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Gangland Wars
Posted 18 Sep 10
When I lived in Tokyo in the 1980′s, “wars” between rival yakuza gangs were common enough to provide regular, lurid content in the tabloid papers. Being Japan, of course, the conflicts were generally little more than fistfights and an occasional knifing. Now and then a samurai sword would come out, and the injuries could be serious; but guns were truly rare. Anyway, all the maneuvers were closely tracked and exhaustively analyzed by reporters, much the same way they’d cover baseball, or the sumo tournaments. Crime was very much an entertainment.
Although their intensity has diminished over the years, the “wars” continue, and the tabs are still there, keeping score. I recently discovered The Tokyo Reporter, which translates articles from Japan’s more sensationalist magazines. (Warning – mildly NSFW.) The yakuza thread is an interesting window on the country’s ganglands.
Sort of like Chicago in the thirties, perhaps, but with better newsprint.
As I said, Japan’s yakuza, while still active, are grubbier and less interesting than they used to be. For excitement and bloody violence, the place to be is apparently Russia. While English-language coverage of domestic mafiya activity remains scant, occasional posts from Mark Galeotti provide something of the breathless, trackside scorekeeping of yellow journalism’s glory days.
Note that Galeotti is in fact a respected academic, and I don’t mean to disparage his reporting — which I find useful and valuable. In fact, we need more like it! Ever since the Gambinos folded up, local mafia reporting has been pallid. As in so many other areas of human endeavor, the interesting work is all being done abroad.
This post indexed as: Crime