Word: yakuza
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...economy collapsed, nearly taking Obara's assets with it, his mother, who still controlled the lucrative pachinko operations, helped bail her son out, at one point paying off a creditor nearly $33 million in cash. Following these business failings, Obara's company reportedly became a front for the Sumiyoshi yakuza - branded Japan's second-largest organized crime syndicate by the national police - who kept him afloat by employing him as a straw man for their money-laundering operations...
...Korean gunman from Japan shot the wife of dictator Park Chung Hee. Called danji (finger chopping) the gesture was immortalized by independence fighter Ahn Jung Geun, who in 1909 swore to assassinate Japanese political leaders, writing the oath in blood from the stump of his severed finger. (Japan's yakuza also cut off their own digits, but that's usually to atone for blunders.) Cho's idol is Kim Du Han, the legendary gangster who battled the yakuza during Japan's colonization of the peninsula: "He was 100% nationalist." Cho is helping the families of the men who lopped...
...always been difficult to separate the reality of Beat's life from his embellishments. Certainly, his depictions of violent yakuza lives are so realistic and tinged with such closely observed comedic touches that it's no surprise to learn that he grew up amid gangsters in his Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo. "I watched yakuza guys getting stabbed in the stomach, punched in the head, all that stuff, ever since I was a kid," he recalls. In Brother there's a scene in a sushi restaurant in which a gangster rams chopsticks up the nostrils of a rival gangster. Then...
...have become part of his myth. According to his autobiography, which was turned into a television drama, Beat was the youngest of four children, born to a strong-willed woman who ran the household, and an underachieving house painter who drank too much and even failed at joining the yakuza. "My childhood was just a succession of nervousness and tension," he remembers. "We all froze the minute we heard my father come through the door. It really twisted me. I don't remember ever having a normal conversation with him. I hated...
...hours, just to see him," recalls Hakase Suidobashi, 38, who grew up in Okayama but enrolled in a Tokyo university to be nearer to his idol. Beat even recruited writers and comics for his TV shows from this clique of fans. Now, like a Japanese trading company or the yakuza, the Takeshi Gundan has become hierarchical, with a seniority system and top-down management style. "Instead of guns, we use laughter as our weapons," says Suidobashi, who has patterned his life after his hero. A shy young man, he was attracted to Beat's boldness. "He speaks his own language...