|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Charles Jannuzi
||
|| Hakki A:
|| >Do you think this is BS too? BTW how many fingers do you have
|| >Charles ;-)?
||
|| Hakki is referring to the practice of lopping off parts of the
|| pinkie finger
|| to show contrition to the boss.
Notice, readers, that I asked for a simple figure, two bytes (I hope). I still haven't got it ;-) Missing joints and prosthetics don't count. I hear plastic fingers are going like hotcakes.
||
|| The Yakuza
|| Johan Björck
|| Anomalies Project Stockholm School of Economics & EIJS 1997
|| Course 9995 Introduction to the Economies and Business of East Asia
|| http://www.hhs.se/EIJS/anomaly/JYakuza.htm
||
|| Do these guys politic for the award of Nobels in economics?
Maybe they're sore because they got left out of the junket ;-)
(Note : The Japanese govt promised they'd get 30 Nobels in the next 50 years and promptly invited some Nobel officials to Japan on a junket. Swedes were outraged)
||
|| (...)
|| The Yakuza´s financial ties
||
|| Point by point:
||
OK I get it: The Yakuza are just doing normal business, or they're only working on contract, or they're really interested in Hawaii or Guam, they make ideal scapegoats, etc.
With all due allowances for the Swedes' permanent consternation at the immorality beyond their borders, isn't the Western impression, however tainted, that the Yakuza have their own political agenda and their own pols, and possibly their own political party, not even a little bit true? It's true the MOF is a dreaded dictatorship - it has been "scapegoated" by the West almost as much as the Yakuza, if writing about it is scapegoating - but what about Japan's so-called democracy? Who exactly has the LDP been representing all these years? My impression is that they're more deeply connected to the Yakuza than the Italian CD were to the Mafia.
I agree 100% that Dubya's visit is a raid but weren't the Yakuza looting the place before Dubya got there?
I guess it all boils down to the figures, which you may have (though I doubt it bec money laundering isn't a crime and therefore isn't investigated in Japan, supposing the police would want to investigate): What are the Yakuza worth; how much money can they throw around? You know about how the Yamaguchi-gumi fed and gave shelter to the Kobe victims. I recently came across a story about a Yakuza boss buying 1 M shares of JAL. But perhaps this story is more eloquent:
Hakki
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http://makeashorterlink.com/?P2AB12E6 JAPAN: ORGANIZED CRIME
Taking Care Of Business
These have been tough years for the yakuza, but one gang has beaten off recession and tougher anticrime laws to strengthen its grip on both Japan's old and new economies
By Velisarios Kattoulas/TOKYO, OSAKA and KOBE
Issue cover-dated November 30, 2000
As far as it goes, the police's overview of the Japanese underworld is hard to fault. They might add that in the 1990s literally dozens of indebted small-time mob bosses committed suicide. Examined carefully, though, the police portrait misses as much as it reveals, because in the midst of the chaos and penury triggered by a slate of recent anti-yakuza laws--not to mention a 10-year recession--one gang has become a veritable colossus: the Yamaguchi Gumi.
To be sure, the gang has faced its share of setbacks, including the jailing of two top under-bosses, and the assassination of a third. All the same, under the leadership of Yoshinori Watanabe it has grown into one of the world's most powerful criminal enterprises.
According to police statistics, it boasted 16,500 full-time members in 1999, up a third since Watanabe took over 12 years ago, and more than five times the size of the entire American Mafia at its peak in the 1950s. All told, as many as 38,000 gangsters--or nearly one in two professional Japanese criminals--report to Watanabe. Little wonder they call him the Japanese Godfather.
Perhaps predictably, the Yamaguchi Gumi is a major player in the underworld's Big Two: sex and drugs. According to Atsushi Mizoguchi, an author and authority on the underworld, Japan's 80,000 yakuza together earn around ¥1 trillion ($9.3 billion) a year, half of it from drugs, and about a quarter of it from the sex trade. Arguably a bigger problem for Japan, though, is that the Yamaguchi Gumi has squirrelled its way into the New Economy, and has political connections reaching into the highest echelons of government.
First, its political ties. Despite the police crackdown, during July's Lower House election, the Yamaguchi Gumi discreetly helped raise money and get out the vote for scores of politicians. Says one beneficiary of mob largesse: "There isn't a single Japanese politician who doesn't know his local yakuza boss."
Exactly what such relationships yield is unclear. But they suggest that short of taking on Watanabe's political allies, the police stand little chance of bringing him to his knees. Equally unnerving, in a recent issue of Shukan Taishu, a magazine closely read by police and yakuza alike, an unnamed Yamaguchi Gumi under-boss warned that if the police ever threatened the gang in earnest it would not hesitate to retaliate.
What's more, in mob-riddled industries such as construction and finance, much-needed reform and restructuring has been sidetracked for decades. Even so, many Japanese were shocked when a government-funded study conducted last year found that of 116 uncollected, mainly construction-related loans examined in detail a chilling 42% involved organized crime.
As for Watanabe's role in the New Economy, with recent antigang laws and the recession denting income from "traditional" sources, police suspect he has channelled some of the fortune his gang amassed during Japan's "bubble economy" in the 1980s into hi-tech start-ups, hoping that--slumping share prices aside--they might one day become a lucrative source of wealth.
Hard evidence of mob involvement in such companies remains scarce. But last month the president of software developer Liquid Audio Japan, Masafumi Okanda, was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping a former colleague amid allegations he was tied to the yakuza. Although the 32-year-old Okanda denies the charges, police say they found the business cards of several senior yakuza bosses on his desk. Notes a veteran member of the Tokyo organized-crime squad: "Yakuza are bishoku, they like to eat well. Always, they go for the juiciest cut, the piece with the most fat on it, and right now that's hi-tech start-ups."
For Japan, the implications of this are not pretty. On top of delays in tackling the Old Economy's woes, doubts about the prospects for hi-tech start-ups could stall the creation of new jobs, and, by extension, the shift to a post-industrial economy.
"Ties between corporate Japan and the Japanese underworld are so extensive it's impossible to even get a grip on where and how they're joined together," explains Raisuke Miyawaki, a former head of the organized-crime division at the National Police Agency and now an adviser to company's seeking to cut ties to the yakuza. "For Japan to solve its long-term economic problems, the only option is to purge the men at the helm of companies sullied by ties to the yakuza, and start afresh."
NOT IN 25 YEARS has there been a yakuza boss as powerful as Watanabe. A bull of a man with a short crew cut and piercing eyes, he was born in 1941 into a large farming family in Tochigi prefecture, north of Tokyo. After finishing middle school, he made noodles in Tokyo for a couple of years before moving to Kobe to join the Yamaken Gumi, a gang that is part of the Yamaguchi Gumi.
It was around 1960, and the Yamaguchi Gumi was embroiled in a series of deadly turf wars. According to underworld folklore, Watanabe proved lethally efficient in resolving disputes, and in recognition of his talent and hard work he rose rapidly through the ranks.
By the time Watanabe became the Yamaguchi Gumi's fifth kumicho--the top boss--in 1988, Japan's biggest gang was in disarray. Between 1981 and 1983 it lost its third kumicho to a heart attack, his anointed successor to liver failure, and his eventual successor to assassins. It split into two rival factions and was dragged into a bloody war that sparked 200 gun battles and cost 26 lives. Many people wrote it off as a has-been.
At first, Watanabe did little to revive the Yamaguchi Gumi. But police officers, lawyers, gangsters and other underworld figures familiar with events say that starting in the early 1990s he radically overhauled the organization. He abandoned the centralized power structure, and split it into seven semi-autonomous regional groups, making it harder for police to keep tabs on, and easier to control internal and external friction. He forged new alliances and cemented existing ones with rival gangs nationwide, and he rekindled an earlier leader's dream of making the gang a nationwide power. When Watanabe swept to power, the gang had offices in 39 of Japan's 47 prefectures. Today, that's up to 43. At the same time, Watanabe added 5,000 full-time men to the gang. "Joining it is like taking out insurance," says Yukio Yamanouchi, a former legal adviser to Watanabe. "It's like working for Sony. You're part of the leader in your field." (...) Since Japan launched its yakuza crackdown a decade ago, serious crime has soared by 70%, the arrest rate for such crimes has fallen to 70% from 90%, and the police have been plagued by a snowballing series of cover-ups and scandals. (...)