Split in Japan’s largest yakuza outfit triggers fear of Tokyo turf war

Finding a mob hangout in Tokyo requires little more than a telephone book. The city’s richest crime group has an office tucked away off the back streets of Ginza shopping district. A bronze nameplate on the door helpfully identifies the Sumiyoshi-kai, but the men inside are reluctant to discuss a potentially deadly split in the yakuza ranks. “Nothing to do with us,” growls a sumo-sized mobster at the door. “Now go away.”

The splintering of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan's largest crime syndicate, has put cops and gangsters across the country on high alert. A dozen of the syndicate's affiliates, reportedly comprising about 2,000 of its 23,400 members, have gelled into a rival outfit known as the Kobe Yamaguchi.

There are worrying precedents for such a breakaway. In 1985, more than two dozen people died in bloody clashes between rival gangs. In the last outbreak of mob warfare in southern Japan a few years ago, gangsters went at each other with grenades and machine guns.

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The split is bad news for

Kenichi Shinoda

, the fedora-wearing boss of the Yamaguchi-gumi. Shinoda (also known as Shinobu Tsukasa) prefers to make headlines, if at all, by trying to soften the image of the mob. Last year he produced an in-house tabloid with features on fishing, boardgames and his own morale-boosting message. An entertainment section contained accounts of fishing trips by its bosses, along with haiku poems.

Money and territory drive the latest dispute, say Yakuza watchers. Profits have been squeezed, particularly in the Yamaguchi-gumi’s home turf in the giant Kansai region west of Tokyo, by Japan’s faltering economy. The breakaway mobsters are unhappy that membership fees, reportedly 12 million yen a month for top-tier bosses, have not been lowered accordingly.

Shinoda has fuelled resentment by favouring his own faction, the Kodo-kai, which is trying to expand to the rich capital. Kansai yakuza feel they’re being neglected, says Hiroki Allen, a security and finance consultant who has worked with the US military.

“The battleground is going to be Tokyo if there is a battle,” he says. “The Sumiyoshi-kai is still the most powerful group there. They’re smaller but still seem to have more money.”

Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, Japan’s mobsters hide in plain sight. Their organisations are legal and members carry business cards and register with the police. Some even have pension plans. In the 1950s and 1960s, the government used them to help quash unions and left-wing demonstrators, and although overt ties with the authorities have faded, politicians often still know local yakuza bosses by name.

Partly under pressure from the US, however, which wants Japan to rein in financial crime by the yakuza, the authorities have recently discovered a new zeal for bringing the mob to heel. Yakuza-exclusion ordinances, introduced three years ago, stop companies from knowingly engaging with gangsters. Businesses, from megabanks to corner shops, are now obliged to confirm customers are not related to organised crime.

Money laundering has also been made illegal, forcing banks to carefully vet potential clients for mob ties. Known gangsters cannot open a bank account. Banks now run nationwide databases listing the names of several thousand yakuza. But there is no official appetite for a complete shutdown of mob activities, which would just drive them deeper underground, says Robert Whiting, author of the seminal Tokyo Underground.

Tougher core

Muscle work, such as money collection and beatings, has been farmed out to subcontractors. Meanwhile, a tougher core of gangsters has migrated from traditional mob cash cows of loan-sharking, drugs and protection rackets, into financial crimes. The yakuza are also known to be eyeing the rich pickings from construction and entertainment ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Tokyo got a taste of possible trouble to come last year when a gang of 10, wearing ski masks, beat a man to death with baseball bats in front of other guests at a club in the city’s Roppongi entertainment district.

According to Allen, the beating was ordered by the Sumiyoshi-kai and outsourced to motorcycle gangs. Because the police could not figure out who landed the fatal blow, nobody could be charged with murder.

Such bloody vendettas bring unwelcome attention so the yakuza try to avoid them. But the authorities fear the latest split is so serious it may not be in the power of gang leaders to keep a lid on violence. Police numbers have been beefed up in known yakuza haunts, such as Kabukicho, Tokyo’s largest redlight district, a crowded 1km warren of striptease clubs, massage parlours and love hotels.

Yakuza gangsters run much of the trade here and, although a declining presence, they can still be found barking into mobile phones behind the tinted windows of Lexus cars. For years, they have met to do business at the Parisienne Cafe, a local landmark. “Kabukicho is a small place so any trouble here would be felt by all of us,” says the cafe’s night manager.

The last time mob violence came visiting here a man was killed and two were injured in a shoot-out at the cafe between Chinese and Japanese rival gangs. “Nobody wants a return to that.”