11 ms·

Goodbye to the Yakuza

148 points by genieyclo 15y ago

thesis 15y ago
Talk about a sensational headline.... goodbye? Give me a break. There will always be organized crime in every country no matter what.
aaronbrethorst 15y ago
My immediate reaction to this is, 'what could possibly go wrong?' > “The new laws will make the price of paying off the yakuza, in loss of face and in penalties, much more expensive than the actual cash payments to the yakuza." So what happens when the yakuza raise the stakes and make it even more costly to not pay them off? (e.g. we'll kill you, your family, etc.)
- archgoon 15y ago
  What sprung to my mind was this article from the economist: http://www.economist.com/node/18652037 http://www.economist.com/node/18652037 The issue is that in India, it's illegal to both accept and give bribes. This prevents bribe givers from 1) blowing the whistle. 2) Admitting to others who want to convict the corrupt official that they gave him bribes. "Kaushik Basu, the chief economic adviser to India’s finance ministry, suggests that this may be partly because the law treats both bribe-giving and bribe-taking as crimes. This makes it hard to blow the whistle on corrupt officials, because the bribe-giver has also broken the law. If he complains, he risks prosecution or, more likely, being asked for another bribe by the police. In a provocative paper based on game theory, Mr Basu argues for the legalisation of some kinds of bribe-giving. His proposal has instigated a furious debate in India, with television channels even assembling panels to discuss it."
  - blahedo 15y ago
    Which is why it's important that they have this policy: > If you go to the police, before they come to you, and tell them that you have been working with the yakuza, the police will exempt you from the ordinance and help you sever relations. i.e. whistleblower protection writ large, at the company level.
    - dlikhten 15y ago
      Yea, otherwise I threaten you "bribe me or die" on camera. I bribe you, you blackmail me with that footage.
  - aculver 15y ago
    I don't think the situation in Japan is really comparable to the situation in India. The huge problem with bribes in India is that the use of bribes is required not when caught up with organized crime groups, but when interacting with the government and local officials to do totally normal things like registering the birth of your child and getting a passport.
    - hkarthik 15y ago
      My cousins and friends from India have explained to me that this is due to a lack of legitimate "fees" for government services that we are accustomed to here in the US. Those extra $10-$25 fees for things like getting a birth certificate are high enough to cover the wages of government workers and therefore discourage the petty bribery that goes on in the third world.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    That's why Japan has the "do tell, and we won't ask" policy. If you admit to giving someone a bribe, you don't get in trouble. If it's found out that you have a bribe later, then you do. So going to the cops is really your only way out.
  - lurker19 15y ago
    If someone refuses to provide a legally required service or threatens to perform an illegal act unless paid, then that payment is evidence of being a victim of extortion or blackmail, not a perpetrator of a bribe. Is the law in India so backward that they call that a bribe?
    - egor83 15y ago
      If someone refuses to provide a legally required service Well, no one refuses outright. Papers get lost suddenly, people forget things, all necessary steps take as long as it is legally possible, you suddenly have to provide tons of papers or references... So you say it'd kill your business if it takes so long? Well, let's discuss it, maybe we can work something out... you know what I mean?
- caseysoftware 15y ago
  'what could possibly go wrong?' I start wondering what happens when other groups fall under the same scrutiny... In the US, the PATRIOT Act was only supposed to apply to terrorism. It turns out that 95+% of the wiretaps, etc have related to drugs.
nhangen 15y ago
More like goodbye to standing a chance as a business owner. So you can't pay for safety, and instead get your windows broken and your kneecaps busted. If you do pay, you become a criminal. Talk about a backwards way of fighting the problem.
patio11 15y ago
Anti-organized crime laws are not exactly new to Japan. Go to any bar, restaurant, or laundry mat, odds are they have a "We don't do business with violent groups" (which means the yakuza) sign up. Anecdotally, their influence has been waning in recent decades, or at least moving from retail level criminality into Chicago-style corruption regarding public works projects. (That aside, I had a bit of a run-in with two of them a few years back while they were painting "Pay us our money or we'll kill you" on a neighbor's house, and I was not left with massive new respect for my local police department as a result of that encounter. Long story short, but you could practically hear "If she hadn't borrowed money and not paid it back then she wouldn't have a yakuza problem now would she" during the middle of my 911 call.)
- donw 15y ago
  To be fair, they're really handling that massive foreigner bicycle-theft problem.
  - patio11 15y ago
    For those of you who were not at the bar and don't understand this in-joke, Ogaki's finest have detained me multiple times on suspicion of stealing my own bicycle. Each time, on getting released, I am reminded that either "the foreigners" or "the Brazilians" are unleashing a biblical plague of bike thefts on Ogaki and that I should be careful to double lock it to avoid becoming the latest victim.
    - blendergasket 15y ago
      That sounds straight out of the novel "The Third Policeman". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Policeman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Policeman
    - gommm 15y ago
      I can't count the number of times a policeman has stopped me during the late evening to check that my bicycle wasn't stolen... But frankly, in Kyoto at least, the problem wasn't stolen bicycle, the problem was that there are no parkings anywhere in the city and so every year you had to expect to have your bike impounded...
zeteo 15y ago
This is confusing a set of legislative measures, aimed at the destruction of an illegal organization, with the attainment of the said result.
kemayo 15y ago
The sheer number of unexplained Japanese words in that article made reading it lightly frustrating. Convenient example: "All yakuza groups have a coat of arms or crest known as a daimon(代紋) that represents the group. The Yamaguchi-gumi daimon is often called hishi-gata because of its shape." Sure, he romanized that last one, but that really didn't make the sentence understandable.
- cdavid 15y ago
  Most Japanese families have a coat of arms. Yamaguchi is the strongest yakuza group (according to wikipedia, it would be around 55000 members), and has a specific daimon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yamabishi.svg.　hishigata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yamabishi.svg.　hishigata means diamond shape.
- roel_v 15y ago
  The next paragraphs explains that sentence (daimon, yamaguchi-dumi). 'hishi-gata' wasn't but from a quick google I understand that it means 'diamond-shaped'. I admit that I found it frustrating as well.
klenwell 15y ago
I'm reminded of that scene in a later season of The Sopranos where a couple of Tony's flunkies pay a visit to the new Starbucks opening on the block for a shakedown and a kid stocking merchandise blows them off saying every last bean is accounted for by corporate and it's out of his hands. The thugs wander out in a daze. Great scene, especially if you wanted to make a case for the benevolent influence of corporations on society. Power to the bean counters!
- lionhearted 15y ago
  Thanks for sharing, that is a great scene. "It's over for the little guy" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxFQYw_MmAA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxFQYw_MmAA
m0nastic 15y ago
I think that's an interesting take on the problem. I don't think there is an equivalent law in the U.S. against paying for "protection", but it might make sense. My dad ran the racket for Boston's Chinatown/Combat Zone in the 70's-80's and it was definitely more acceptable at the time to pay up (as the police weren't interested in what happened there).
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- lurker19 15y ago
  Is your father still alive?
  - m0nastic 15y ago
    Yeah, "retired" in southern California. Why?
    - pontiacred 15y ago
      I think it would be interesting to read about his involvement with the rackets. You could interview him to jog his memory and ask him to write about it. Also I know reddit's IAMA subreddit loves topics like these.
      - m0nastic 15y ago
        I saw him mentioned in a Discovery Channel documentary when I was in High School, which surprised the hell out of me. I don't know how interesting it all is. He basically showed up in the Combat Zone one day and went from place to place telling them they were going to start paying him. The guy they were already paying got disappeared, so they complied. Over time the territory came to include Chinatown (which abuts the Combat Zone), and he eventually got hooked up with the non-Irish mob in Providence (where I guess he was one of their better earners). He also apparently stole a lot of boats (very easy to steal, very hard to track), which when I found out helped explain to me why my grandmother was Admiral of the Quincy Yacht Club without ever owning a boat. The FBI issued an arrest warrant for him the day I was born, so he fled (apparently to California). They seized all my mom's assets (in an effort to get her to cooperate), and tailed her and I everywhere for most of my childhood. He ended up getting arrested back in Boston in the early 90's (A few years ago I worked at the same company as the prosecutor who tried his case, which we both discovered one night drinking at a company off-site...awkward conversation). From what I know, he's now living in Southern California (he had a security consulting company...which I suppose it somewhat serendipitous considering that both my brother and I ended up working in information security). I'm not one of those people who believes that people are "good" or "evil", but if forced to decide one way or the other, my dad falls pretty squarely into the "bad" camp. The thought of him participating in an IAMA on Reddit is about the funniest thing I can think of.
thematt 15y ago
I'm confused by this. I was never under the impression people were paying protection money voluntarily -- I thought it was always so that groups like Yakuza wouldn't come back and break your legs or kill your family. This threat probably won't go away, so the local shopowner is still left with that decision to make...which will he be more afraid of? Yakuza or police? Seeing as how there's only 100 officers to enforce this new law, I'd still be more afraid of the Yakuza.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
mrb 15y ago
I never understood how organized crime can exist in a society as modern as Japan (or most western countries for that matter). Most people are against it, so why doesn't it die off by itself? There is an estimated 100k Yakuza members. Japan has a population of 127M. That's 1 Yakuza member per 1270 inhabitant. How can they seemingly be so prevalent? Most likely the Yakuza phenomenon is exaggerated by the media, and for most people, they are just a thing you hear about on the TV, but that you never see in real life.
- rhizome31 15y ago
  Actually if you go out a bit in Japan, you'll often hear that such place is own by Yakuza or you'll be told that such person is Yakuza. The Japanese are generally quite tolerant with the Yakuza, considering them a normal and distinctive part of their culture, some kind of necessary evil, which is something I never understood.
  - toyg 15y ago
    The key element of yakuza is that it's organized and somewhat predictable. It's violent and illegal, yes, but it's also very formalized and fairly static. Whereas in Western countries criminal cartels are wildly unpredictable, and more often than not involve innocent parties in their squabbles, Yakuza families are very conservative, in a very Eastern way, and value stability above many other things. Inevitably, in large metropolis, you'll have things like red-light districts. These places will be full of people who don't particularly value the rule of law, which means they're going to be hotbed of instability. Policemen have little incentive to risk their neck for prostitutes and various scumbags. In comes the yakuza, and order is guaranteed; nobody will make trouble, and if they do, yakuza will dispatch of them quickly and reliably. Police are happy, less work for them. They also provide easy cash, something hard to come by in a very conservative society where banks often lend money depending on your surname rather than your cashflow. They like finance as much as anybody else. In a society that (in most cases) still values tradition and stability above everything else, yakuza provides these elements to the inevitable "dark underbelly"; as long as they cover that role, rulers are not particularly interested in going after them for a bit of unpaid taxes. Nowadays it's fashionable for mainstream media to bash them because they all need scapegoats for a long-running financial crisis that has no clear culprit (apart from the usual "generalized greed" and "implicit flaws in the capitalist model", but nobody wants to really address those two, of course).
ck2 15y ago
Sounds like they are taking hints from American "law enforcement". It's a heck of a lot easier and cheaper to go after people who cannot defend themselves than the powerful. This is why virtually no-one from wallstreet has been put in prison and corporations have become "people". Once you give police laws like this, they start hitting the innocent little-guys with all the power they have and no-one gets how horrible that is until someday the bystander who says "well if you didn't do anything wrong... blah blah" gets caught in the trap as well. Then it's too late.
scotty79 15y ago
That doesn't work for bribes. Why should it work for racket money?
known 15y ago
Why don' you give autonomy to Yakuza? http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/ http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...

148 points by genieyclo 15y ago

Talk about a sensational headline.... goodbye? Give me a break. There will always be organized crime in every country no matter what.

aaronbrethorst 15y ago

My immediate reaction to this is, 'what could possibly go wrong?' > “The new laws will make the price of paying off the yakuza, in loss of face and in penalties, much more expensive than the actual cash payments to the yakuza." So what happens when the yakuza raise the stakes and make it even more costly to not pay them off? (e.g. we'll kill you, your family, etc.)

archgoon 15y ago
What sprung to my mind was this article from the economist: http://www.economist.com/node/18652037 http://www.economist.com/node/18652037 The issue is that in India, it's illegal to both accept and give bribes. This prevents bribe givers from 1) blowing the whistle. 2) Admitting to others who want to convict the corrupt official that they gave him bribes. "Kaushik Basu, the chief economic adviser to India’s finance ministry, suggests that this may be partly because the law treats both bribe-giving and bribe-taking as crimes. This makes it hard to blow the whistle on corrupt officials, because the bribe-giver has also broken the law. If he complains, he risks prosecution or, more likely, being asked for another bribe by the police. In a provocative paper based on game theory, Mr Basu argues for the legalisation of some kinds of bribe-giving. His proposal has instigated a furious debate in India, with television channels even assembling panels to discuss it."
- blahedo 15y ago
  Which is why it's important that they have this policy: > If you go to the police, before they come to you, and tell them that you have been working with the yakuza, the police will exempt you from the ordinance and help you sever relations. i.e. whistleblower protection writ large, at the company level.
  - dlikhten 15y ago
    Yea, otherwise I threaten you "bribe me or die" on camera. I bribe you, you blackmail me with that footage.
- aculver 15y ago
  I don't think the situation in Japan is really comparable to the situation in India. The huge problem with bribes in India is that the use of bribes is required not when caught up with organized crime groups, but when interacting with the government and local officials to do totally normal things like registering the birth of your child and getting a passport.
  - hkarthik 15y ago
    My cousins and friends from India have explained to me that this is due to a lack of legitimate "fees" for government services that we are accustomed to here in the US. Those extra $10-$25 fees for things like getting a birth certificate are high enough to cover the wages of government workers and therefore discourage the petty bribery that goes on in the third world.
- jrockway 15y ago
  That's why Japan has the "do tell, and we won't ask" policy. If you admit to giving someone a bribe, you don't get in trouble. If it's found out that you have a bribe later, then you do. So going to the cops is really your only way out.
- lurker19 15y ago
  If someone refuses to provide a legally required service or threatens to perform an illegal act unless paid, then that payment is evidence of being a victim of extortion or blackmail, not a perpetrator of a bribe. Is the law in India so backward that they call that a bribe?
  - egor83 15y ago
    If someone refuses to provide a legally required service Well, no one refuses outright. Papers get lost suddenly, people forget things, all necessary steps take as long as it is legally possible, you suddenly have to provide tons of papers or references... So you say it'd kill your business if it takes so long? Well, let's discuss it, maybe we can work something out... you know what I mean?
caseysoftware 15y ago
'what could possibly go wrong?' I start wondering what happens when other groups fall under the same scrutiny... In the US, the PATRIOT Act was only supposed to apply to terrorism. It turns out that 95+% of the wiretaps, etc have related to drugs.

nhangen 15y ago

More like goodbye to standing a chance as a business owner. So you can't pay for safety, and instead get your windows broken and your kneecaps busted. If you do pay, you become a criminal. Talk about a backwards way of fighting the problem.

patio11 15y ago

Anti-organized crime laws are not exactly new to Japan. Go to any bar, restaurant, or laundry mat, odds are they have a "We don't do business with violent groups" (which means the yakuza) sign up. Anecdotally, their influence has been waning in recent decades, or at least moving from retail level criminality into Chicago-style corruption regarding public works projects. (That aside, I had a bit of a run-in with two of them a few years back while they were painting "Pay us our money or we'll kill you" on a neighbor's house, and I was not left with massive new respect for my local police department as a result of that encounter. Long story short, but you could practically hear "If she hadn't borrowed money and not paid it back then she wouldn't have a yakuza problem now would she" during the middle of my 911 call.)

donw 15y ago
To be fair, they're really handling that massive foreigner bicycle-theft problem.
- patio11 15y ago
  For those of you who were not at the bar and don't understand this in-joke, Ogaki's finest have detained me multiple times on suspicion of stealing my own bicycle. Each time, on getting released, I am reminded that either "the foreigners" or "the Brazilians" are unleashing a biblical plague of bike thefts on Ogaki and that I should be careful to double lock it to avoid becoming the latest victim.
  - blendergasket 15y ago
    That sounds straight out of the novel "The Third Policeman". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Policeman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Policeman
  - gommm 15y ago
    I can't count the number of times a policeman has stopped me during the late evening to check that my bicycle wasn't stolen... But frankly, in Kyoto at least, the problem wasn't stolen bicycle, the problem was that there are no parkings anywhere in the city and so every year you had to expect to have your bike impounded...

zeteo 15y ago

This is confusing a set of legislative measures, aimed at the destruction of an illegal organization, with the attainment of the said result.

kemayo 15y ago

The sheer number of unexplained Japanese words in that article made reading it lightly frustrating. Convenient example: "All yakuza groups have a coat of arms or crest known as a daimon(代紋) that represents the group. The Yamaguchi-gumi daimon is often called hishi-gata because of its shape." Sure, he romanized that last one, but that really didn't make the sentence understandable.

cdavid 15y ago
Most Japanese families have a coat of arms. Yamaguchi is the strongest yakuza group (according to wikipedia, it would be around 55000 members), and has a specific daimon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yamabishi.svg.　hishigata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yamabishi.svg.　hishigata means diamond shape.
roel_v 15y ago
The next paragraphs explains that sentence (daimon, yamaguchi-dumi). 'hishi-gata' wasn't but from a quick google I understand that it means 'diamond-shaped'. I admit that I found it frustrating as well.

klenwell 15y ago

I'm reminded of that scene in a later season of The Sopranos where a couple of Tony's flunkies pay a visit to the new Starbucks opening on the block for a shakedown and a kid stocking merchandise blows them off saying every last bean is accounted for by corporate and it's out of his hands. The thugs wander out in a daze. Great scene, especially if you wanted to make a case for the benevolent influence of corporations on society. Power to the bean counters!

lionhearted 15y ago
Thanks for sharing, that is a great scene. "It's over for the little guy" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxFQYw_MmAA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxFQYw_MmAA

m0nastic 15y ago

I think that's an interesting take on the problem. I don't think there is an equivalent law in the U.S. against paying for "protection", but it might make sense. My dad ran the racket for Boston's Chinatown/Combat Zone in the 70's-80's and it was definitely more acceptable at the time to pay up (as the police weren't interested in what happened there).

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
lurker19 15y ago
Is your father still alive?
- m0nastic 15y ago
  Yeah, "retired" in southern California. Why?
  - pontiacred 15y ago
    I think it would be interesting to read about his involvement with the rackets. You could interview him to jog his memory and ask him to write about it. Also I know reddit's IAMA subreddit loves topics like these.
    - m0nastic 15y ago
      I saw him mentioned in a Discovery Channel documentary when I was in High School, which surprised the hell out of me. I don't know how interesting it all is. He basically showed up in the Combat Zone one day and went from place to place telling them they were going to start paying him. The guy they were already paying got disappeared, so they complied. Over time the territory came to include Chinatown (which abuts the Combat Zone), and he eventually got hooked up with the non-Irish mob in Providence (where I guess he was one of their better earners). He also apparently stole a lot of boats (very easy to steal, very hard to track), which when I found out helped explain to me why my grandmother was Admiral of the Quincy Yacht Club without ever owning a boat. The FBI issued an arrest warrant for him the day I was born, so he fled (apparently to California). They seized all my mom's assets (in an effort to get her to cooperate), and tailed her and I everywhere for most of my childhood. He ended up getting arrested back in Boston in the early 90's (A few years ago I worked at the same company as the prosecutor who tried his case, which we both discovered one night drinking at a company off-site...awkward conversation). From what I know, he's now living in Southern California (he had a security consulting company...which I suppose it somewhat serendipitous considering that both my brother and I ended up working in information security). I'm not one of those people who believes that people are "good" or "evil", but if forced to decide one way or the other, my dad falls pretty squarely into the "bad" camp. The thought of him participating in an IAMA on Reddit is about the funniest thing I can think of.

thematt 15y ago

I'm confused by this. I was never under the impression people were paying protection money voluntarily -- I thought it was always so that groups like Yakuza wouldn't come back and break your legs or kill your family. This threat probably won't go away, so the local shopowner is still left with that decision to make...which will he be more afraid of? Yakuza or police? Seeing as how there's only 100 officers to enforce this new law, I'd still be more afraid of the Yakuza.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

mrb 15y ago

I never understood how organized crime can exist in a society as modern as Japan (or most western countries for that matter). Most people are against it, so why doesn't it die off by itself? There is an estimated 100k Yakuza members. Japan has a population of 127M. That's 1 Yakuza member per 1270 inhabitant. How can they seemingly be so prevalent? Most likely the Yakuza phenomenon is exaggerated by the media, and for most people, they are just a thing you hear about on the TV, but that you never see in real life.

rhizome31 15y ago
Actually if you go out a bit in Japan, you'll often hear that such place is own by Yakuza or you'll be told that such person is Yakuza. The Japanese are generally quite tolerant with the Yakuza, considering them a normal and distinctive part of their culture, some kind of necessary evil, which is something I never understood.
- toyg 15y ago
  The key element of yakuza is that it's organized and somewhat predictable. It's violent and illegal, yes, but it's also very formalized and fairly static. Whereas in Western countries criminal cartels are wildly unpredictable, and more often than not involve innocent parties in their squabbles, Yakuza families are very conservative, in a very Eastern way, and value stability above many other things. Inevitably, in large metropolis, you'll have things like red-light districts. These places will be full of people who don't particularly value the rule of law, which means they're going to be hotbed of instability. Policemen have little incentive to risk their neck for prostitutes and various scumbags. In comes the yakuza, and order is guaranteed; nobody will make trouble, and if they do, yakuza will dispatch of them quickly and reliably. Police are happy, less work for them. They also provide easy cash, something hard to come by in a very conservative society where banks often lend money depending on your surname rather than your cashflow. They like finance as much as anybody else. In a society that (in most cases) still values tradition and stability above everything else, yakuza provides these elements to the inevitable "dark underbelly"; as long as they cover that role, rulers are not particularly interested in going after them for a bit of unpaid taxes. Nowadays it's fashionable for mainstream media to bash them because they all need scapegoats for a long-running financial crisis that has no clear culprit (apart from the usual "generalized greed" and "implicit flaws in the capitalist model", but nobody wants to really address those two, of course).

ck2 15y ago

Sounds like they are taking hints from American "law enforcement". It's a heck of a lot easier and cheaper to go after people who cannot defend themselves than the powerful. This is why virtually no-one from wallstreet has been put in prison and corporations have become "people". Once you give police laws like this, they start hitting the innocent little-guys with all the power they have and no-one gets how horrible that is until someday the bystander who says "well if you didn't do anything wrong... blah blah" gets caught in the trap as well. Then it's too late.

scotty79 15y ago

That doesn't work for bribes. Why should it work for racket money?

known 15y ago

Why don' you give autonomy to Yakuza? http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/ http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...