Tokyo: A senior member of yakuza was arrested for allegedly stealing Pokémon playing cards close to Tokyo in April, a case seen for example of Japanese organised crime teams combating declining membership.
Police brokers who had been busy coping with hundreds of yakuza members just some years in the past have seen one thing new: unorganised and loosely linked teams they imagine are behind a sequence of crimes as soon as dominated by yakuza.
A plastic sheet covers the location the place the lifeless our bodies of an older couple had been present in Nasu city, Tochigi prefecture, north-east of Tokyo, this yr.Credit score: AP
Police name them “tokuryu,” nameless gangsters and tech-savvy younger folks employed for particular jobs. They typically co-operate with yakuza, obscuring the boundary between them and making police investigations tougher, consultants and authorities say.
The Tokyo metropolitan police are investigating six suspects of their 20s and 30s, most of them with out connections to at least one one other, who’re believed to have been employed on social media to kill, transport and burn the our bodies of an older couple at a riverbank of Nasu, 200 kilometres north-east of Tokyo.
“It’s a criminal offense carried out like a part-time job,” Taihei Ogawa, a former police investigator and crime analyst, mentioned on an internet discuss present. “Duties are divided, making it tough for police to trace down the place directions come from.”
Yakuza membership has fallen considerably after intensive police restrictions.Credit score:
The yakuza membership shrunk to twenty,400 final yr, a 3rd of what it was twenty years in the past, in response to the Nationwide Police Company. It attributed the decline largely to laws handed to fight organised crime that features measures like barring members of designated teams from opening financial institution accounts, renting flats, shopping for cell telephones or insurance coverage.
Yakuza as soon as operated from well-marked workplaces, typically with indicators out entrance and symbols of their commerce equivalent to lanterns and samurai swords seen by the home windows. They had been typically portrayed in movies and cartoons as noble outlaws with a code of honour. Their typical rackets had been extortion, playing, prostitution, gunrunning, drug trafficking and development kickbacks.
However gang violence in plenty of neighbourhoods, together with the 2007 deadly capturing of Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Ito throughout his election marketing campaign, have since led the federal government to tighten gun management, racketeering legal guidelines and different anti-gang measures.
