• Sat. Nov 9th, 2024

Japan Subculture Research Center

A guide to the Japanese underworld, Japanese pop-culture, yakuza and everything dark under the sun.

Everything I Ever Needed To Know In Life I Learned From the Yakuza or The Cops That Kick Their Ass in 7 Lessons

“Everything I Ever Needed To Know In Life I Learned From The Yakuza Or The Cops That Bust Them”

The seven lessons:

  1. Know the difference between hearing and listening, and learn to listen to people
  2. Repay the kindness bestowed upon you, keep your code, all is good
  3. There are no small promises. A man’s promise should weigh more than his life
  4. It’s okay to be betrayed, just don’t be the betrayer. Betray others and you betray yourself. You won’t be able to trust anyone
  5. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. You can tell more about a man by his enemies than you can by his friends. A man with no enemies is worthless
  6. In life we only encounter the injustices we are meant to correct
  7. If you want to live well you have to die once

Thanks to Sakaki-san for summarizing the talk for me.

10 thoughts on “Everything I Ever Needed To Know In Life I Learned From the Yakuza or The Cops That Kick Their Ass in 7 Lessons”
  1. […] A few days someone who seems to collect yakuza resources, reblogged the entry, and I thought nothing of it, as they have done so before. Again, I moved on. And then a couple of weeks after my post, something happened. The Japan Subculture Rearch Center (Adelstein’s home-blog) [link]. Adelstein himself listed the seven points of his talk just the same way I had, and thanked Sakaki-san for doing the summary for him [link]. […]

  2. dude, ok. loosen up. The japanese are dying out, and its probably because they are too damn rigid and make up all these stupid rules. You’re a little western Jew, and that means you have a life and a future. Not sure about the Japanese.

    1. I politely disagree. I think Japan is doing badly because they’ve abandoned a lot of the values they used to have—lifetime employment being one of them. Maybe liberalizing the markets did not benefit Japan.

  3. ok ok ok, you and your listening. Ok, it’s obvious. Just not with the eyes and mouth. Listen, I dont think we will EVER be like the Japs or any “asiatics”. We will always USE our brains and whatever they tell us, we’ll just be bouncing it back and forth in our head in relation to what we are. Brainy, driven, mobile. I think a hick would take it differently, but I imagine a hick would be closer to an average Jap, so you know…all thugs like to talk about listening. But you see, listening is about power too. Its a power relation. I dont think western journalists can listen, because we have big agendas – we dont have the freedom to think freely, it wont fit the editorial perspective. You had a lot to learn, and you learned it. Japanese dont talk. So an inspector can advise you to listen. When there is infinite Blah blah, like in the American media-sphere, you can’t survive if you don’t know how to selectively NOT to listen.

    1. I don’t want to be “Japanese”. But there are good things to learn from Japanese culture. American culture has some great ideas as well but somewhere along the lines we forgot that “civic duty” used to be a virtue.

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