Word: yakuza
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Just before the final shootout in Brother, the yakuza played by Takeshi Kitano walks into a diner out in the California desert. The old man behind the counter takes a long look at him and says, "You Japanese are very inscrutable...
...Loner, whom Kitano embodies in most of his films, is bound to no nation and needs no subtitles to translate his brute magnetism. It doesn't even matter which side of the law he is nominally on: as an officer in Violent Cop and Fireworks (Hana-bi) or a yakuza in Boiling Point, Sonatine and Brother, he carries a gun and a grudge. Like the uninflected killer played by Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's classic 1967 crime film, aptly titled Le Samourai, Kitano walks slowly, stares blankly; he might be a patient whose life the surgeons have saved...
Rumors about sumo fixing have been around almost as long as the sport. Four years ago, a tabloid magazine in Japan ran a series of articles alleging yakuza (Japanese mafia) ties and match rigging. Making the claims then were two ex-wrestlers, who died suddenly within 15 hours of each other in the same Nagoya hospital and of the same respiratory ailment. Sumo is indeed filled with mystery. Itai is aware of the fate of previous whistle-blowers. One of the deceased wrestlers was his stable master...
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...