Word: yakuza
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Mild in comparison with the U.S., social ills are nevertheless becoming more acute. The use of amphetamines and marijuana is growing, as is the fear of crime. In the past, only members of the Mafia, or yakuza, carried guns, and for the most part they killed only other yakuza. But last year there were several brutal handgun murders that did not involve mobsters. Three female employees at a supermarket, for example, were shot in the head in a Tokyo holdup. An advisory board to the National Police Agency last year endorsed the hiring of tens of thousands of additional police...
...jusen, created in the 1970s to provide loans to home buyers. During the "bubble" years of the late 1980s and early 1990s, these companies lent huge sums, not to home buyers but to shady real estate speculators, many of whom were linked to Japan's tattooed gangsters, the YAKUZA. Just as in the U.S., real estate crashed in Japan, although a bit later, in the early 1990s. Result: the housing-loan companies watched their bad loans rise to at least $77 billion, more than 75% of their total portfolios...
...Nishinomiya sports center and other large shelters--enough, in fact, so that authorities claimed everyone was getting two good meals a day. In some neighborhoods, the resumption of running water reduced the prospect of disease. Makers of goods ranging from helicopters to lingerie donated wares (the local yakuza had already turned themselves into neighborhood godfathers by dispensing necessities in their district), and tractors and cranes began working day and night to dig out victims and remove the huge hulk of the collapsed highway...
...traffic became two-way, with Filipina and Thai prostitutes migrating to Japan. Despite the efforts of citizens' groups to publicize the problem, little has been done to help the estimated 70,000 Thai "hostesses" now working in Japan as virtual indentured sex slaves in bars usually controlled by yakuza gangsters. The women, many of them ignorant villagers, are sold by Thai brokers for an average of $14,000 each and resold to the clubs by Japanese brokers for about $30,000 -- a sum they are obliged to work off, but rarely...
EVEN AS THE FBI IS GAINING GROUND ON THE AMERICAN branch of the Mafia, it is getting ready to take on a new threat: the YAKUZA -- Japanese mobsters. An estimated 100,000 yakuza in Japan rake in some $10 billion a year from narcotics, extortion and loan-sharking. As the gangs channel that cash into legitimate investments in the U.S. and Europe, the FBI will be hard pressed to decipher the money trail. One reason: money laundering is not a crime in Japan, so the mobsters can operate through shell corporations without the kind of close scrutiny at home that...