My Inspirations

Before I start getting into what I've learned about the Yakuza, I wanted to go into a few of my inspirations. I have a hard time calling myself a yakuza fan. That implies admiration for the people, beliefs, and actions. I'm curious about yakuza. The culture and people are intensely interesting and, well, pretty mysterious.

With the tight stranglehold the yakuza has on the media in Japan, much of what people see is what they want people to see. Movies, fiction, and films rarely depict yakuza negatively. Of course there are always villains, but there's more than one redeemable character. Hell, even the villains are often redeemed at some point.

So, I've been curious for a while about the organizations and everything surrounding them.

What really lit the fire was, of course, a video game. You know which one.

This guy here, with the awesome dragon tat, is my boy Kazuma Kiryu, the main protagonist of the Yakuza series. In Japan, Yakuza is called Ryu ga Gotoku (龍が如く), or Like a Dragon. Presumably because Kiryu is like a dragon in the way he acts and fights. The games, as you'd expect, depict the classic media image of the yakuza. The lonely anti-hero, the relentless badass. The loyal brother, bound by blood. There is literally no one on earth cooler than Kazuma Kiryu. I'll go deeper into the games in a later post. There are pages waiting for you. Pages.

Oddly, the Yakuza games lead directly to the next source of inspiration:

Mr. Jake Adelstein. (check out his site, Japan Subculture Research Center)

My first introduction to Jake Adelstein was his awesome review of Yakuza 3 - as reviewed by real yakuza. This blew my mind. From zero to legit in a few mouse-clicks.

Adelstein is, essentially, what I didn't know I wanted to be when I grew up. Adelstein applied to the Yomiuri Shimbun (a major Japanese newspaper) - via the standard Japanese route, not as an international reporter - and got in, becoming the first American to work as a Japanese-language reporter for a Japanese newspaper.

Adelstein was put on the police beat and over years, developed strong relationships with both police and yakuza. His autobiographical book, Tokyo Vice, was a huge inspiration to me as a former student of the Japanese language, a journalism graduate, AND as someone with an ongoing interest in yakuza culture.

Jake Adelstein is cooler than Kazuma Kiryu, by the way. In 2005, Adelstein uncovered information about one of the heads of Yamaguchi-gumi receiving a liver transplant in America. Investigating further and documenting his findings resulted in Adelstein receiving a notice from some intimidating men in dark suits: "Erase the story or be erased, your family too."

Not that having a contract out on you is cool in real life. It's having the balls to uncover and reveal the information that led to the contract and then maintaining that nerve when it's really tested. Standing up to a man who has potentially hundreds of men at his beck and call.

There have been other things over the years, too. Neuromancer and Shadowrun were many nerds' first introduction to Japanese organized crime. Beat Takeshi's many movies - Sonatine chief among them - are modern yakuza classics.

It isn't the men of the yakuza clans themselves that inspire me, but rather everything about them. How they got to where they are as a group, why they do what they do. Jake and the Yakuza games just helped lead me here.