It's easy to spot a Japanese gangster. He's the one with the full-body tattoo. But he'll probably just show you his card: crime's so much neater when it's organised. David McNeill, in Tokyo, meets a yakuza.
Mitsunori Agata, a hard man with a past that would have made Martin Cahill blush, is slipping off his kimono to show me his tattoos. "Beautiful, eh?" he says, turning round to show off a rippling tapestry of dragons, chrysanthemums and well-fed geishas that will never come off in the wash. "What do you think?" he asks, as if I'm about to disagree with someone with a four-foot sword on his wall. "Beautiful," I say.
Some people, and not just chain-smoking, gimlet-eyed molls who like their men rough, are said to find yakuza tattoos erotic, but I can't find anyone to say so for this article. "Kimoi," - disgusting - says a friend when I show her the snaps of Agata afterwards. "Kowai," - scary - says another.
"I bet your friends will be impressed with those photos," says Agata, putting his kimono back on. You could mistake him, fully clothed, for a retired civil servant. From his neatly trimmed silver hair to his sensible shoes, little marks him as out of the ordinary except a hardness lurking behind the crinkly pensioner's eyes.
But here in his office in Kabukicho, in the licentious pink heart of Tokyo's vice trade, it's clear that Agata is a very important person. The evidence is in the many photographs around the room of Agata bonding with flinty-faced men in expensive suits. Or the way his male assistant approaches and retreats on his knees, his shaven head almost touching the floor.
The dead giveaway, though, if you didn't know this nondescript man was a high-ranking yakuza gangster, is the layout of the room. Agata sits dead centre, flanked at the highest possible point by images of the most important figures in the yakuza hierarchy: his oyabun, or boss, and the emperor of Japan. "Everybody in our organisation knows their place," he says.
To the grovelling assistant and others who enter, this holy trinity of the Japanese mob - local boss, big boss and the man they still regard as the symbolic head of the Japanese family - is designed to intimidate.
Allegiance to the yakuza fatherhood means subordinating personal ambition and even logic to the dictates of the "organisation", which is why the self-willed Japanese gangster, although terrifying, can be useful to powerful people. Corporations have hired yakuza gangsters to break strikes and demonstrations, protect politicians and businesses from other gangsters and, extensively, intimidate people standing in the way of construction projects, which make up a huge chunk of the Japanese economy.
These days, apart from run-of-the-mill extortion, loan sharking (which has snared an estimated two million debt-ridden Japanese) and drug running, gangsters keep busy in deflation-hit Japan, collecting debts from reluctant creditors. The mere appearance of a tattooed hood bearing the business card of his organisation is usually enough to make a loan defaulter reach for his chequebook with shaking hands. The tattoos, like fortitude, are part of yakuza tradition, which has survived intact into the 21st century; more than 70 per cent of gangsters have endured hundreds of excruciating hours under inky needles for full-body tattoos, presumably while lying back and thinking of the emperor.
DOWN BUT NOT OUT
Like its corporate counterpart, the yakuza world has been hit by lay-offs, suicides and the unwelcome attention of the authorities. A 1992 anti-organised-crime law kicked off a bad recession-hit decade for the underworld, which has consolidated and downsized like the rest of Japan Inc. But there seems little danger of its becoming extinct. Although the law hit smaller gangs hard, and the number of full and associate members fell from 90,600 to a low of 79,300 in its immediate aftermath, the mob has steadily recovered to be an estimated 85,300 strong in 2003, according to police.
And while income from crime has shrunk along with the rest of the economy, the yakuza has steadily worked its way into legitimate businesses. As much as 42 per cent of banks' bad loans, mainly to construction-related companies, involved organised crime, according to a recent government-funded report. The yakuza, observers say, is as much a part of Japanese life as dodgy builders and corrupt politicians, helping to explain why an FBI-versus-the-Mafia-style war is not on the cards.
"The authorities and the yakuza are in each other's pockets," says Tomohiko Suzuki, a crime journalist. "They've achieved a kind of balance where they basically accept each other's existence but pretend otherwise. It's very Japanese. The 1992 law was a kind of performance for the public."
Mitsunori Agata agrees. "The law was introduced because some politicians thought we were becoming too big and dangerous. It's had a small impact on what we do, but more important is the economy. We're very sensitive to recession, so some of us have been hard hit, but look at Yamaguchi-gumi," he says, referring to Japan's largest yakuza group. "They are getting bigger and bigger."
A visit to the headquarters of the Yamaguchi-gumi is a good way to get a sense of the yakuza's place in Japanese society. Set off the street in a quiet upmarket suburb of Kobe, 100 yards from a police station, one of the world's most powerful crime syndicates, with 17,900 full-time members - more than five times as many as the US Mafia at its peak - displays a large sign reassuring locals that it prohibits underage workers, the selling of drugs and the discarding of cigarette butts on its patch. "They're nice people," says a smiling pensioner next door. "They come around twice a year with gifts, and they keep the neighbourhood safe. We've never had any trouble from them."
This neighbourly harmony is only mildly disrupted on the fifth day of each month by a whispering fleet of Mercedes and Lexus cars, ferrying local mob bosses here from all over Japan. The monthly gatherings are observed by detectives but never interrupted. "Unless they break a specific law we can't intervene," says Takao Hamada, who investigates organised crime.
This odd genteelness between the underworld and law-abiding society appears surreal to anyone expecting the war against organised crime to be red in tooth and claw. Japan's top two dozen crime syndicates, including Agata's Sumiyoshi-kai, have published addresses, often in the best areas of the largest cities, with members proudly bearing name cards and corporate insignia. Mob bosses have for years been on first-name terms with corporate presidents and senior politicians. Nobusuke Kishi, a former prime minister, once helped to organise a yakuza funeral; another, Yoshio Mori, gave a speech at a wedding attended by Yuko Inagawa, the boss of the Inagawa-kai crime syndicate. When this was reported by a weekly magazine he said he didn't realise who Inagawa was.
"Politicians always say things like that," laughs Agata. "I go to a lot of political events with well-known people. Many know me, and, if they don't, when I'm dressed up in my full regalia they know what I am, the same way we always know a detective when we see one. They don't admit it, because it would cause them political damage, but they all call on us when they need something."
This symbiosis is partly a pragmatic recognition by both sides that, if there's going to be crime, at least it should be organised. The worst thing anybody wants in orderly, disciplined Japan is chaos on the streets.
"The government could try to break us up, but then what would happen? You'd have thousands of little thugs on the streets, threatening people and tearing the place up. We give people discipline. That's why we don't like the term 'violent groups' [as the yakuza is often called in Japan]. We prefer to be called ninkyodan [chivalrous groups], a bit like other civic groups. Of course wehave our own internal rules, but our violence is controlled and targeted and doesn't spill out among the public."
Not true. A long-running feud between Agata's Sumiyoshi-kai and the Yamaguchi-gumi has claimed a number of innocent lives, including three people killed in a bar earlier this year when a Sumiyoshi mobster opened fire on a rival. As often happens, the culprit voluntarily surrendered to what may well be a death sentence rather than cause problems for his organisation by going on the run, but it all adds to the unwelcome police heat.
"Things have changed, that's for sure," Agata says. "I used sometimes to go drinking with the police, but we don't do that any more, now they've started to frame people like me. And the business is getting more difficult. But we will always be around. There's all kinds of trouble in this world, and as long as this exists you'll have people who need our strength and expertise."
But what happens when Japanese mobsters want to abandon their criminal ways and go straight? US wise guys have limited options: run and hope for the best or fink on your mates and live in FBI-sponsored witness protection, remembering to check under the car bonnet every morning. It's even worse in Japan: there's no police help, and leaving often requires an offering to appease the offended honour of an oyabun - usually your little finger.
Cash will do fine, this being the criminal underworld, but few junior hoods have much money, so the options are to sleep with the fishes or say goodbye to your golf grip. The preferred tools are a very sharp knife, a spotless white handkerchief and a manly grimace as you amputate your pinkie at the joint, in an honour sacrifice known as yubizume. A colleague provides a piece of string to stem the blood. After that the hood is off to his new life, via the hospital.
But then the problems start, because nobody wants to hire, marry or even sit next to a former gangster with tattoos and a missing little finger. Skin grafts can deal with the former; as for the fingers, that's where Yukako Fukushima comes in.
A sort of high-tech Florence Nightingale of the underworld, Fukushima is one of the world's leading suppliers of hand-made prosthetics. She has used them to help more than 500 yakuza gangsters go straight, often for little or no profit. In her small office in Osaka city, the yakuza capital of Japan, surrounded by body parts so scarily real looking that they could have fallen off her, she explains the tribulations of your average reformed hood and why she helps them.
"Many former yakuza gangsters want to go back to work, but without their pinkies nobody will take them on," she says. "They're often not bad people at all, although they can get very angry and scary sometimes. Some of them can't bring their kids to the swimming pool or be seen with their children in public at all, because the other kids will bully them and say: 'Your father is a gangster.' So I help them out."
Many former yakuza come to Fukushima broke, desperate and fingerless, meaning the 32-year-old, who studied industrial arts, has had to develop counselling skills to go with her technical talents, so she can deal with blubbering former hard men. "People don't think about this, but many yakuza have killed themselves. The statistics are really high. They come in here with no money, job or little finger, and sometimes they just burst into tears and blurt it all out," she says. Although she has been fiddled out of money many times, she still charges only €400 for custom-made fingers that should cost €1,200. "It's often all they can afford."
As in most Japanese companies, the customer is king, and Fukushima makes every effort to meet her clients' needs. She spends hours making her silicone creations as realistic as possible: blue veins for older feet and hands, for example, and all-weather sets for former yakuza who like to go out in the sun, with darker prosthetic fingers for summer and paler ones for winter. So seriously does she take her work that she has had three trips to hospital for overwork and stress, not helped by police who come and lean on her for information about her unusual clientele. "I don't have client privilege, like doctors or lawyers, unfortunately," she says.
The obvious question, after years of dealing with untrustworthy men nursing violent tempers and mutilated mitts, is why does she still do it? Fukushima, who got into the prosthetic business after taking pity on someone with a missing ear, says she's not clear herself. "Part of it is for my own enjoyment. I enjoy helping people. I can help people out with this skill I have, and they come back and tell me I've helped them get their lives back. I am also really angry with the government, smashing up gangs but not providing any help. When people say why do this, I say I didn't have a choice. I felt I had to. I want them to have happy lives, to make families and get jobs. Everybody deserves a second chance."