A tense face-off with Chinese criminals a few years back convinced a 36-year-old yakuza gang member that things were changing between Japanese and Chinese underground groups.
Now, he finds his hunch was correct. The man, a member of a suburban Tokyo gang, was guarding a massage parlor that had paid protection money to his organization.
About 20 men, all in black coats, suddenly invaded the parlor, wielding knives with long, sharp blades.
The Japanese man figured he’d soon be dead. The leader of the group shouted something in Chinese. The Japanese guard wondered if they had come seeking revenge because a few days earlier, he had thrown out a drunken Chinese man from another shop.
“What are you?” the leader asked him in broken Japanese. “I’m yakuza,” shouted the guard. “I’ll kill you all with this,” he said, grabbing the nearest weapon–a ball-point pen. He was otherwise unarmed.
After a few tension-filled moments, the leader backed off. “Your heart is strong. We can be friends,” he said.
He then signaled the other men that it was time to leave. They stole nothing from the parlor.
The yakuza later heard of the arrest of several members of the Chinese gang in a neighboring prefecture. Smuggled into Japan from China’s Fujian province, they had committed robberies across a wide swath.
His yakuza gang had long controlled the suburban town’s entertainment districts. Attacks by Chinese gangs were unheard of.
But it seemed they had underestimated the threat from the Chinese underground. This, and the increasingly close ties formed between the two groups, is the new reality in Japan.
The reason is simple: money. Ken, a 25-year-old Chinese living in Tokyo, came here from northeastern China with his family when he was 9. His grandmother was a war-displaced Japanese who had been left behind in China in the chaotic end to World War II.
After graduating from a junior high school, Ken joined a road race gang called “Dragon.” Most of its members were descended from war-displaced Japanese like his grandmother. Ken is now a middle-ranking member. He has no job. He earns money from bank transfer scams or by arranging fake marriages. His partners in crime are Japanese yakuza.
“I have acquaintances in the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Sumiyoshi-kai, the Inagawa-kai and the Kudo-kai, among others,” Ken said, dropping the names of some of Japan’s largest crime syndicates. “I count on them, and they count on me.”
He says his relationship with the yakuza dates back to a run-in he had when racing his bike.
Although he sometimes teams up with them for a crime, he refuses to join any of the yakuza gangs.
He doesn’t hide his reasons for committing crimes. “I can’t make much money otherwise,” he shrugs.
Another Chinese man belonging to a different Dragon hot rod gang says he has even test-fired a gun in Japan.
“I can buy one any time I want because I know where to get one,” he says. “Many of my friends have guns.”
His gun source is a yakuza group. A 33-year-old Japanese, meanwhile, who once belonged to a yakuza gang in the Kanto region, says he sometimes was asked to help a Chinese theft ring.
His Chinese clients had a list of wealthy homes, complete with photos. They would request a driver.
He was paid for getting an underling to drive the Chinese to and from a targeted house.
“Our organization strictly banned us from forming ties with Chinese. But we low-level guys couldn’t earn anything if we stuck with that rule,” the man says.
“Any request from a Chinese is attractive because it pays immediately,” he adds.
Another gangster was asked by the leader of a Chinese theft ring to get him a visa to live in Japan legally.
The leader, whose favorite phrase is “Japanese are my wallet,” offered to pay the gangster 3 million yen to procure a visa for the leader, even at the risk of arrest.
Japanese and Chinese gangs do not always coexist peacefully. Some Japanese yakuza syndicates, like the Kita-Kyushu based Kudo-kai, have pledged to eliminate Chinese gangs from their territories.
About 10 years ago, the syndicate assigned 30 members to discover if any sex shops or bars in the city’s entertainment districts were run by Chinese. Any found were soon evicted.
“If the Chinese take root, women and children won’t feel safe walking in town. We are on guard to prevent that from happening,” said a source close to the gang.
In the city’s Kokura district, there are no more Chinese-run shops.
Japanese police, while cracking down on yakuza, also keep a sharp eye on two Chinese groups: One is crime rings formed by those from the same region, such as Fujian province, Shanghai and the northeastern region of China, and the other is Japan-grown Dragon gangs.
The presence of Chinese rings in Japan was revealed in the early 1990s after their members were involved in murders, robberies and other crimes in Tokyo’s Kabukicho entertainment district.
Most of the crimes in those years came from fights over money between different groups.
In September 2002, a senior member of a gang affiliated with Japan’s Sumiyoshi-kai was fatally shot by a Chinese gang member in Kabukicho. Revenge attacks ensued, but the affair did not develop into a major clash between the yakuza and Chinese criminal gangs.
Chinese criminal rings are now entrenched in Japan, where they target ordinary Japanese citizens.
Police are struggling to grasp the whole picture.
Chinese criminal rings tend to assign different members to different crimes, staying in the shadows until they are ready to strike.
Dragons, meanwhile, are groups of bikers and hot rodders that formed in the mid-1980s. Seven or eight groups exist in the Tokyo, Yokohama and Osaka areas.
The first Dragon gang emerged in Tokyo’s Edogawa Ward, where a resettlement center to help war-displaced Japanese returning from China and their families was located.
One Tokyo group, Oji Dragon, was once led by Zhang Yong, 30, who now runs a construction company.
Zhang came to Japan at 7 with his family. His grandmother was a war-displaced Japanese left in China as a child. He also has a Japanese name, but still keeps his Chinese nationality.
His Dragon group’s name uses Chinese characters meaning the “soul of China.”
As an elementary school pupil, Zhang was often bullied, beaten and kicked by older pupils.
In junior high school, he was able to overpower his tormentors and the bullying stopped. He joined the Dragon gang and became its leader at 16. He fought almost every day and never lost, he says.
About 90 percent of Oji Dragon’s membership of 200 are now Japanese, attracted by the group’s strength, he says.
Meanwhile, Japanese police working against crimes committed by Chinese have been accused of going overboard and discriminating against Chinese and other foreign nationals.
One example is an anti-crime leaflet produced in 2000 by the Metropolitan Police Department. It urged citizens to call police whenever they saw a suspicious Chinese.
The police said they used the word “Chinese” specifically because many suspects arrested around then in lock-picking home break-ins were Chinese. The leaflet was withdrawn after being criticized. The Chinese Embassy also protested to the Foreign Ministry.
Still, Chinese suspects were the largest group among all foreign nationals arrested for crimes that year.
In 2000, police acted on 16,784 crimes and visa violation cases involving Chinese. That was more than twice the number in 1995, and accounted for 54 percent of all cases committed by foreign nationals that year.
In 2008, the number of cases involving Chinese suspects fell to 12,430, about 40 percent of all cases involving foreign suspects. But Chinese still top the list at about 2.6 times more than second-place Brazilian nationals. Most were cases of break-ins for theft.
Also last year, 2,764 Chinese were arrested or referred to prosecutors for theft, murder and other criminal acts, 3.4 times the number of Brazilians. Meanwhile, 330,000 Japanese were accused in similar crimes.
However, the ratio of Chinese suspects to people from China who are registered legal aliens was 0.45 percent–about 1.7 times higher than for Japanese suspects versus the Japanese population at 0.26 percent. The ratio for Brazilians was also 0.26 percent.
As Japan with its shrinking and aging population faces a growing shortage of labor, discussion continues on whether to accept more foreign workers.
Some people are staunchly opposed to opening the doors to unskilled foreign labor, mainly out of concern over crime. A Cabinet Office survey in 2004 found that the main reason for opposing such moves, cited by 74 percent of those opposed, was fear for deteriorating security.
bron: (IHT/Asahi: December 5,2009)
In a more subtle way, some forms of capitalism today have been instrumental for brutalizing businessmen. Through an ideology that can be summarized in the words of Gordon Gekko of the film Wall Street, “Greed is good,” people in business were brainwashed into thinking that in the world of business, there is no room for the love of benevolence, that is the ability to seek the good of others without expecting anything in return. These businessmen knew the love of attraction, that is the love for money and power. They were also able to love with the love of friendship, that is, they could be motivated to work for their relatives and their friends. But they were told that there was no room for gratuitousness in business.
