TOKYO (Reuters) – With her dyed-brown long hair and tight designer jeans, Shoko Tendo looks like any other stylish young Japanese woman — until she removes her shirt to reveal the vivid tattoos covering her back and most of her body.
The author of “Yakuza Moon,” a best-selling memoir just out in English, the 39-year-old Tendo says that police efforts to eradicate the gangsters have merely made them harder to track.
“The more the police push, the more the yakuza are simply going underground, making their activities harder to follow than they ever were before,” she told Reuters in a recent interview.
Police say full-fledged membership in yakuza groups fell to 41,500 last year, down from 43,000 in 2005, a decline they attribute to tighter laws against organized crime.
“They’re being forced into a corner, their humanity taken away,” she said. “All the things they used to do for a living have been made illegal, so life has become very hard.”
Being a gang member is not illegal in Japan, and until recently the gangs were known for openness. Their offices even posted signs with their names and membership lists inside.
Gangs cooperated with police, handing over suspects in return for police turning a blind eye to yakuza misdemeanors, but this broke down after organized crime laws were toughened in 1992.
Read more at Reuters article “Gangster daughter sheds light on Japan underworld” (Image from Reuters)
I always thought the Japanese Yakuza is kinda cool. Anyway Shoko Tendo’s book “Yakuza Moon” is in stores now.
Possibly related:
I clicked the link and read the article; I’m not really a tatoo person, but they always do look really cool on yakuza
Seems like a cool book, I should look it up later when it’s in the library
by pketh (Sep 5, 2007 at 9 PM)[...] of Eiji Ijichi, a former Yakuza boss, as told to his doctor in the last months of his life, and Yakuza Moon (also here), which is a memoir about a woman born to a man who was the leader of a gang linked to [...]
by duncan heights » Yakuza: more than ‘Gungrave’ and ‘GTO’ (Mar 3, 2008 at 11 AM)…no comment
by the hunter (Jun 7, 2009 at 7 PM)In the 90s I read that Yakuza owned large portions of the real estate in Tokyo and were embedded in many major industries and corporations.
Of course, government is often as bad as any criminal gangs, it’s just that government is the largest and most powerful syndicate. All one has to do is look at the U.S. for an example of the latter.
by Igvend Storrensen (Jun 16, 2009 at 9 PM)That’s real ???
by rian (Sep 2, 2009 at 9 AM)I just finished her book. In it, she recants that her hair is naturally brown a few times. Very hard/crazy life for her, it’s much more about her story than Yakuza.
by Purity (Sep 17, 2009 at 10 PM)uff me boi hacer 1no, la gente del bloke klk
by EL super EG (Apr 29, 2010 at 12 AM)