Word: yakuza
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...Yakuza gang bosses in Japan give interviews on TV, dine openly with politicians and traditionally hand out business cards, so everyone knows how to find them. Roughly 40,000 mobsters belong to the Yamaguchi-gumi alone. Everybody knows that the yakuza get money from bars and restaurants, construction companies, even private-detective agencies. But these days some of their principal businesses include securities trading and management consulting. They are increasingly, Jake Adelstein tells us in his gripping descent into the underworld, Tokyo Vice, like bankers "with guns...
...Adelstein should know. As a rare foreigner working the crime beat at the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's (and the world's) largest-circulation newspaper, he got so close to the yakuza that he found himself buying cigarettes for former gang leaders and being guarded round the clock by a fiercely loyal retired crime boss. This all seems like an unlikely fate for a "goofy Jewish-American" in mismatched socks, as Adelstein presents himself, but his juicy and vividly detailed account of investigations into the shadowy side of Japan shows him to be more enterprising, determined and crazy than most...
...pages of the book, our unlikely hero tells us about his initiation into the seamy, tough-guy Japan beneath the public courtesies, a racy world filled with reporters given names like Chuckles and Googly. He digs up details in "the Chichibu Snack-mama murder case." He sleeps with a yakuza's moll who has a dragon tattoo on her back...
...only law enforcement that has had to get used to new times. Traditional organized crime groups like the Sicilian mafia, New York's Five Families and even the powerful Yakuza syndicates in Japan have had difficulty adjusting to this rapacious new model of international crime. Old patterns of family and clan ties have given way to networks whose obsessive focus is on making money - lots of it, as quickly as possible. The global integration of capital markets, coupled with the fall of communism, has triggered an enormous explosion of international financial flows, which has both facilitated criminal behavior, as trillions...
...Buddhist temple that is the city's oldest. The throng, more densely packed than any rush-hour train, is an unforgettable spectacle. Young and old are adorned in festive clothes, and pant with the effort of bearing dozens of mikoshi (portable shrines) through Asakusa's 44 residential blocks, while yakuza in loincloths proudly sport their full-body tattoos in a normally forbidden display...