This is tangentially related but fascinating. A terrific movie called Minbo came out in Japan thirty or so years ago. It's about the Yakuza and not very flattering. The director was stabbed at the premier. Then, later, died of suicide in very suspicious circumstances.
A former member of the Goto-gumi recounted the murder as follows: "We set it up to stage his murder as a suicide. We dragged him up to the rooftop and put a gun in his face. We gave him a choice: jump and you might live or stay and we'll blow your face off. He jumped. He didn't live."
You can watch a fictional(ized?) series (Tokyo Vice) about and produced by the author Jake Adelstein on HBO. I’ve watched the first season, season 2 recently released.
That's not really an endorsement: to a first approximation, Adelstein is full of shit when it comes to all things Yakuza. He's made a career out of claiming they're super powerful and pulling strings across Japanese society, when all actual evidence indicates that they're weaker than ever and declining.
I'd be interested in reading more about the evidence.
I just watched the show and though I'm sure it's got quite a bit of embellishment, anything I've read in the past made the yakuza out to be about the level they're shown in the show (have some power within their local communities, but not much in government unless they can blackmail someone via prostitution or otherwise).
The Yakuza, weirdly, operate semi-publicly so their headquarters, hierarchies, and membership numbers are well known. In the early 90s there were close to 100,000 members, now there's probably under 20k.
His problems with National Geographic are telling... the same year he's unable to produce any connections for their show, he's got close enough connections to "high-ranking gangster bosses" to write an article where he purportedly has them play and discuss the video game Yakuza 3:
(side note: this article describes him playing this game with these guys "one Thursday afternoon," having a teenager teach them to play a video game, having three separate people play this single-player game while discussing it, one of whom finishes it despite an average main story playtime of over 16 hours)
Come on man, they're baked into the alliance that was chosen by the American occupation to rule post-War Japan. They're far from irrelevant to anyone who wants to understand modern Japan. If you don't like Adelstein's brand the Kaplan/Dubro book is good but at this point dated. Either way, they're endemic in construction, entertainment, and lending and still have meaningful political links.
> A memoir (/ˈmɛm.wɑːr/; from French mémoire [me.mwaʁ], from Latin memoria 'memory, remembrance') is any nonfiction narrative writing based on the author's personal memories. The assertions made in the work are thus understood to be factual.
Any work of nonfiction will end up with some inaccuracies and a form based on one person's memories may be especially prone to this. But if he's outright deliberately fictionalizing events (not saying he is, necessarily), that's a big mark against the work. I mean that's exactly what got James Frey castigated on TV and made persona non grata.
There is a subplot about these magazines in the show. It’s unclear how accurate the show itself is, but the basic concept of yakuza mags is covered accurately.
As mentioned in several other comments, the numbers of yakuza members have reduced significantly in the 25 years since this article was published.
An often unmentioned aspect of these gangs is that many people end up in them due to the ongoing discrimination against Japanese people of buraku descent:
The buraku are not genetically distinct from other yamato Japanese, they were just stigmatized due to buddhist concepts of "impurity", and an effort to replicate the "untouchable" practices of India while importing buddhism.
As such, in the modern world, they often had little other opportunity in life outside of yakuza membership.
Many yakuza practices are violent and abusive, and I don't want to offer any apologetics for those practices. But like a lot of discussion of crime, the root cause (mostly poverty) is often overlooked, and the elimination of poverty and lack of opportunity downplayed as a possible solution.
Related, "Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan" by by Jake Adelstein is absolutely fascinating. So too is the drama produced by HBO based on the book, but I am partial to the book. Adelstein becomes friendly with the Yakuza and comes to understand them. Very eye opening.
We now know that mafias are endorsed by the (deep) state.
This is after the situation in Salvador where the government has apparently jailed every single gang member and murder rates fell to average Latin American rates.
If Japan wanted Yakuza to go they would just put all of them behind bars.
>Myway Publishing is ceasing publication of Gekkan Jitsuwa Document, a monthly tabloid that covers (and caters to) Japan’s organized crime members. The last issue (May) will hit newsstands on March 29. (2017)
I really hate that people glorificate ilegal activity. I'm from Mexico and now we've a big problem with Cartels, people can't work because cartels extortion them, and now they commit terrorist acts to civilian towns with dronebombs. That's not cool, but in Mexico there are also Narco corridos, that glorificates narcotrafic. It sucks, there are no place for criminal in a civilized country. They have to be hated not loved.
Japan is just about the least likely country to glorify illegal activity there is. I'm not sure they'd even understand the concept half the time.
It's a problem for their soft power because it means they can't do any of the cool music genres. How can you have metal bands or rappers if none of them are allowed to do drugs or commit any crimes?
(If there's a hint any musician knows what a marijuana leaf might look like they and all their work get instantly deleted entirely from society. Although they do let music producers sexually abuse all the talents they can get their hands on.)
> How can you have metal bands or rappers if none of them are allowed to do drugs or commit any crimes?
Drugs and crime aren't really in the metal imagery, I'm not convinced it's the explanation (also I don't think metal culture has ever really been significant soft power, always been too niche)
Japan has rock. The have punk. They have metal. They have rap. They have deathcore. Go through the list. Look up fucking Hanatarash. Take ten minutes to Google. They have everything.
You don't need "sex drugs and rock and roll," you just need an appreciation for the culture and a sense of alienation and rage against an oppressive system. Which, despite your belief that Japanese people cannot even comprehend the concept of illegal activity or rebellion, they do have. You need to stop looking at people and cultures in terms of reductionist stereotypes.
I am not really a fan of either rap or metal, but Japan has a very healthy scene of musicians in both genres. You don't have to commit crimes to do music.
I think that's facile and actually downplays Fascism: It fits only if you drop so much detail that it's no better than saying "Crime Gangs are Feudalism" or even "Crime Gangs are Government".
While there may be a subset of gangs which also have Fascist ideologies, I don't see how one could claim all gangs express stuff like (among other definitions) palingenetic ultranationalism.
Fascist ideology, or goal is that we should be governed by a hierarchical power-structure not elected by democratic elections.
I believe most crime gangs fit that description.
On the other side groups who explicitly identify themselves as Fascist or Neo-Nazi etc. don't really differ from criminal gangs much. They have similar goals: Rule by the Boss, not restricted by any laws or elections.
I never found where my extreme dislike came from, now I know. They are organisations whose purpose is to destroy the individual by violence to propel a hierarchy with a single individual at the top. Even the fake conservatism is there, which can also be visible in Mexican drug cartels. A pox on them all.
I mean, that's literally how Hitler got his start in politics.
A disturbingly large number of criminal organizations form on racial lines and hold explicit racial supremacist views. There's white supremacists, black supremacists[0], MS-13, and so on. Religious divisions are also fertile soil for crime; that's how you get all the Islamofascist terrorists[1] like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and so on. We don't usually think of any of these groups actually becoming the government, but it's entirely possible for this to happen (e.g. with the Taliban).
Going the other way you have police organizations like NYPD, LAPD, or LASD that are exercising sovereign power without oversight. They aren't explicitly racist, but are easily infiltrated by white supremacists who are part of gangs. In the case of the LASD, they have so many gangs in them there's a dedicated Wikipedia page for it[2].
It's easy to miss out on this because, for the most part, gangs are the Scary Other that your local white supremacist is using to make racial minorities look more threatening. That's because fascists have two kinds of enemies: their stated enemies - i.e. other races; and their de facto enemies - i.e. liberals who don't want a perpetual race war. Fascists will shout and scream about MS-13 or Islamists by day, while breaking bread with them by night. Because they are ultimately plotting the same thing: how to steal your money, your livelihood, your freedom, and your life.
[0] I have a friend who calls Louis Farrakhan "Blitler".
[1] Christofascist terrorism is not a matter of if, but when.
Great post, though I am somewhat puzzled by the omission of self proclaimed "liberals" that somehow managed to infest much of the web. They are pretty much an exact replica of what we usually call fascists. It's likely that both groups are operated by the same forces.
America is a liberal nation. Almost every political philosophy has to rephrase itself in terms of liberty in order to get a foothold here.
Depending on the political context, you could be describing anyone from tankies[0] to ancaps to Black Lives Matter. The only commonality between them is that they all used Twitter at one point, a microblogging platform with a hilariously toxic userbase for the amount of attention the media gave it.
I shouldn't have to say this, but being toxic doesn't make you a fascist. Furthermore, political disagreements tend to be self-perpetuating in ways that look like coordination from far away.
[0] Who will insist they aren't liberals, but America doesn't use that definition of "liberal"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minbo
All his movies were terrific.