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1945: Japan was in shambles. It wasn’t just Hiroshima and Nagasaki; all major cities except for Kyoto had been extensively bombed, like the firebombing that took place in Tokyo during March. Factories, infrastructure, supply chains, all had been left in total ruin. The few production facilities still standing had been meant for war material, and retooling them for times of peace was expensive. Many working men were dead. There was starvation. Crime ran rampant.
With disaster comes opportunity, and what this meant for Japan at the time was the proliferation of black markets. Legally gray, the government was left with little choice but to turn a blind eye, since they quickly grew to become the backbone of the poor man’s survival. And naturally, an unsupervised, legally gray area like these are ripe for criminal activity. Protection rackets, kickbacks, counterfeiting, scams, contraband; ten times out of ten, it was always the yakuza being whatever shady shit was going on. Those who dominated the gray areas turned to the lucrative business of post-war reconstruction: the removal of debris, the building of roads, sewers, and factories- the rebuilding of Japan itself. Come 1950, they had already become a piece of the foundation of the Land of the Rising Sun, key players in its economy and politics.
The yakuza is the Japanese gangster; yet so different do they operate that they fall into a category of their own. Their strict codes of conduct, their unconventional rituals, those full-body tattoos done by hand with metal needles that take years to make; they live in a world of their own. Even to this day they maintain the traditional hierarchical structure of oyabun-kobun, in which the kobun is the foster child that swears loyalty to the kobun by sharing sake from the same cup; the kobun is to cut ties with its real family and swear loyalty to the oyabun. Patriarchal, the few women in their world are the wives of their bosses- the rest are slaves, hookers, or strangers.
Involved in scams, prostitution, gambling, and human trafficking, the yakuza are met with both derision and idealization from the public. Not every clan participates in these activities; some of them outright punish them. A necessary evil, they drastically reduce petty crime in the areas where their protection racket is enforced; they move through the shadows that the light of law enforcement can’t reach. During the Lost Decade, in 1995, they mobilized disaster relief services when an earthquake hit Kobe; following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011, the yakuza sent trucks by the hundred, all filled with food, water, and blankets, faster than the government.
Their numbers peaked at 184,100 in 1963.
By 2023, only 20,400 active members were reported.
