Yakuza - The Unlucky Hand
“The Japanese semi-legal chivalrous mafia.”
The Yakuza is a Japanese mafia-like, gang community derived from the Samurai. Their name literally translates to the numbers 8 (ya), 9 (ku) and 3 (za), which are considered the unluckiest hand in a Japanese gambling game when combined, and so the name symbolises being unlucky or good for nothing.
These criminal organisations can be identified by their body tattoos, which is why tattoos are stigmatised in Japan to this day, and they normally hide their illegal businesses by owning legal, cover-up businesses such as restaurants, bars, talent agencies, factories and more.
Their community is close-knitted, with a blood-oath of alliance (besides the killing of a rooster and the thirty-six oaths that recruits recite) connecting them in a family-like structure of oyabun and kobun; parent and child. One of their rituals is, when someone breaks their code, the kobun would cut off their pinky finger with a sword and hands it to the oyabun, however, this ritual is dying with time and modernization.
The Yakuza started by doing all sorts of crimes, from drug-trafficking and prostitution to smuggling and loan sharking but, currently, they are into white-collar crimes only. And, though their ways are deemed evil by the majority of the population, they consider themselves chivalrous as a lot of their causes and intentions are good; they have helped those affected by the Kōbe earthquake of 1995 and 2011’s earthquake and tsunami.
Moreover, their work is normally overlooked by the government and they are sometimes asked by Japanese police agencies to help at events with security and whatnot (like when they were supposed to protect the US President, Eisenhower, during his visit to Japan when the people were against the Japan-America Security Treaty), making it legal to be a member of the Yakuza. As a result, in a lot of media portrayals of them, they are shown as a necessary evil, the underdogs or even as the protagonists. Early 21st-century studies have even shown that they were the least murderous criminal group worldwide and that their numbers have severely declined to 80K from 184K in the early 1960s.
The biggest and most dominant Yakuza organization is Yamaguchi-Gumi and, as a result, its founder, Harukichi Yamaguchi, is considered a hero figure in the Yakuza community, nevertheless, the “Godfather of Godfathers” or ”The Japanese Godfather” of Yakuza is Kazuo Taoka (or Kuma, meaning bear in Japanese), the third oyabun of Yamaguchi-gumi, as he had restored the gang post-WWII.
References:
- Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2020. Taoka Kazuo. [online] Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Taoka-Kazuo> [Accessed 14 October 2020].
- Kaplan, D. and Dubro, A., 2003. Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld, Expanded Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 8-9. [4]
- Hill, P., 2006. The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law, And The State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.55.
- Ray, M., 2020. Yakuza | History And Rituals. [online] Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: <www.britannica.com/topic/yakuza> [Accessed 14 October 2020].