Word: yakuza
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...most Japanese, the yakuza are as instantly recognizable as soldiers in an enemy army. They wear their hair in crew cuts, parade about in flashy double-breasted suits, and affect the swaggering gait and tough-guy scowl of characters out of Guys and Dolls. They are the gangster minority in a society that enjoys the lowest crime rate of any industrialized nation in the world (violent crime actually decreased by one-third in Japan over the past 15 years). But unlike mobsters of the West, Japan's yakuza (good-for-nothings) are part of a chivalric tradition that dates...
...mobsters within their communities. But no longer. Public opinion has been aroused as never before against the hoods. Premier Takeo Fukuda has called for a crackdown, and across Japan police are unleashing "Operation Bulldozer"-a kind of psy-war harassment, Japanese-style-against the nation's 2,500 yakuza bands and their 110,000 members...
What turned the heat on the sons of the samurai bandits was an unprecedented outbreak of warfare among the gangs. Six yakuza have been killed and 34 wounded since the first of the year in gun battles that terrorized whole communities. Worse, one innocent bystander and two police officers were wounded in gross violation of the ancient code. According to police undercover agents, the warfare erupted because of the waning health and authority of Crime Czar Kazuo Taoka, 64, leader of the 11,000-member Yamaguchi-gumi, the biggest yakuza gang in the country...
...flourish such illegal activities as gambling, prostitution and extortion. His estimated net revenues last year: $10 million. But Taoka, who is suffering from a heart condition, is no longer strong enough to prevent his fiery young lieutenants from trying to expand Yamaguchi-gumi power into territories held by rival yakuza. As the suspected aggressors in the internecine gangland warfare, Tao-ka's organization has been selected by police as their primary target in the cleanup. Says Seitaro Asanuma, director general of the National Police Agency: "Not until Yamaguchi-gumi is smashed to pieces will the nation accept the sincerity...
Kodama has financed adamantly conservative causes and postwar politicians. He is also reputed to have a grip on the yakuza, the Japanese equivalent of the Mafia; politicians have been known to wince at the mention of his name. Idaho Democrat Frank Church, chairman of the Senate subcommittee, charged last week that Kodama is "a prominent leader of the ultra-right-wing militarist political faction in Japan. We have had a foreign policy of the United States Government which has vigorously opposed this political line in Japan and a Lockheed foreign policy which has helped keep it alive...