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Yakuza Vs the Police, & Foreign Crime Gangs

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Yakuza Vs the Police, & Foreign Crime Gangs Volume 10 | Issue 7 | Number 1 | Article ID 3692 | Feb 11, 2012 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Recent Trends in Organized Crime in Japan: Yakuza vs the Police, & Foreign Crime Gangs ~ Part 2 ２１世紀のやくざ ―― 日 本における組織犯罪の最近動向 Andrew Rankin evidence, forced confessions, beatings of suspects, drug abuse by police officers, Recent Trends in Organized Crime embezzlement from police slush funds, and in Japan: Yakuza vs the Police, & much else. Senba’s sensational conclusion: ‘The Foreign Crime Gangs ~ Part 2 ２１ largest organized crime gang in Japan today is the National Police Agency’ (Senba 2009:73). 世紀のやくざ ―― 日本における組織犯 罪の最近動向 As a case study of the sort of situation that Senba describes we might consider the recent Andrew Rankin history of the pachinko industry. The yakuza first infiltrated peripheral areas of the pachinko II The State, the Police and the Yakuza: industry during the 1970s. Supplies of gifts to Control or Symbiosis? pachinko hall stores, for example, provided effective camouflage for extorting security The Yakuza and the NPA payments. In the 1980s the police announced their intention to eliminate these yakuza The popular status of outlaws logically relates rackets. They accomplished this with great to the integrity of the legal system outside success. Today pachinko business owners need which they operate. Putting it simply, for not placate the yakuza. Instead they must villains to look bad, the police need to look placate the Security Electronics and good. Tamura Eitarō has shown how the Communications Technology Association chivalrous image enjoyed by nineteenth- (SECTA; referred to in Japanese as the century yakuza stemmed in part from public Hōtsūkyō). A governmental body founded in disgust for corruption and violence by the 1985, SECTA is the sole regulator of the entire police squads who hunted them.1 A similar pachinko industry, issuing permits for pachinko problem confronts the NPA today. Since the halls, conducting safety inspections of pachinko early 2000s police corruption has been the machine factories, and so on. Given the vast subject of increasingly numerous academic sums of money at stake – annual pachinko articles and media reports. Ichikawa Hiro, a earnings are estimated at ¥30 trillion – SECTA lawyer who gave testimony on policeis an immensely powerful organization. corruption in the Diet, says, ‘There is an institutionalized culture of illicit money-making Though it is unclear what types of skills are in the NPA, and since it has gone on for so long required to work at SECTA, being a recently it is now very deep-rooted’ (Akahata 2004:116). retired police officer seems to be a plus. In 2009 a veteran police officer named Senba Yamamoto Shizuhiko, chairman of SECTA until Toshirō, while still serving on the force, 2005, was formerly the Director-General of the published a lengthy exposé of policeNPA, and his successor, Yoshino Jun, is a corruption: financial scams, fabricatedformer Commissioner of the Tokyo 1 10 | 7 | 1 APJ | JF Metropolitan Police. A former bureau chief at the NPA’s Communications Division and a former chief of the Fukuoka Police Department sit on the Board of Directors.2 Investigative journalists estimate that one third of SECTA’s employees are ex-policemen.3 Ex-policemen who cannot find a post to their liking at SECTA may choose from a number of related organizations, such as the associations of wholesalers who supply gifts to the pachinko halls, or any of the companies that provide card-reading machines for pachinko halls; all of these have security departments and monitoring teams that are heavily populated by ex-policemen. Many pachinko machine January 2012: Police raid a yakuza gang manufacturers and pachinko owners’ headquarter associations retain ex-policemen as consultants simply to ensure smooth relations with SECTA. One complicating factor is the prevalence of In short, all that appears to have happened is bribery and protection agreements, and other that the police have closed down the yakuza forms of collusion, between police and the rackets and set up their own rackets, creating yakuza. Police officers may expect or demand comfortable retirement posts for themselves free drinks and service in bars, clubs, and while causing more trouble and expense for commercial sex businesses within a gang’s pachinko businesses than the yakuza ever did. territory; the gang may offer these things free to the police whether they demand it or not. In As Peter Hill says, ‘The police and the yakuza return, police officers ignore minor legal are ultimately rivals in the market for violations, or raid another gang’s territory. protection’ (Hill 2006:258). The yakuza There is also a long tradition of plea- themselves are alert to this phenomenon. A bargaining, known in yakuza slang as chinkoro, Tokyo gangster says, ‘Ever since the cops where gang members give the police started getting tough, the gangs have lost a lot information in exchange for leniency. All such of their power to take kickbacks and collect arrangements are said to have become less debts. And what happens to that power frequent and less dependable in recent years. vacuum? Out goes the yakuza gang and in comes the Sakuradamon gang [i.e. theEven so, cases where police officers forewarn Metropolitan Police Department,local gang bosses about impending police raids 4 headquartered in Sakuradamon]’. are still being reported.5 A Hokkaido detective who held the police record for most firearms confiscated in a single year eventually confessed that he had cut a deal with a Hakodate yakuza gang: they gave him the guns and in return he pretended not to notice their 2-ton shipment of cannabis and crystal meth.6 In 2008 as many as 23 detectives and inspectors in the anti-yakuza squad of the Aichi Police Department were implicated in a bribery scandal involving the Blue Group, a Nagoya- 2 10 | 7 | 1 APJ | JF based federation of brothel-owners andThere remains a strong tendency among moneylenders with strong ties to the Kōdō-kai. Japanese police detectives to base their cases Though one police inspector, who admitted to on confessions, which they do not hesitate to having accepted a ‘loan’ of ¥8.5 million from coerce from suspects. Courts have been less the Blue Group, received an official reprimand, tolerant of this practice in recent years. The the internal investigation otherwise appears to two Kudō-kai gangsters acquitted of murdering have fizzled out.7 a rival in the 2010 case mentioned earlier had both signed their names to confessions Critics of the police can also point to poor helpfully printed out for them by detectives. results. In 2010 the NPA arrested 25,681 The judge deemed the confessions to be gangsters, roughly one-third of the entire unreliable, and the only other evidence was yakuza population.8 That figure sounds circumstantial.11 impressive, but it is unchanged in two decades: the police were also arresting one-third of the Though elements of the Japanese media are yakuza population in the early 1990s. Crucially, resistant to police requests for yet more the prosecution rate of yakuza arrestees has powers, it must be noted that some aspects of declined since then: in 1991 prosecutors filed Japan’s organized crime laws are still mild in charges in 81% of cases; by 2010 that figure comparison with those of other developed had dropped to 68.2%.9 Despite all the new countries. Japan’s Wiretapping Law, passed in 2000, allows wiretapping tsūshin( bōju: the legislation and talk of eradication, then, the interception of telephone or internet yakuza are actually safer from prosecution communications, not the use of bugging today than they were twenty years ago. While devices) only in the most serious cases, such as there are various influential factors here – gun-running and gangland murder plots. In outsourcing by yakuza of overtly criminal 2010 investigators used wiretaps in just 10 activities to non-yakuza collaborators, less cases, from which, however, they made a cooperation between the yakuza and the police, record 47 arrests.12 Sting operations otori-( greater secrecy of yakuza operations, and so on sōsa) have been legal in Japan only since 2004 – the main problem is of course the failure of and are mostly confined to street-level drug police to obtain strong evidence. The NPA often busts where policemen pose as dealers or seems more concerned with fulfilling self- buyers. Deep undercover operations by law imposed quotas (number of guns confiscated, enforcement agents within yakuza gangs, in the number of brothels raided, number of arrests manner of mafia-infiltrations by FBI agents in per month, etc.) than with putting the the US, do not appear to have been attempted gangsters in jail. At the end of 2010 the NPA and would in any case have questionable proudly announced that it had arrested a legality. record 21 bosses of the major (first-tier) Yamaguchi-gumi gangs that year. However, Another problem in the past has been the lack only seven were actually prosecuted and the of an effective witness protection program in charges in each case were trifling: renting an Japan. Although police will provide ad hoc apartment under a false name, erecting a ‘personal protection’ (shinpen hogo) for trial 10 building without a permit, etc. While there is witnesses, there is no nationwide program for no question that police raids of yakuza-run offering new identities to those who have businesses and confiscations of yakuza profits testified and permanently relocating them and are hurting the yakuza financially, the falling their families. Concerns about intimidation number of prosecutions suggests that many were raised in the Kudō-kai murder trial, and arrests constitute little more than harassment. police are currently keeping close guard over 3 10 | 7 | 1 APJ | JF the home of the chief witness in the extortion (mibun seisaku) against the yakuza.17 But few case against Kōdō-kai chairman Takayama.
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