Goodbye to the Yakuza
theatlanticwire.com
theatlanticwire.com
Anecdotally, their influence has been waning in recent decades, or at least moving from retail level criminality into Chicago-style corruption regarding public works projects. (That aside, I had a bit of a run-in with two of them a few years back while they were painting "Pay us our money or we'll kill you" on a neighbor's house, and I was not left with massive new respect for my local police department as a result of that encounter. Long story short, but you could practically hear "If she hadn't borrowed money and not paid it back then she wouldn't have a yakuza problem now would she" during the middle of my 911 call.)
But frankly, in Kyoto at least, the problem wasn't stolen bicycle, the problem was that there are no parkings anywhere in the city and so every year you had to expect to have your bike impounded...
And other gibbering in a western accent and they wave me past. I usually get stopped around 2am during my cycling commute home. Makes sense I guess when the last trains have stopped and lots of bicycles get "borrowed".
I'm half-joking, but then again I'm half-serious. I know it's not PC, but for heaven's sake, she borrowed money from a crime syndicate. Shouldn't she have known what she was getting herself into?
By law and custom the United States has a lot of protections for debtors. Japan... well...
There must be a way to stop it all. However the law does indicate that ANY involvement with them will screw the business, so banks using the Yakuza to collect will now be equally liable.
Even more dispiriting and harmful to their carefully nurtured image of lovable bad boys, many Japanese are pointing at yakuza involvement with the banks and loan companies, the avalanche of unpaid mortgages and are blaming the hoods for Japan's entire economic woes.
There was another NYTimes article on how "long time" members of the Yakuza, with an emphasis pre-crash on financial revenue sources, faced severe layoffs (I can't find it, google quality search problems).
Also, in many spas and golf clubs, they don't allow customers with tattoos or missing pinky fingers.
b) She should not have borrowed money. Then again instead of the US credit card loans, Japan has the Yakuza, two sides of same coin, except Yakuza kill, we just make you homeless.
Yes. Consumer credit in the US is exactly like Japanese organized crime.
Predatory tactics on both ends, my friend. See the subprime mortgage problem in the US.
Like I implied: Yakuza = violent means to an end, US Loans = non violent means to a same end within the respective field.
I am not implying banks do the same as the Yakuza regarding "protection" and bribery/extortion, though that does happen in the US, just on a different level (can't threaten politicians so easily with baseball bats). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#Automobile_safety_a... about how an attempt was made to blackmail Nader.
And you don't consider the distinction between being violent and non-violent pretty damn significant? Also, consumer credit holders doesn't get to repossess your home, only your mortgage lender does that.
Great scene, especially if you wanted to make a case for the benevolent influence of corporations on society. Power to the bean counters!
"It's over for the little guy" -
> “The new laws will make the price of paying off the yakuza, in loss of face and in penalties, much more expensive than the actual cash payments to the yakuza."
So what happens when the yakuza raise the stakes and make it even more costly to not pay them off? (e.g. we'll kill you, your family, etc.)
http://www.economist.com/node/18652037
The issue is that in India, it's illegal to both accept and give bribes. This prevents bribe givers from 1) blowing the whistle. 2) Admitting to others who want to convict the corrupt official that they gave him bribes.
"Kaushik Basu, the chief economic adviser to India’s finance ministry, suggests that this may be partly because the law treats both bribe-giving and bribe-taking as crimes. This makes it hard to blow the whistle on corrupt officials, because the bribe-giver has also broken the law. If he complains, he risks prosecution or, more likely, being asked for another bribe by the police. In a provocative paper based on game theory, Mr Basu argues for the legalisation of some kinds of bribe-giving. His proposal has instigated a furious debate in India, with television channels even assembling panels to discuss it."
> If you go to the police, before they come to you, and tell them that you have been working with the yakuza, the police will exempt you from the ordinance and help you sever relations.
i.e. whistleblower protection writ large, at the company level.
Those extra $10-$25 fees for things like getting a birth certificate are high enough to cover the wages of government workers and therefore discourage the petty bribery that goes on in the third world.
Well, no one refuses outright.
Papers get lost suddenly, people forget things, all necessary steps take as long as it is legally possible, you suddenly have to provide tons of papers or references...
So you say it'd kill your business if it takes so long? Well, let's discuss it, maybe we can work something out... you know what I mean?
I start wondering what happens when other groups fall under the same scrutiny... In the US, the PATRIOT Act was only supposed to apply to terrorism. It turns out that 95+% of the wiretaps, etc have related to drugs.
Most likely the Yakuza phenomenon is exaggerated by the media, and for most people, they are just a thing you hear about on the TV, but that you never see in real life.
Inevitably, in large metropolis, you'll have things like red-light districts. These places will be full of people who don't particularly value the rule of law, which means they're going to be hotbed of instability. Policemen have little incentive to risk their neck for prostitutes and various scumbags. In comes the yakuza, and order is guaranteed; nobody will make trouble, and if they do, yakuza will dispatch of them quickly and reliably. Police are happy, less work for them. They also provide easy cash, something hard to come by in a very conservative society where banks often lend money depending on your surname rather than your cashflow. They like finance as much as anybody else.
In a society that (in most cases) still values tradition and stability above everything else, yakuza provides these elements to the inevitable "dark underbelly"; as long as they cover that role, rulers are not particularly interested in going after them for a bit of unpaid taxes. Nowadays it's fashionable for mainstream media to bash them because they all need scapegoats for a long-running financial crisis that has no clear culprit (apart from the usual "generalized greed" and "implicit flaws in the capitalist model", but nobody wants to really address those two, of course).
If you do pay, you become a criminal.
Talk about a backwards way of fighting the problem.
I don't think there is an equivalent law in the U.S. against paying for "protection", but it might make sense.
My dad ran the racket for Boston's Chinatown/Combat Zone in the 70's-80's and it was definitely more acceptable at the time to pay up (as the police weren't interested in what happened there).
I don't know how interesting it all is. He basically showed up in the Combat Zone one day and went from place to place telling them they were going to start paying him. The guy they were already paying got disappeared, so they complied.
Over time the territory came to include Chinatown (which abuts the Combat Zone), and he eventually got hooked up with the non-Irish mob in Providence (where I guess he was one of their better earners). He also apparently stole a lot of boats (very easy to steal, very hard to track), which when I found out helped explain to me why my grandmother was Admiral of the Quincy Yacht Club without ever owning a boat.
The FBI issued an arrest warrant for him the day I was born, so he fled (apparently to California). They seized all my mom's assets (in an effort to get her to cooperate), and tailed her and I everywhere for most of my childhood.
He ended up getting arrested back in Boston in the early 90's (A few years ago I worked at the same company as the prosecutor who tried his case, which we both discovered one night drinking at a company off-site...awkward conversation).
From what I know, he's now living in Southern California (he had a security consulting company...which I suppose it somewhat serendipitous considering that both my brother and I ended up working in information security).
I'm not one of those people who believes that people are "good" or "evil", but if forced to decide one way or the other, my dad falls pretty squarely into the "bad" camp. The thought of him participating in an IAMA on Reddit is about the funniest thing I can think of.
"All yakuza groups have a coat of arms or crest known as a daimon(代紋) that represents the group. The Yamaguchi-gumi daimon is often called hishi-gata because of its shape."
Sure, he romanized that last one, but that really didn't make the sentence understandable.
It's a heck of a lot easier and cheaper to go after people who cannot defend themselves than the powerful. This is why virtually no-one from wallstreet has been put in prison and corporations have become "people".
Once you give police laws like this, they start hitting the innocent little-guys with all the power they have and no-one gets how horrible that is until someday the bystander who says "well if you didn't do anything wrong... blah blah" gets caught in the trap as well. Then it's too late.