One afternoon last December, three men armed with steel bars burst into the Osaka city room of the Yomiuri Shimbun, one of Japan's largest newspapers. "Howling like mad dogs," as one eyewitness recalled later, the thugs knocked over desks, broke windows and beat up several reporters. By the time police arrived, the city room was a shambles, and eleven editorial staffers lay injured. Next day, Yomiuri reported that the daylight raid on its offices had been staged by organized gangsters in retaliation against the newspaper's describing them in a story as "a pack of bandits." The thugs have since been captured, and last week police also nailed the leader of the gang, a notorious hoodlum named Michio Sasaki, on charges of engaging in another current underworld practice: shaking down corporations. Sasaki, police contend, used his knowledge of an irregular loan to blackmail one of Tokyo's top banks for $16,000. According to the cops, Sasaki's shakedown of another corporation netted him nearly $100,000.
Thugs. Both incidents point to a relatively new phenomenon in law-abiding Japan that has police seriously worried: the rapid growth and increasing boldness of Mafia-like crime syndicates. Japan boasts the lowest crime rate of any industrial nation (Tokyo's homicide rate is about one-tenth that of New York's, for instance, and robbery is almost nonexistent). But police estimate that the country now has 124,000 yakuza (good-for-nothings, as mobsters are commonly called), divided into some 2,900 gangs. A crackdown on these boryokudan (violence organizations) has become the top priority of Japan's 200,000-man national police force.
As police have put pressure on such traditional gangland rackets as gambling, drug trafficking and prostitution, the mobsters have increasingly turned to corporation blackmail for new revenues. The shakedowns are made possible by the common corporate practice of hiring yakuza thugs, instead of less effective private guards, to police general stockholders' meetings. Such men even have a name, sokaiya, meaning general-meeting experts.
Protected by gangster muscle power, management has often been saved from probing or embarrassing inquiries by dissident stockholders. But as soon as the gangsters learn the inside dealings of a company, often with the aid of hired detectives, they turn the information into lucrative blackmail. Some sokaiya are known to maintain complete dossiers on corporate misdeeds, including the names of mistresses kept by executives. All too often, the companies are willing to pay the price of silence lest their public images be tarnished.
One Kyoto bank, which had used yakuza to threaten and intimidate workers into going along with management in a labor dispute, almost went broke from mob shakedowns before it recently called on police for help. At a general stockholders' meeting of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries two years ago, a tough-looking platoon of men beat up a group of peace advocates who had bought shares in the company so that they could protest Mitsubishi's arms production. The men were known to be sokaiya, but no company official ever admitted inviting them. Indeed, it is possible that they had simply muscled their way into the meeting.