Samurai Gangsters

In early May 2007, my friend and I wandered the streets of Oita, Japan, at night, trying to understand this strange culture all around us. Near a main downtown intersection close to Miyako Machi, the "red-light district" of the area, I saw a young man with dark, slicked-back hair, a black suit, white-collared shirt, and a loosened black tie. He held a clipboard, and his grip allowed me to see part of a greenish tattoo stretched out over the top of his hand. When a young woman passed by, he'd approach, smile, and compliment her looks.

"He's recruiting," my friend said. I nodded. "Pimp?" No, he replied: "Check his fingers, but I'd say yakuza." My eyes widened. "Here? I thought they were only in the big cities." He shook his head, exuding far too much confidence after having lived in Japan for only a year: "They're everywhere."

I was naïve then—most likely, the young man was a harmless, well-dressed kyakuhiki hustler—but not anymore. After nearly 12 years of living in Japan, I am quite aware that the yakuza are not some knock-off mafia-like organization caricatured in pop culture. As scholar Andrew Rankin reveals in Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld, their roots run centuries-deep within the culture, stretching back to the beginning of the Edo period (1603–1867), the era before Japan's strong pivot toward adopting Western modernization.

The book, divided into 14 chapters and a conclusion, is an engrossing, comprehensive study of Japan's love-hate relationship with organized crime. The first chapter, "Samurai Gangsters," begins with the words of Numata Toramatsu, an important Tokyo underworld figure during the militant rise of Japan between the two world wars. "It is no overstatement to say that many of our yakuza ways, the customs and rituals that we continue to observe proudly today, were born from warrior culture." That, Rankin astutely points out, is the image of the yakuza, not necessarily the truth.

Seventeenth-century samurai sometimes behaved like gangsters. Rankin explains that the noble samurai "enjoyed other violent privileges, including the right to carry out revenge killings, with the shogunate's permission." He then describes a painstaking paperwork process so similar to how Japan works today it made me smile. "A samurai wanting to carry out a vendetta needed to register his name, and the names of any men who were going to assist him, at the office of the shogunal magistrate. The samurai then waited for his application to be adjudicated. Once his name had been accepted into the official list of registered avengers, he was free to pursue his vendetta." Upon reading this, I muttered, if he still wants to.

Fluent in Japanese, Rankin "studied and worked in Tokyo for twenty years," and later earned his Ph.D. in Japanese literature from Cambridge University. His English-language scholarship of Japan continues through his books—Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Kodansha 2011) is a personal favorite. When I saw that he'd decided to tackle the yakuza, it seemed a natural extension.

To most Americans, the yakuza are superficially known for their tattoos, and, yes, finger chopping. Rankin contextualizes this act, borrowing upon his own past scholarship: "The voluntary finger chop was a way for a gang member to differentiate himself from katagi ('law-abiding civilians'). It was also a form of symbolism that asserted a link to warrior chivalry. The criminal who turned his dagger on himself resembled the samurai who killed himself with his own sword. A finger chop was thus like a mini-seppuku."

The wound was also seen as a source of earned pride: "since fingers were often the first part of the body to be struck in a duel or sword fight, a missing fingertip suggested an experienced swordsman."

The yakuza did not invent finger amputation as a form of punishment; Rankin notes that "finger-cutting rituals" had been in existence across Asia for centuries. But they have definitely popularized the act. Rankin links its standardization to Kosaka Senkichi, more commonly known as Kotetsu, "a gambler and swordsman" who entered the Aizu syndicate in the 1860s. What separates Rankin's book from other accounts is his pursuit of rare, primary sources. In reconstructing Kotetsu's life story, he reveals in his endnotes the discovery "of a privately printed memoir by one of [Kotetsu's] grandsons."

In the early 1870s—a turbulent time when the country was abandoning its samurai principles—it was Kotetsu who "restored order where anarchy had prevailed among the gambling houses" of Kyoto. When Kyoto opened its "first railway station in 1877," Kotetsu saw an opportunity to expand his network into more legitimate businesses. He "quickly imposed a system of taxation on the droves of horse-cart drivers and rickshaw pullers who conveyed cargo and passengers to and from the station." That was the beginning of a crucial trend. "At one point," writes Rankin in his introduction, "the yakuza penetrated almost every industry in Japan, from fish markets, to geisha agencies … pachinko parlors, garbage collecting, sumo wrestling, speedboat racing, property development, and pornography."

And yet to this day the yakuza are not deemed illegal by the Japanese government. The phrase "necessary evil" comes to mind here, and in fact "the addresses and telephone numbers of the headquarters of all the major groups are publicly available." Rankin rightly labels their current organizational status as "semilegitimate," and points out that even today in Japan, talking openly about the yakuza on a train can feel uncomfortable and even dangerous, depending on where and when you're having a conversation.

In the last 20 years, their numbers have dwindled. The Japan Times reported the yakuza's "membership exceeded 80,000," but by the end of 2025 "stood at 17,600." When asked why there has been such a decline, Japan's National Police Agency, the yakuza's natural foe, believed it was because of "an aging population within these criminal groups," and also, patting themselves on the back, "tighter enforcement and the nationwide rollout of anti-gang ordinances that restrict businesses and individuals from engaging with organized crime."

In July 2011, President Barack Obama signed an executive order targeting "transnational criminal organizations," imposing sanctions on four groups, the yakuza being one of them. The Department of the Treasury soon froze the assets of Oita-born Kenichi Shinoda, the leader of the largest yakuza organization, the Yamaguchi-gumi (gumi meaning group).

Rankin deems the Obama executive order a decisive blow. Facing an ever-increasing police backlash and the American government's denouncement, the yakuza were forced into an ultimatum: "They could either cease engaging in predatory crimes targeting civilians and limit their activities to the underground economy and the nightlife districts, or they could become full criminal clandestine groups like mafias and wage war against the authorities." Rankin explains that "most took the first option," but one group, the Kudokai, based in Kitakyushu, chose the second option. Its leader, Nomura Satoru, described by Rankin as having "menacing eyes" and "an aura of invincibility" that featured a "perpetual half-snarl of someone with a short fuse," was convicted in August 2021 of ordering assaults on a union leader and former police officer, among others. He was first sentenced to death by hanging, but in 2024 the court changed his sentence to life in prison.

Are the yakuza still relevant? Rankin believes so, but only if Japan finds itself in a state of disarray, he argues. "Moments of national crisis have tended to revitalize Japan's traditional underworld structures, granting them renewed legitimacy and social prominence." Rankin's final chapter, aptly titled "Death Sentence," includes an overview of the ever-increasing international crime networks being documented by the police, such as "Brazilian burglars, Chinese counterfeiters, Vietnamese shoplifters, Turkish smugglers, Nigerian car thieves, Peruvian drug traffickers, Taiwanese human traffickers, and Thai fake-marriage brokers," with many of these criminals choosing to "imitate Japanese gangster culture" by "sporting Japanese-style sleeve tattoos and performing loyalty rituals in the yakuza manner."

Recently, Japan has implemented stricter rules on immigration, making it more difficult to earn a visa, their reasons being that "foreigners" are not paying taxes. For some, the rules seem needlessly strict, since immigrants make up only 3.3 percent of the population—the most in recorded history. But there are others who welcome the tightening, fearing Japan is losing its core cultural identity, of which the yakuza remains.

Rankin ends his excellent historical summation with a suggestive sentence—a sort of wink at the near future. "The next time Japan lurches toward disorder and strife, perhaps the yakuza will rise again." Until then, the yakuza's real war for legitimacy is with the Japanese police, an organization some view as just as corrupt as the yakuza. "The largest mob in Japan today is the National Police Agency," said Senba Toshiro, a former police officer, in 2009. To Rankin, "it is not unreasonable to view the police and the yakuza as competitors rather than as enemies."

Perhaps, if societal "disorder and strife" reach unmanageable levels, as they did post-World War II when businessmen and politicians paid the yakuza "to stifle labor unionists and communist agitators," they'll one day be partners. For Japan's sake, let's hope not.

Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld
by Andrew Rankin
Basic Books, 400 pp., $32

Patrick Parr, who teaches at Lakeland University Japan in Ryogoku, is the author of Malcolm Before X, One Week in America, and The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age.

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