February 2012 Archives

Easily the most recognizable and dramatic visual associated with Japanese organized crime is the irezumi (Japanese traditional tattoo) many yakuza adorn their bodies with. These colorful, elaborate tattoos should be impressive to anyone who has ever been poked with a sharp stick, because that's what happens thousands of times to make the tattoos materialize. In Peter B.E. Hill's The Japanese Mafia, it is stated that in the 1970s and 1980s, 70% of yakuza had extensive tattooing, and that statistic held true regardless of rank within the group.

Irezumi is the traditional Japanese style, which is done by a trained tattoo artist (who previously apprenticed with a master), by hand. That means no buzzing needle machine-gun to speed things up, just manual tools. It's quite painful compared to regular tattooing. While my life-goal of avoiding intentional contact with sharp things that leave permanent marks prevents me from getting a tattoo, I'd be curious to feel for myself just what it is so many men and women, yakuza or not, have taken part in. Large tattoos can take years of weekly visits and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

But why are they such a big deal for yakuza?

Much of it comes from the way Japanese culture views tattooing overall. For a long time, tattooing was a form of punishment in Japan. Convicted criminals were tattooed with rings on their arms to permanently mark them as such. Tattooing has even been outlawed at times in Japanese history, associating them directly with criminality.

Tattoos, for yakuza, serve a number of purposes. Such extensive tattooing shows a long-term commitment to the gang. If you're willing to cover your body in ink, you're in the yakuza life for the long-haul. It's a pain-tolerance thing, too. Only a Real Man can tolerate the pain of traditional tattooing. Here's a picture of a woman with extensive tattooing to balance out that silly statement (Shoko Tendo, author of autobiography Yakuza Moon).

The reasons for yakuza tattoos really aren't that different from the tattoos associated with American gangs. Branding yourself as an outcast, tolerating the pain and spending the money to show commitment are part of the package in both cases.

Irezumi tattooing, though, does have the benefit of being a lot more artistic. While many American tattoos seem to inspire a bit of disgust, irezumi tattoos are awe-inspiring. Instead of gothic lettering or a photo-realistic face or something like that, Japanese culture, history, and myth provide the source material for irezumi tattoos. Imagery of samurai, geisha, dragons and more populate the backs of yakuza (and tattoo enthusiasts brave enough to take on the pain and ostracism should their secret come to light). The traditional imagery has its own meanings for the wearers. Power, good luck, wisdom, endurance and other lofty ideas can factor in. It matches up well with the traditional yakuza political stance of emperor-worship and reverence for their own (self-professed) history as noble outlaws descended from the men who protected townspeople from abusive samurai.

Despite the artistry and tradition of both the tattoo artists and the tattoos themselves, they still have that criminal association. As such, they aren't something the "common folk" like seeing around their establishments. Japanese public baths have signs up specifically prohibiting customers with tattoos from entry. With the way Japanese police are cracking down on yakuza lately, yakuza might just heed those signs now.

As a side note, I'd recommend that if you're an American in Japan with heavy tattooing, consider covering it up. Wear long sleeves, turtlenecks, etc. where possible. It'll make interactions with businesses and general people a little less tense.

There are also some interesting side effects to these massive tattoos. In Jake Adelstein's Tokyo Vice, he writes about some of them. A woman who'd slept next to yakuza characterized the skin as being reptilian; pleasant to sleep next to in the summer, but chilling in the winter. Additionally, according to Adelstein, it seems that having such a huge portion of skin covered in ink, which affects sweating, also affects the liver. Because the body can't get rid of toxins as efficiently, the liver has to work harder. Liver failure can apparently be linked to these tattoos. Peter Hill corroborates Adelstein's claim; however, the liver damage is attributed to the pigments used by traditional irezumi artists, rather than difficulty sweating. I suspect both play their own roles.

For more information about irezumi, here are a few good resources worth checking out:

An interview with Horiyoshi III, one of the most well-known irezumi artists. Interestingly, he differentiates between tattoos and irezumi, which literally means tattoo. Important distinction, or old-fart grumping about kids?

Horiyoshi's personal homepage, with an extensive gallery of his work.

The wikipedia page on irezumi, for some of the basics.

A basic guide on the meanings of some of the commonly-found symbols used in irezumi. I can't vouch for these being 100% accurate but it's pretty good overall for a topic that's pretty hard to research in English.

If I missed anything notable, let me know. I'm always looking to expand articles like this one.

Despite the yakuza being one of the most open crime cultures in the world, its members are generally pretty tight-lipped. Detailed first-person narrative of a yakuza member's experience isn't terribly common in Japanese and less-so in English (though I'd love to read Goto-gumi boss Tadamasa Goto's memoir, however accurate it may or may not be).

Confessions of a Yakuza is just that - a detailed first-person narrative of one yakuza's experience as part of Japan's underworld. However, it might not be quite what people are expecting. My first though was that I might've named it "A Gambler's Life," or something like that. Reading afterward, I discovered that the original English title was "A Gambler's Tale," and the Japanese title (浅草博徒一代) translates roughly to "Biography of an Asakusa Gambler." Giving credit to the publisher, though, I might not have found it for my research under that title. The story comes from Dr. Junichi Saga's conversations with Eiji Ichiji, a dying yakuza boss. Ichiji details his teenage years and entry into the yakuza through the war and up until his post-war retirement, covering about 50 years' time.

The yakuza that Ichiji is a part of is the more traditional yakuza; the ones the movies put on pedestals. The yakuza of today aren't so much like the guys of old. Ichiji and his group were traditional bakuto yakuza - gamblers. They ran gambling games and looked out for their district in Tokyo. Loansharking and other ventures were not only not in their wheelhouse, they were considered anathema. If you were a yakuza and you were shaking down civilians for money or selling meth, then you weren't considered a yakuza at all.

The story isn't exactly rife with dark shadows, either. There's not a whole lot to confess. In fact, it's more like a lesson in the Japanese concept of saving face. The games Ichiji ran were clean, because dirty games would ruin the group's reputation with customers and attract attention from cops. Instead, if someone playing lost all their money, they might be sent away with enough money for a ride home and a small gift. Imagine a casino doing that, these days! When one of Ichiji's men was caught urinating on shop signs, Ichiji would go around apologizing for it. The yakuza in those days performed a delicate balancing act that required a lot of humility when interacting with the towns, civilians, and law enforcement and a strong even hand when working with other yakuza.

The worst of it is really a few affairs on Ichiji's part and being too close to some much shadier people. If Ichiji's story is accurate, then he was a pretty nice guy considering he spent a fair portion of his life as a yakuza boss. The affairs, I think, were something more acceptable in his time and in some cases his wife at the time didn't even seem to mind. Ichiji killed a man once, in self-defense, and had a few rounds in the Japanese prison system, more for just being in the wrong place at the right time than for anything truly terrible. Neither of his yubitsume (finger severing) had to do with anything within the yakuza, but rather for love of a woman.

It is interesting, though, to read about these traditional yakuza. Guys like Ichiji are the ones that the older yakuza of today still look up to. They lived outside society, but acted generally with honor and respect. While I would never describe yakuza of today as cool, I can see why someone might think this guy was. Ichiji, really, was on his way out just as the new yakuza were starting to pop up. Yakuza members picked up a lot of their fashion sense at the time from American gangster films in the 50s and 60s. Drug trafficking and real estate entered the scene in the 70s and 80s.

It's worth noting that Japan isn't exactly a tell-all culture. It's possible that, despite being on his deathbed and having nothing to lose, Ichiji whitewashed small or even large parts of his story. Making older yakuza look good or newer yakuza bad, or even just leaving out the ugly parts to keep himself from looking bad. It's impossible to say, but worth thinking about.

One anecdote that sticks out, though, is a graphic (unusually so, for this book) description of a treatment for syphilis. It involves a spoon, let's just say that.

Confessions of a Yakuza is interesting from a historical perspective, and helps put some perspective on where the yakuza today come from. It's good, easy reading. I would even say pairing this with say, Battles Without Honor or Humanity, gives a good timeline of modern Yakuza. Romanticized, of course, but with many grains of truth throughout.

Again, possible SPOILERS below.

There are many, many Japanese films about the yakuza, and it seems like all the notable ones break away from the norm in some way or another, instead of being just a really good genre film. Battles Without Honor and Humanity (Jingi Naki Tatakai, henceforth referred to as Battles) is considered by many to be the Japanese answer to Scorsese's Godfather films. Battles is the first of five movies in the Yakuza Papers series directed by Kinji Fukusaku (Best known in recent years for Battle Royale).

Battles takes us back to 1947, just after the war. Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) is a recently demobilized soldier dumped into the chaotic world of post-war Japan. The country he was fighting for is in ruins; without the black market, there would be no market. After a run-in with US soldiers trying to rape a Japanese woman, and a very bloody encounter with some out-of-control gangsters, Hirono finds himself behind bars with a yakuza named Wakasugi from the Doi gang, with whom he exchanged blood vows, effectively joining the yakuza world. Wakasugi gets out with an intentionally botched suicide attempt and Hirono walks out the front gates a while later met by his old friends, who have now joined the Yamamori gang.

Things get complicated from here. Both Hirono's gang and his blood brother Wakasugi's gang are involved in a political battle that pits the gangs directly against each other. Hirono ends up in jail again and Wakasugi is betrayed. Hirono comes out of the slammer to a world of much cooler suits and bigger sunglasses. Gangs have gotten meaner and are starting to move out of the small worlds of gambling and water trade. Drugs like the ever-present Shabu (Meth) now account for a notable segment of yakuza income.

A conflict between Yamamori and one of his top men, Sakai, erupts when Yamamori forbids his men from selling drugs only to profit off drug sales himself. Hirono is caught in the middle between warring gang brothers as the body count rises.

Stylistically, Battles couldn't be more different from the last film I talked about, Sonatine. Where Sonatine was a meditation on life and death, Battles is a faux-documentary of chaos. Violent, chaotic fights erupt left and right. Where death was sudden and powerful in Sonatine, it's unavoidable and messy in Battles. Admittedly, the deaths can be a bit over-the-top. Blood is red as ketchup and weirdly unrealistic in a movie filmed like a documentary. Handheld cameras dive into the chaos and the death of a main character is followed by on-screen text displaying the victim's name and year of death to further cement the documentary feel. The film is, after all based on a series of news articles about a real gangster, so a documentary style makes sense.

Battles is a bit closer thematically than Sonatine to the traditional yakuza film, I think. The main characters are noble outlaws and the antagonists are sniveling twits. In the end, the main character has to choose between duty to the gang and saving face for his dead blood brother, who is being given an "honorable yakuza funeral" after being dishonorably gunned down.

There's a lot of great yakuza-related content to pick up on in the movie, though. The handling of the yubitsume (pinky cutting) ritual feels realistic in a darkly funny way when Hirono cuts his finger off and is dismayed to raise his hand and find the severed digit missing. The evolution of the yakuza from gamblers and right-wingers to drug dealers and boat race moguls is ripped right out of yakuza history as well. Philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa was, like Yoshio Kodama, a kuromaku and powerbroker. He basically created the motorboat racing business from smoke and even had laws passed (read: bribed them through parliament) allowing gambling related to the sport. While not quite a yakuza, he kept yakuza company and wasn't far off himself.

The saddest part about Battles is that it, along with the other Yakuza Papers films, is out of print. Hopefully some of these films will see re-release on Blu-ray, as they certainly deserve it.

I added a page to my blog today of useful Yakuza-related words for anyone reading about or studying the yakuza. I tried to include both terms directly related and some of the words you might run into during reading. If you can think of a term I missed, let me know!

The Yakuza Glossary

SPOILERS FOR A 19-YEAR-OLD MOVIE BELOW.

If you want to get into Japanese film and especially yakuza movies, there's hardly a better place to start than "Beat" Takeshi Kitano's movies. He's one of the most interesting directors to come out of Japan and one of the best.

Kitano's 1993 film Sonatine is one of his best and the first one to hit US shores. Before Kitano's take on the genre, most yakuza films-even the best ones-had followed a bit of a formula. They were always about a strong, manly hero choosing between his duty to his oyabun (boss/father-figure) and family, and doing the right thing as fits his personal code. This idea is called giri-ninjo, and it is the conceptual thread that connects most yakuza movies. With Sonatine (and to a degree, Violent Cop and Hana-bi), Kitano uses the yakuza characters as a way to stare death in the face. Sonatine is a stark film of bright light and absolute darkness with long, quite camera shots punctuated with sharp bursts of violence.

Sonatine introduces us to Murakawa (played by Kitano), a yakuza man who runs his neighborhood tightly and efficiently. In one of the first scenes, Murakawa and his cronies dip a man into Tokyo Bay for flippantly refusing to pay protection money. They look on casually as the man drowns. Murakawa's neighborhood is profitable and his oyabun wants a piece of the action. Murakawa finds himself sent down south to Okinawa to help out another gang in a turf war going on. Murakawa knows it's no good, but gang law obligates him to follow orders.

Having introduced us to Murakawa himself and to the basics of yakuza culture, Sonatine takes an interesting turn. The trip proves to be exactly what Murakawa already knew, and after losing a few of his men he and the survivors retreat to a beachside cabin in Okinawa to wait out the war and figure out what to do next. Knowing they're in a no-win situation, though, the men actually relax. This part of the film feels a bit like "Yakuza Purgatory," where the men aren't dead but aren't considered alive either.

So they play. They play on the beach, with action figures, folded paper sumo. In one sequence they have a mock gang-war with fireworks. I get the impression, from watching movies like Blue Spring (Aoi Haru) and the documentary Young Yakuza (available online free!), that most men enter the yakuza as they finish high school. As the men in Sonatine play, they look more like boys. Practical jokes and simple childrens' toys - albeit more dangerous versions of them - are the what they think of to entertain themselves. When yakuza are out of their element, with their guard taken down, do they become boys again? I think that's what Sonatine suggests.

Much of the childishness has a dark tinge to it, though, and much of that darkness is contributed by the already-dead Murakawa. The men play rock-paper-scissors (janken) and Murakawa brings a revolver that supposedly has one round left. Again, the men are playing with fireworks-already dangerous enough-and there's Murakawa firing pistol rounds. He never intends to hit anyone, but it still adds that same deadly flavor to the games.

Purgatory, even as bright green and blue as an Okinawan beach, doesn't last forever. Someone sends a hitman to take care of the ones that made it out of the city. Murakawa explodes in the way only a Kitano character can, resulting in some of the most startling violence I've seen in a movie.

This is where we come back around to giri and ninjo. Except, I think, giri (the word for duty or obligation) and ninjo (the word for personal feelings/empathy) have merged here. Murakawa's so-called family has betrayed him and left him to die, and his only duty is to his brothers in arms. With an American assault rifle in hand, Murakawa hits the lights and pays his oyabun-and a bunch of other bosses-a visit. Where earlier violence was vivid and graphic, the greatest outburst is viewed from outside, as the muzzle flashes reflect off the cars below the darkened picture floor-to-ceiling windows.

Once he's taken care of business, there's only one thing left for Murakawa to do.

Sonatine, despite being about a bunch of criminals, is a terribly sad, somber movie. It has plenty of laughs, but they come from that Yakuza Purgatory, and are all colored with the sadness that permeates the film.

Not only is Sonatine one of Kitano's best, but in my opinion one of Japan's best. I haven't seen enough yakuza films to say it's the best of those, but I have no doubt it stands near the top.

*NOTE: Sonatine is now on Netflix Instant watch! Don't miss it!

Note: I read this book some months ago, so apologies to Mr. Adelstein and the readers for any inaccuracies in the text.

Compared to Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld, Jake Adelstein's Tokyo Vice is no less factual, but it's a lot more exciting and a great introduction to the yakuza culture through the eyes of an American reporter in Japan.

Not just any American reporter, though. Adelstein isn't a correspondent for the Times or NBC or something like that. After studying abroad in Japan during college, Adelstein applied to one of Japan's major newspapers, the Yomiuri Shimbun, not as an English-language writer but as a member of the Japanese staff. No-one had done this before, but that didn't deter Adelstein, who passed all the entrance examinations and interviews (and even outperforming some of the Japanese-born applicants on the Japanese-language section!) and became a full employee of the paper.

Adelstein was assigned to the crime beat of the paper where he started to make valuable friends on both sides of the law. This is something I imagine could never happen in America. Sometimes documentaries get into a gang or some other group for a bit, but in a land where the criminal organizations have perfectly legal offices and business cards, it's possible to make long-time friends with an individual here and there.

The book is interesting enough as a piece about a curiosity like Adelstein, but it really turns on when his reporting on the sex trade in Japan shines a bright light on the world of human trafficking by the Yakuza. Hostess bars, pink salons, strip clubs and whatever else get a good boost out of having a sexy, blonde white woman to advertise. Unfortunately, there aren't as many willing to do the work as the owners might like, so ads indicating wealth and an easy life end up in front of the eyes of young women in eastern Europe and even, to a degree, America. The girls are flown to Japan on the agency's bill only to find out that they're expected to pay back the fee for the flight - and the hotel, food, paperwork, and whatever else - with interest.

The final twist, the big one for Jake, comes when he gets a tip about a yakuza boss getting an organ transplant in the United States. This kind of thing shouldn't happen. As a criminal, a yakuza boss shouldn't even be allowed in, let alone put at the top of the donor recipient list. Adelstein digs deeper and ends up sitting in a restaurant with two unhappy-looking men dressed in black and the very real knowledge that the lives of everyone close to him are now in danger along with his own.

Tokyo Vice is as exciting as any crime thriller you'll find with the primary distinction being that it' is very, very real.

So you want to learn about the Japanese mob, huh? Well, you can't do much better than David Kaplan's Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld. Naming your book directly after its subject matter takes a bit of balls; it'd better be comprehensive and accurate. While I can't vouch for the accuracy of the book (despite my many connections to the underworld), it is absolutely comprehensive.

Yakuza is primarily historical in perspective, taking us through the history of the yakuza in chronological order. The book starts with the beginnings of the yakuza as bakuto (gamblers) and tekiya (peddlers), and the groups they formed to survive. The rise of the ultra-nationalism that led to Japan's colonizing of East Asia and its associations with the the criminal element follow. More interesting, though, is the association of the U.S. Occupation with that same group in the post-war era as an ally in the fight against Communism.

The book goes not into only the history of the yakuza, but also into their activities both at home and abroad. As the groups begin to modernize, financial crime becomes the order of the day. Groups calls sokaiya harass corporations at investor meetings to embarrass them (this is a big deal in Japan). They dig up dirt on company finances and organize them into "informational magazines" that they sell to the companies at ridiculous prices, something the company is willing to do to keep the information private.

Japan's incredible bubble economy, of course, was ripe for exploitation by yakuza as they went into real estate in a big way, buying up golf courses and hotels left and right on bad loans obtained from banks with inconvenient secrets and bankers that maybe don't ask enough questions.

The various groups venture abroad for drugs and guns, human trafficking, and financial fraud, finally bringing themselves to the attention of the U.S. government, taking us up through the first few years of the century.

As a factual research-based text, the book does a good job not judging the yakuza themselves one way or the other. There is minor commentary on some of the actions, though; I imagine it's hard to read that much about human trafficking and not have anything to say.

Weighing in at 337 pages, the book is long enough to be comprehensive but not so long as to be difficult to read. Kaplan's writing and the subject matter itself is interesting enough to keep things moving. The book also includes a comprehensive list of sources and a great index, as well as a short glossary worth checking out on its own.

If you're interested in reading about the yakuza, this is an absolute must-read. Pick up Jake Adelstein's Tokyo Vice first to get acquainted with the drama and excitement, and then Yakuza for the history and facts.