A senior member of yakuza was arrested for allegedly stealing Pokemon cards near Tokyo last month, a case seen as an example of Japanese organized crime groups struggling with declining membership.
Police agents who were busy dealing with thousands of yakuza members just a few years ago have noticed something new: unorganized and loosely connected groups they believe are behind a series of crimes once dominated by yakuza.
Police call them “tokuryu,” anonymous gangsters and tech-savvy young people hired for specific jobs. They often cooperate with yakuza, obscuring the boundary between them and making police investigations more difficult, experts and authorities say.
Photo: AP
The Tokyo metropolitan police are investigating six suspects in their 20s and 30s, most of them without connections to one another, who are believed to have been hired on social media to kill, transport and burn the bodies of an older couple at a riverbank of Nasu, 200km northeast of Tokyo.
“It’s a crime carried out like a part-time job,” Taihei Ogawa, a former police investigator and crime analyst, said on an online talk show. “Tasks are divided, making it difficult for police to track down where instructions come from.”
The yakuza membership has shrunk to 20,400 last year, one-third what it was two decades ago, Japanese National Police Agency data showed.
The agency attributed the decline largely to legislation passed to combat organized crime that includes measures such as barring members of designated groups from opening bank accounts, renting apartments, buying cellphones or insurance.
Yakuza once operated from well-marked offices, often with signs out front and symbols of their trade such as lanterns and samurai swords visible through the windows. They were often portrayed in films and cartoons as noble outlaws with a code of honor. Their typical rackets were extortion, gambling, prostitution, gunrunning, drug trafficking and construction kickbacks.
Gang violence in a number of neighborhoods, including the 2007 fatal shooting of then-Nagasaki mayor Iccho Ito during his election campaign, led the government to tighten gun controls, racketeering laws and other anti-gang measures.
Local residents and businesses have also stepped up and filed dozens of lawsuits against yakuza groups to bar them from their communities. In December 2022, Fukuoka city filed for a court injunction to close down an office led by the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi branch of yakuza near elementary and junior-high schools, and forced it off the street six months later.
The aging of yakuza members and their financial difficulties have also hobbled the syndicate, experts say.
The number of arrested yakuza members last year declined to 9,610, compared with 22,495 in 2014, police said.
Yakuza crackdowns have driven many members to quit and sent others underground, but they also prompted younger generations to join “tokuryu” groups rather than the traditional criminal structures, Noboru Suetomi, a criminologist and expert on yakuza, wrote in a recent article.
The National Police Agency describes “tokuryu” as “anonymous and fluid” groups that repeatedly form and disband through social media to carry out swindling, illegal betting, prostitution and other crimes often remotely, including from overseas.
They recruit participants who are not connected to each other and assign them specific roles. While often cooperating with conventional yakuza, they invest their earnings into illegal businesses, the agency said.
“They have become a threat to public safety,” it said.
While numbers are hard to track, more than 10,000 people were arrested from 2021 to last year for alleged swindling, illegal drug trade and other crimes, such as forgery of identification cards, which were linked to “tokuryu,” records showed.
In April 2022, police busted a ring of 19 people recruited anonymously who operated a fake telecom out of Cambodia and swindled elderly Japanese. Last year, Tokyo police arrested six people who got in touch via social media and carried out a high-profile daytime robbery of watches and jewelry worth ￥300 million (US$1.93 million) at a store in Tokyo’s posh Ginza district.
Japanese National Police Chief Yasuhiro Tsuyuki, at a meeting on Monday of top prefectural criminal investigators, said that “tokuryu” have been part of surging cases of swindling over social media and have become a “serious concern.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS