,000 members. Kazuo Uchibori, the leader of the Inagawa-kai, was arrested this month on money-laundering charges. The Tokyo Prosecutor’s Office (TPO) has not yet decided whether to prosecute him. The TPO is also part of the Ministry of Justice, headed by Mr. Tanaka.

The Shincho article alleges Tanaka has long relied on the support of the Inagawa-kai in his political and business dealings and had participated in many Inagawa-kai events—including serving as a matchmaker (仲人, nakoudo) at the wedding of an underboss. The piece also states that the Inagawa-kai suppressed scandalous rumors about Tanaka’s life, involving a tawdry love affair. The underboss responsible for handling the negative PR matters allegedly told would-be extortionists, “Tanaka was the matchmaker at my wedding. Save my face—forgive and forget about it.”

The Daily Beast spoke with Inagawa-kai members and police officers from Kanagawa Prefecture who confirmed that Tanaka did indeed have strong ties to the Inagawa-kai, until at least two years ago.

Tanaka has admitted to attending Inagawa-kai events in the past, including the wedding, but has denied the rest of the allegations.

Sen. Shoji Nishida who has investigated and written about the ties of some DPJ members to the mob in WILL magazine (November 2011) says, “Tanaka is the 4th DPJ-coalition-appointed minister with yakuza ties. I wonder if they even screen the people they put in cabinet positions. The minister of Justice is supposed to be the watchdog of the law, not a matchmaker for the yakuza. Putting a yakuza associate in charge of Japan’s criminal-justice system ... that’s outrageous. Now I can understand why the Yamaguchi-gumi endorsed their party.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/18/japan-s-justice-minister-to-resign-over-yakuza-ties.html

Yakuza Bosses Found Liable for Damages for Civilian Killing

These days the price of a standard civilian hit-job can run as high as $2 million. That’s not the price to get the job done―that’s the price if one of your underlings gets caught. The whole inflationary spiral started with one dumb yakuza stiffing McDonald’s on the price of a cheeseburger in Kyoto a few years ago.

The Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest organized crime group with 39,000 members and their notorious former underboss Tadamasa Goto (at left, from a 2005 video of a Yamaguchi-gumi celebration) are expected to reach a settlement this month with the family of a civilian killed in 2006. The surviving family members, represented by a group of 25 lawyers, filed the lawsuit last month, asking for ¥187 million in damages, or $2.4 million.

A potential key witness to the murder was extradited from Thailand on Thursday and arrested on the plane back to Japan―on charges of driving without a license―by Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department detectives, who were waiting on the plane. The police also plan to question him about the killing and, of course, his lack of respect for Japan’s rules of the roads.

The arrest has made all parties involved with the murder anxious to sweep the case under the table. Goto, former head of the disbanded Yamaguchi-gumi Goto-gumi, who has never faced any criminal charges for ordering the hit, is desperate to avoid being tried in civil court, and said to be willing to cut a deal. However, it's the current “CEO” of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Shinobu Tsukasa shown at right, who has the most to lose. At the time of the murder, he was in jail on gun possession charges, had no knowledge of the plan, and did not approve it, is not very happy to be cleaning up the mess. He doesn’t want to pay for a crime he didn’t commit or condone. Naturally. The whole thing is bad for business and terrible PR. It really damages the Yamaguchi-gumi corporate brand. And if the lawsuit actually goes to court, it could be a very bad legal precedent for “Yakuza Inc.”

According to those involved with the case and police sources, in 2006 Kazuo Nozaki, a real estate agent, was in a legal dispute with a Goto-gumi front company over the property rights to a building worth ¥2 billion ($26,000,000) in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo. On March 5 of that year, three members of the Goto-gumi waited for Nozaki to walk down a street in Tokyo’s upscale Kita-Aoyama area, and then one allegedly stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife. Of the three assailants, only two have been caught; criminal charges of ordering the hit were never filed against Goto.

The first hearing in the civil suit is tentatively scheduled for this month but sources on both sides say a settlement for the full amount is already being proffered by the Yamaguchi-gumi. A Yamaguchi-gumi middle manager said, “We don’t want this case to go to court. It could set a bad precedent. If this lawsuit were Apple versus Samsung, we’d be Samsung.”

It is an unusual lawsuit. Police sources say it represents the first time Japanese yakuza bosses have been sued for crimes pre-dating the 2008 revisions to the Organized Crime Countermeasures Law (暴力団対策法) which made it possible to hold organized crime bosses responsible for the actions of their underlings in civil court, by essentially recognizing yakuza groups as corporations.


http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/09/its-not-easy-being-yakuza-boss/57384/

Tokyo police chief promotes anti-gang legislation at J-League match

The superintendent general of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department raised a “red card” to criminal organizations on Wednesday evening prior to a J-League cup match, reports the Sankei Shimbun (Aug. 8).

Tateshi Higuchi offered a ceremonial kick of a soccer ball from the sidelines in front of an estimated 10,000 spectators to begin a quarterfinal match of the Yamazaki Nabisco Cup, featuring F.C. Tokyo against Vegalta Sendai, at Ajinomoto Stadium in Chofu City, Tokyo.

Legislation that went into effect on October 1 of last year prohibits business transactions between ordinary citizens and members of organized crime, such as the paying mikajimeryo (protection money). The law is in effect nationwide.

In February, a declaration signed by J-League chairman Kazumi Ohigashi formally indicated that “anti-social forces,” or organized crime syndicates, are banned from associating with the league’s clubs, players, and referees.


http://www.tokyoreporter.com/2012/08/09/tokyo-police-chief-promotes-anti-gang-legislation-at-j-league-match/

Of course, it curious what they make of the owner of J2 team http://www.fcryukyu.com/ Nobuyuki Sakakibara - a colorful character - maybe only a yellow card?

http://www.fightopinion.com/2011/02/08/where-are-they-now-nobuyuki-sakakibara/
http://www.fightopinion.com/2012/03/26/pride-five-years-later/

A short search of the web produces some other interesting background on Nobuyuki Sakakibara's yakuza connections -

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46533478/Miro-Mijatovic-v-Pride-FC-Nobuyuki-Sakakibara-Yamaguchi-Gumi
激突！ ミロ・ミヤトビッチ vs 榊原社長 PRIDE FC 山口 組