A bloody dispute between two yakuza groups in a Japanese city has led to a historic fightback by local people, writes David McNeillin Kurume city
A REPUTATION for unpredictability and violence keeps journalists away from the yakuza, but a vicious turf battle between two rival gangs in this southern city has made them reluctant media fodder. The two-year war has produced seven deaths and over 20 shootings and bombings.
Now, in a remarkable act of collective courage that has electrified the fight against organised crime in Japan but divided this city, local people are taking the gangsters to court.
"The yakuza are using weapons like the kind you see in the Iraq war: grenades, bombs and guns that can shoot people from 500 metres away," says lawyer Osamu Kabashima, who is representing the 1,500 plaintiffs. "My clients have had enough. They want to live in safety and peace."
In the most notorious episode in the war, a gangster walked into a hospital and pumped two bullets into an innocent man mistaken for a rival.
In another, outside this, the head office of the 1,000-member Dojin-kai gang in a busy shopping area, a machine-gun ambush sprayed bullets in all directions.
Those attacks finally snapped the patience of locals, who have banded together to drive them out, using a civil law that allows them to challenge businesses that "infringe on their right to live peacefully".
Win or lose, the legal fight will go down in history. "This is the first time that citizens are trying to expel the head office of a designated gangster organisation," heralded the liberal Asahinewspaper, which called on local businesses and government leaders to support the plaintiffs and "drive the yakuza into extinction".
That seems unlikely. Japan's National Police Agency estimates that there are more than 84,000 gangsters in the country's crime syndicates, many times the strength of the US Mafia at its violent peak.
A single group, the Yamaguchi- gumi, is the General Motors of organised crime, with nearly 40,000 members in affiliates across Japan and a high-walled central compound in one of the wealthiest parts of Kobe city.
Fan magazines, comic books and movies glamorise the yakuza, who operate in plain view in a way unthinkable to western observers.
Dojin-kai's headquarters is public and known to any Kurume taxi driver. Signs pasted on the doors of the six-storey building politely explain that the organisation has temporarily moved and provides its new address on the other side of the train station.
The tangled relationship between the yakuza and legitimate businesses, particularly real estate, suggest the mob has metastasised into Japan's economy and society and will not easily be removed.
In March of this year, Suruga Corporation, a listed company, was revealed to have paid more than ¥15 billion (€110 million) to a firm linked to a Yamaguchi- gumi affiliate. In return, gangsters removed tenants from five properties Suruga wished to acquire, taking on average 12 to 18 months to empty a building.
"We cannot make profits unless we sell land quickly," Takeo Okawa, director of Suruga's general affairs department blithely told the Asahinewspaper. "Speed is our lifeline." Suruga reportedly made ¥27 billion (€198 million) in profit by selling on the property.
The Dojin-kai's new headquarters, immediately identifiable by its business nameplate, is a two-storey compound in one of Kurume's better neighbourhoods. The acting boss sits in a conference room dominated by portraits of deceased chairman Yoshikazu Matsuo in ceremonial kimono, murdered last year.
"We have always had a strong relationship with local people, so this is a bad situation for us," he explains. "It is obvious that they are being manipulated by the cops who want to crush us."
The police, who declined to go on the record, deny this, as does lawyer Kabashima.
"No ordinary person wants to live beside these gangs," he says. "There is a school close to the site of the machine-gun attack. What if the bullets had hit children?"
Kabashima and his family have lived in fear since he was outed in the media last year, but he says his foes are "not stupid enough" to attack him. "They cannot move against me without severe consequences."
The yakuza has long occupied an ambiguous position in Japan. Like its Italian cousins, it has murky historical links with the county's ruling party, the Liberal Democrats. A reputation for keeping disputes to itself and not harming "non-combatants" protected it from the ire of citizens and the attentions of the police.
That ambiguity was supposed to have ended in 1992 when the government introduced the toughest anti-mob legislation in a generation, punishment for yakuza excesses during the booming 1980s when it shifted into real estate and other legitimate businesses.
However, the state still hasn't made membership of a criminal organisation illegal, or given the police the anti-mob tools long considered crucial in other countries: wire-tapping, plea- bargaining and witness protection.
"The authorities and the yakuza have achieved a kind of balance where they basically accept each other's existence, but pretend otherwise," says Suzuki Tomohiko, a journalist who specialises in crime writing.
"It's very Japanese. The 1992 law was a kind of performance for the public."
A new police White Paper warns that the yakuza has moved into securities trading and infected hundreds of Japan's listed companies, a "disease that will shake the foundations of the economy", it says.
Experts claim the Yamaguchi- gumi, in particular, has become a behemoth with resources to rival Japan's larger corporations.
The lack of legal tools to fight the yakuza is painfully obvious in Kurume, where the law only allows the plaintiffs to challenge hoods within a 500-metre radius of their homes.
"It's not easy to kick them out of town," laments one, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We're demanding that they stop using the building as a place of gathering. They own the building, it's their property and we can't make them give it up."
Even if it moves, the mob will simply pop up somewhere else in Kurume, admits a senior official at the city office, which is backing the plaintiffs. "I guess it is correct to say that Japanese people have learned to live with the yakuza," said the official, who also requested anonymity.
Unchallenged, the Dojin-kai will invest huge untaxed profits in real estate, eventually taking over whole blocks.
"We have to hope that even if they relocate, the residents of the new area will challenge them again," says the official. "The yakuza are strong on a one-to-one basis, but they are extremely weak in the face of collective action."
Kurume's latest problems began in May 2006. Long-time Dojin-kai boss Seijiro Matsuo suddenly announced his resignation, sparking a war of succession with splinter group Kyushu Seido-kai that detonated in front of the Kurume headquarters with an AK-47 rifle attack.
Not everyone is rooting for the plaintiffs. "We're not against the people going to court but if they win, the yakuza might relocate close to us and that would cause problems for my business," says Yuichiro Okamura, who owns a small restaurant beside Kurume station.
The owner of a vegetable shop next to the Dojin-kai building said the plaintiffs should let sleeping dogs lie. "The yakuza have never done anything to me, but the people in that building have much better manners than some of the youngsters around here today."