“When you are looking at child pornography, you are not looking at something sexually titillating. You are looking at a crime scene. I mean it is crime scene. It is evidence that crime has been committed and that people can derive sexual pleasure from that or profit on that is horrifying.”

– Jake Adelstein

The Australian Broadcasting Corperation’s Radio Australia reports on how old time Yakuza are concerned about the rising number of younger blood who are looking to make their fortune with child pornography. Jake Adelstein weighs in.

Listen here:

Veteran Yakuza express concern over porn push [via Radio Australia's Connect Asia]

Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) — Japan’s underworld can tell you a lot about what’s happening in the legitimate economy.

Gangsters are on the run as growth wanes and deflation worsens. Yet the oddest development by far involves yakuza members sitting for exams covering key aspects of their work.

If you think this is just a law-enforcement issue, think again. It’s a sign Japan’s funk will be longer than economists predict. That may surprise those betting Japan is recovering. Oddly, though, the plight of gangsters tells the story.

Huddled over legal texts and documents isn’t the popular image of Japan’s storied mobsters. When they aren’t collecting debts, shaking down shop owners, overseeing prostitution rings or rigging stocks, members of Japan’s biggest organized crime group, Yamaguchi-gumi, are studying for 12-page tests.

Yakuza’s Series 7 Exam Is Harbinger for Economy [via Bloomberg]

子ども性被害防止で相談ＨＰ

Note: I’ve been working with the Polaris Project Japan, a non-profit organization that combats human trafficking and sexual exploitation of women and children, since 2005 and recently agreed to be their temporary public relations director.  In the last year, a lot of the calls coming to Polaris Project Japan were concerning Japanese teenage women who appeared to have been forced into the sex industry–not foreign women.  It does seem that the Japanese government has been enforcing the anti-human trafficking laws to the point where there are significantly fewer non-Japanese women being made sex-slaves. However, it seems they have been replaced by young Japanese teenage girls, many of them runaways or abused children. 

Polaris Project Japan had the brilliant idea of reaching out directly to these girls by making a mobile-phone web-site aimed at them, that was user friendly, and could offer some good advice.  Young schoolgirls don’t read newspapers, don’t watch as much television as they did, and most of their communications is over cell-phones and social networking sites. Unfortunately, such sites have also becoming prime hunting grounds for pimps, low-life yakuza, and pedophiles who seek out fresh meat to use themselves or sell to others. 

A mobile phone web-site aimed at helping Japanese teenage victims

NHK, Japan’s answer to the BBC gave the website some good coverage this morning. 

The contents of the consultations that Polaris Project Japan and their partner organization Yukon have gotten are quite unpleasant. 

●　From Host Club Patron To Forced Prostitution 

　　 A male Host asked a young victim come visit his club without worrying about money. After his begging continued, she went to the club a few times. Then, a different man from the club asked her for a few hundred thousand yen (a few thousand dollars) for the food and drinks she had consumed. She received threatening phone calls and was even ambushed at her own home. The men kept pressuring the girl to pay the bill, coercing her to go and work in the sex industry. Around that time, she was put in touch with Polaris, and after consulting with the police, she is safe once again.  

Note: I covered incidents like this one as far back as 2000, when I was still a police reporter assigned to the 4th district. It’s a classic technique that yakuza or general low-lives use to force young women into the sex trade.  Host clubs seems to be the equivalent of trafficking recruitment centers in many parts of Japan. 

●　A 14-year-old farmed out as a prostitute by her classmates

　Her friends told her that she had a bad attitude, and forced her to apologize by paying money earned from prostitution. A few months later, through some website, she was introduced to a customer, and forced into prostitution. It had already been taken up as a case as a juvenile victim when she contacted this organization. She says, “I’m out of the situation, but I have nowhere to go. I always feel depressed.I let myself get picked up for casual sex, abuse my body, and start crying for no reason.” Polaris Project Japan provides  her regular counseling and the support she needs. 

Polaris Project Japan Launches a New Mobile Website:

To help victims of child/teen prostitution

and child pornography and prevent further exploitation

The Polaris Project Japan (PPJ) is the Japanese branch of Polaris Project in Washington DC.  PPJ has been operating a hot-line for human trafficking victims for several years In the last year, PPJ has been receiving more and more calls not just from the traditional human trafficking victims–foreign women ensnared in the sex industry–but Japanese teenage girls who have been lured or forced into the sex industry and can’t get out, and sometimes even been asked by their own parents to work in the industry to make money for their family members. 

Contrary to the popular picture of Japanese teenage prostitutes as clueless teenagers who just want to earn money to buy a designer bag–many of the girls now in the industry are there because of financial necessity and a lack of support for abused girls and boys who run away from home. 

Many of these victims are recruited over the internet and or/are sold over social networking sites by their pimps–like commodities. 

The National Police Agency reported in 2008 internet Profile sites and Social networking sites are the hotbeds of child sex crimes, surpassing the net dating sites (which were originally the hub of sex trafficking).

It is hard to measure the extent of the problem because no Japanese government agency has attempted a comprehensive survey, and the laws protecting children are administrated by many different government agencies and ministries that do not share information or work together.

To provide an effective and systematical intervention to prevent sexual exploitation of adolescents and help victims, Polaris Project is launching a website:

¨       To provide an environment to seek counseling in a safe and anonymous way.

¨       To give information to questions like “What happens if….”, rather than sending simple “Stop” or “Danger” signs.

¨       To eliminate the embarrassment and fear of seeking counseling face to face by allowing contacts via website and phone.

¨       To inform the victims of additional channels of help available.

Polaris Project will also be working with The Children’s Human Rights Committee of the Japan Lawyer’s Association, Prefectural Women’s Centers, and Children’s Shelters to make sure that the children calling receive the best care and advice possible. It will also advertise on sites popular with Japanese youth to make sure the message reaches those who are most vulnerable.

Japan’s top two newspapers covered the end of Goto Tadamasa’s reign as head of the Goto-gumi today.　Probably, they didn’t feel this was the most pressing of stories.

Maybe they didn’t have the resources to stay on top of the story. Who knows? 

The Mainichi Shinbun has done some good coverage. All of it in Japanese. Sankei Shinbun 産経新聞 probably did the best job of reporting on Goto’s fall from power and what it meant in terms of Japan’s social-cultural and economic landscape. Trust me, forty-thousand gangsters have an impact on the Japanese economy, and Goto Tadamasa, one of the richest of all the Yamaguchi-gumi gang lords, has his hand in many pockets and many financial markets. He’s also the biggest stockholder of Japan airlines, if my memory is correct. 

The articles are below. No english translations available. 

Mainichi Shinbun 毎日新聞

The Asashi Shinbun also had a decently detailed account of events as well. Neither newspaper has reported on this in English–although unlike Sankei Shinbun, both the Mainichi and the Asahi have English language versions of their paper.  There has always been an unwritten policy not to focus in the English media on Japan’s yakuza problem. Bad for the country’s image. 

The Asahi Shinbun 朝日新聞

(The Yamaguchi-gumi symbol. Often used in a badge to identify members and intimidate civilians. New laws make displaying the symbol very risky for the yakuza and their bosses)

Japan’s most powerful gangsters are mugging up on legal terminology in an attempt to skirt strict new laws that make them liable for crimes committed by their henchmen.

The country’s top three crime syndicates are believed to have hired former prosecutors to teach them the finer points of the law, which was introduced after the assassination of the mayor of Nagasaki, Iccho Ito, by a gangster last April.

Media reports said the legal change has unsettled senior members of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s biggest underworld organisation, who could now be sued or imprisoned for a range of crimes committed by their underlings, from embezzlement to refusing to pay for a hamburger.

Two other major gangs, the Inagawa-kai and Sumiyoshi-kai, have also summoned experts to explain the law and identify loopholes, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper said. 

The Yamaguchi-gumi, whose 40,000 members make up about half Japan’s entire gangster population, has reportedly ordered its operatives “not to cause problems for members of the main clan through illegal activities”.

The Asahi said police officials had obtained documents distributed at the study meetings that could have only been drawn up by lawyers.

The new law claimed an early success in August when a gangster from a Yamaguchi-gumi affiliate was arrested for refusing to pay the bill at a hamburger restaurant in Kyoto. He only agreed to pay after the restaurant’s owner, aware of the legal changes, threatened to charge his boss for the meal.

Most top gangsters are also afraid of being sued by the victims of crimes committed by their juniors. “This fear has made them go quiet recently, as they know they can be sued for damages,” a source close to the yakuza told the Guardian.

Legal experts are reportedly being paid generous fees for talking yakuza leaders through the law and identifying loopholes, which include producing retroactive letters of expulsion to prove that a suspect was no longer a member of a gang at the time he allegedly committed a crime.

Lawyers are said to be coaching gangsters on how to conduct themselves during police questioning so as to avoid arrest.

The legal revisions are also designed to end the practice of rewarding members of the yakuza after they have served their prison sentences.
Compensation for jail time will probably now be paid in cash rather than by bank transfer. In addition, stricter penalties for gun ownership are expected to herald the reappearance of hitmen armed with razor-sharp katana swords rather than pistols.

Public tolerance of underworld crimes has waned following a series of lethal shootings, some of which have involved non-yakuza victims. A month after Ito’s assassination, a former gangster wounded his son and daughter and shot dead a policeman before taking his own wife hostage at their home in Nagoya.

This summer, residents of Kurume in western Japan sought court help to evict a yakuza gang from a local apartment block, saying the ever-present threat of violence infringed on their constitutional right to live in peace.

“The cozy relationship between the police and the yakuza is coming to an end,” the source said. “No one really cared when they whacked each other, but when they started to kill civilians, people decided they’d had enough.”

Once the yakuza move in, they don't move out easily.

YAKUZA WARS

by David McNeill and Jake Adelstein

A bloody dispute between two rival Yakuza groups in a southern Japanese city has led to a historic fight-back by local people.  But rooting out the mob from society will not be easy.

“Get lost.”  Not a promising start to an interview but this is hardly a standard interviewee: a flint-eyed gangster sporting a crew cut and a boiler suit.   His two colleagues glower from behind oversized sunglasses and thick layers of suspicion.  Rippling tattoos snake out of the rolled-up sleeves of Goon No. 1.  “Kieusero,” [Fuck Off], he growls before slamming down the shutter of his office garage.

 For the entire article see below. 

Residents of a city in western Japan this week became the first to turn to the courts for help in ridding their neighbourhood of organised crime, amid fears that they will become the next victims of a violent power struggle.

Around 600 residents of Kurume, in Fukuoka prefecture, have asked a local court to order members of the Dojinkai yakuza gang to vacate an office building in the middle of a busy shopping district.

According to Japanese newspaper reports, the eviction attempt is the first by ordinary residents against an officially recognised crime syndicate.

In their petition, the residents said the gang’s activities and the ever-present threat of violence infringed on their constitutional right to live in peace.

Their target is the head office of the Dojinkai, whose 1,000 members have controlled parts of south-west Japan since the late 1960s.

The gang occupies three buildings near Kurume’s main railway station, using one as its headquarters and letting the other two to affiliates.

The residents say they risk becoming the innocent victims of an escalating conflict between the gang and the Kyushu-Seidokai, a splinter group formed after a bitter power struggle inside the Dojinkai in 2006.

Since the start of the conflict, half a dozen mobsters, including the leaders of both gangs, and a bystander, have been shot dead, the Asahi Shimbun daily said. Several dozen bullets have been fired at the Dojinkai’s headquarters. Though police were stationed outside the building to deter further attacks, the residents say they have been living in fear since the patrols ended in June this year.

Faced with the threat of violent retribution, few Japanese who live among gangsters in cities around the country have the stomach to take legal action against their unsavoury neighbours.

In Kurume, however, 1,500 people living near the Dojinkai building, supported by a 380-strong team of lawyers, have signed a petition calling for the gang to be turfed out.

But experts said their campaign stood little chance of success. “Japanese law as it stands is on the side of the tenants [in this case, the Dojinkai],” Jake Adelstein, a former police reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and an authority on the yakuza, told the Guardian. “Once someone moves into a building, it’s very difficult to get them out.”

Typically, gangs move into premises they know are about to be auctioned off and then demand money from the new owners in return for agreeing to move out. Many simply end up staying.

“There’s nothing illegal about simply being yakuza,” Adelstein said. “The court will be sympathetic, but as far as the law is concerned the yakuza are citizens with the same rights as other tenants.

“The Dojinkai are a particularly vicious group, certainly not as polished as others that prefer to stay out of the limelight. They may decide to move out to avoid any more bad publicity, but where would they go then?”

The move comes as the yakuza are expanding their sphere of influence to include real estate, the stock market and other legitimate businesses, in addition to traditional money-earners such as prostitution, drugs, extortion and gambling.

And faced with dwindling financial spoils and police crackdowns on their traditional activities, powerful crime syndicates are engaged in a renewed struggle for money and influence.

Last year saw a slew of shootings involving members of the Yamaguchi-gumi – Japan’s biggest underworld organisation – and a rival gang as they battled for control of lucrative districts in Tokyo.

The island of Kyushu, where the Dojinkai has its headquarters, is no stranger to yakuza violence. Last April a gangster fatally shot Iccho Ito, the mayor of Nagasaki in the island’s northwest. The killer, Tetsuya Shiroo, described by police as a senior member of the Yamaguchi-gumi, was sentenced to death in May.

The National Police Agency puts the number of full-time yakuza members at just over 40,000. If unregistered members and hangers-on are included, however, the number rises to over 80,000, about half of whom belong to the Yamaguchi-gumi.

“When you look at the numbers it’s easy to see how influential they are,” Adelstein said. “The authorities here are tolerant of the yakuza – more than you would like them to be.”

He is about fifty years old, six feet five, and has arms that are bigger than my legs.

I was sitting on the tatami listening to the rain outside, and while he lit up his twentieth cigarette of the day I said,

“I love rainy days.”

He didn’t agree.

“I hate them. Most yakuza do. People get taken out when it rains –  the rain washes away the blood, the trace evidence, the footprints, everything. You can’t hear a gunshot in the rain, you can’t hear the whoosh of a sword, you can’t even hear people walking behind you. Rain makes it dark, makes it hard for eyewitnesses to see anything. Makes it hard for you to see anything. And… if you’re holding an umbrella, you can’t react. You’re handicapped. We get killed on rainy days. And, of course, that’s also the day that, if you’re going to take someone out, you’d choose to do it. Maybe just snatch them off the empty streets. Take them somewhere else and kill them. If there’s a turf war going on, a downpour tells me someone is going to die.”

He is calm as he says these things, smoking all the while. He has a self-described “racoon-face” and a thick grey beard that covers up a scar on his face where he was once slashed with a Japanese sword in his youth.

According to him, in the good old days, that’s how yakuza took each other out during a gang war. With a sword. Not a gun.

“Anybody can use a gun. All you have to do is have enough strength to flick a lighter. Swords are manly things. Heavy to carry. Swing it too hard and it feels like you’re going to rip your own arm off.”

He tells me that the newly revised and much harsher anti-organized crime laws are spurring a comeback of swordplay. Since a Boss can now go to jail if one of his underlings is caught with a gun, people are switching back to swords. The penalties for possession of a sword are much lighter. He points out that there was an Inagawakai Sanbonsugi guy taken out last Friday in Shibuya [August 22nd, around 10:45 pm]–with a sword.  The assailant wielding it cleaved half of his victim’s jaw off–the guy bled to death.

It was not a sunny day when it happened, that’s for sure. Speculation was that the Kokusuikai, a faction of the Yamaguchigumi which is trying to take over Tokyo, orchestrated the rainy-day hit.

Yakuza kill each other all the time. There’s a lot of murders in Japan, just not a lot of bodies. Typically, the dead are dumped into the setting foundations of buildings because so many yakuza run construction companies or do business with them. After the Kobe Earthquake, body after body showed up in the rubble of broken cement buildings. All those dead people didn’t die in the earthquake, though. Some of them had been dead for a long, long time.

Murders in Japan are low, but if you look at the number of missing persons reported each year, it‘s over 10,000 per year. [from National Police Agency figures]

The racoon-faced man said to me “I don’t even want to walk out the door on a rainy day, and if I were you, I’d learn to hate them, too.”

But I can’t help it — I still like them. I guess I’m just a happily gloomy person. And besides, I have a really big, sturdy umbrella– a baseball bat, practically, though I don’t know how well it would do against a Japanese sword.

I don’t plan on finding out, either.

Isn’t that a sunny thought?

The stories Jake Adelstein wrote as a crime reporter for a Japanese newspaper have earned him and his family a death threat from one of the country’s most notorious and influential yakuza. Writing a book about crime and criminal culture in Japan is likely to have further enraged the Tokyo uderworld. Adelstein never planned it this way.  

Adelstein, 39, from Missouri, became the first foreigner to be taken on as a staff writer for a Japanese-language newspaper when he joined the Yomiuri Shimbun in April 1993. He had experienced Japan as an exchange student – albeit one with interests in karate and Buddhism – and studied Japanese before passing a newspaper entrance exam and joining the Yomiuri. As with all cub reporters he landed on the police and organised-crime beat, which meant close contact with policemen and gangsters and eventually the material for the forthcoming Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.     

 “It’s not all about the yakuza,” says Adelstein. “It’s about crime and criminal culture, including human trafficking, murder and serial rape in Japan and how the media here covers it. Consider it a primer of the dark side of Japan as seen through the eyes of a police reporter. It tells you a lot about the Japanese police as well.”

 The impression he initially built up was of Japan’s yakuza groups being similar to the officers charged with bringing them to book. But that has changed, he believes.

 “My impression was that both had their stringent codes of honour and duty and a grudging respect for each other,” he says. “Now, I think, with most yakuza, money trumps everything and the cops don’t have respect for them any more. I have a lot more respect for the cops since I now understand how difficult their job is. How the hell are they going to bust these organisations if they can’t wire-tap, can’t do undercover operations, can’t plea bargain and can’t offer witnesses any real protection? They are handicapped while the yakuza have a tactical advantage, politically and financially.

 “There was a time when the two sides had an uneasy truce,” he continues. “When there was a gang war and shooting was involved, the yakuza quickly offered up someone to the police. Not necessarily the real criminal, but someone. In the good old days the organised crime cops would drop by the yakuza offices, have a cup of tea and get updates on who was rising and falling in the organisation.”

 When Japan’s largest underworld group, the Osaka-based Yamaguchi-gumi, was smaller the police were able to play off various yakuza groups against each other. But that too has changed.

 “The Yamaguchi-gumi is the Wal-Mart of the Japanese mafia and they are driving all the little mom and pop yakuza out of business, efficiently and ruthlessly,” Adelstein says. “They don’t feel a need to get along with the police any more. Last year, allegedly, when a group of Aichi prefectural cops raided a Yamaguchi-gumi office, they found photos of themselves and their families tacked on the walls. The former taboos about attacking journalists are gone as well. Anyone is fair game.”

 Adelstein’s book took about 2½ years to write and was completed after he left the Yomiuri in 2005. Adelstein says he loved his job, built up good working relationships with police officers and was fascinated by Japan’s underworld. That fascination means his life – and those of his family – are now on the line.

 According to police statistics, there are 80,000 gang members in Japan and the Yamaguchi-gumi is without question the largest and most powerful. In Tokyo alone it has more than 800 front companies ranging from construction businesses to auditing firms to cake shops. It’s all a far cry from the traditional businesses of drugs, protection and prostitution on which underworld empires were previously built.

 His trawls though the underbelly of Japanese society also revealed links between organised crime and the political world, with lawmakers appearing in police organisational charts of the Yamaguchi-gumi and others accepting political donations from gang bosses.

 But the story that changed Adelstein’s life most came about on May 18, 2001, when the FBI arranged for Tadamasa Goto – the “John Gotti of Japan” – to travel to the US for a liver transplant. Goto is the head of the Goto-gumi, an offshoot of the Yamaguchi-gumi that was used by the Yamaguchigumi to expand its business interests into Tokyo. In return, Goto provided the US with information on yakuza moneylaundering operations and front businesses in the US, although it fell far short of what he had promised before the operation.

 The information led to a series of busts, as well as friction between law-enforcement authorities on the two sides of the Pacific Ocean about the sharing of information.

 In 2005 Goto discovered Adelstein had learned of the transplant and was planning to write a scoop. One of his associates unleashed an oblique threat, which was followed by a formal meeting with Goto’s representatives. The offer was clear, Adelstein recalls. He was told to “erase the story or be erased”. The same went for his wife and children.

 Adelstein took advice from a senior Japanese police officer, dropped the story and resigned from the newspaper. But instead of killing the story he planned to incorporate it into a book that, given Goto’s poor health, would be published after his death. Goto defied the odds, however, and is still alive. Unfortunately for Adelstein, the contents of the book were leaked and became common knowledge among Japan’s criminal fraternity.

 “I am very concerned,” he says. “Goto’s group does things like smash dump trucks into stores that won’t pay protection money, uses bombs, invades homes, beats people in front of their families … I’m certainly an enemy.”

 The FBI are keeping a close watch on Adelstein’s family in the US while local police are monitoring his well-being in Japan.

 “My wife is very angry with me; my kids are confused,” Adelstein says. “I’ve had to learn to shoot a rifle and I’m in constant touch with the police on both sides of the ocean. I’ve blown thousands of dollars to install security systems and to make sure I got my best source out of Japan and safe.

 “If the psycho would only have the decency to leave my family and friends out of it, that would be great. But he has no honour and no morals. He’s capable of doublecrossing the Yamaguchi-gumi and the FBI and he has lots of money.”

 Adelstein’s only glimmer of hope, he says, is if the Yamaguchigumi excommunicate Goto for betraying their business interests in the US. Even so, Goto has hundreds of loyal henchmen. “I have no idea what the hell to do,” Adelstein says. “I miss my family, but until things are settled every time I’m with them I put them in firing range.

 “I’m hoping that Shinobu Tsukasa, the honourable head of the Yamaguchi-gumi, sends me a thank you letter: ‘Mr Adelstein, we appreciate you pointing out this traitor in our midst. Go live in peace and continue to write. We will not kill you for the time being.’ That would be nice. You see, I still have a sense of humour.”

  ………………………………………………

 Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan

(to be published by Kodansha International in November)