The Sumo and the Yakuza

You still act like yakuza off the street.

To compensate, Yakuza groups plunged into financial fraud, stock manipulation, and cybercrime, giving rise to a new generation of gangster nerds, more interested in business than blackmail. For instance, Yamaguchi Gumi, the largest Yakuza organization in Japan, boasts roughly 36,000 members and associate members, constituting less than a half of the total Yakuza gangsters in Japan, and is estimated to haul in as much as 2 trillion ( 21 billion) annually.

In the 1950 s, Japanese ministers and industrialists sometimes relied on nationalist elements of Yakuza groups to quash unions and socialists. The gangs then upheld classic Japanese virtues of manliness and loyalty and paid for mistakes by slicing off one of their fingers in atonement.

Instead, these respectable supporters have gradually been replaced over the years by a shady new class of rich Japanese, who have risen through loan sharking and other dubious businesses. As a result, some Sumo stables have become associated in one way or another with people running front companies for Yakuza organizations.

Neither the DPJ nor the LDP appears dependable in any of these areas. As a result, the public is paying increasing attention to the newly created Japan Restoration Party (JRP) and its populist leader, Osaka City Mayor Toru Hashimoto, a former governor of Osaka prefecture and the son of a minor Yakuza (mafioso).

Backed by an enraged public, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) recently searched some 30 sites, including a raid on a major Sumo stable, or training center. The move was made in an effort to seize material evidence about the nexus between Sumo wrestling and the Yakuza, Japan s Mafia like organized crime groups that date from the seventeenth century.

Once he is released, it is anticipated that he will direct a major drive to revitalize his organization through both its traditional and new illegal activities. Some analysts suspect that the Sumo circle has provided some of the best match tickets to Yakuza leaders, who, as matches were shown on television, sent signals to the godfather that they remain loyal to him.