The Yakuza Retreat, the Tokuryu Rises – Changing Organised Crime in Japan
The Asian Crime Century briefing 113
The Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest yakuza group in Japan, has submitted a letter to the police with a pledge to end their conflict with splinter groups and to “not make any trouble”. The Yamaguchi-gumi has been engaged in violent conflict with splinter groups formed by members who left the main group in 2015. There is not as yet any known commitment from those splinter groups to also cease fighting. The capitulation by the main Yamaguchi-gumi comes after the police in Japan kept up prolonged tight surveillance from 2020, which may be affecting their ability to operate and hence influencing their desire to seek less police monitoring.
The commitment from the Yamaguchi-gumi to not engage in violence comes after high level attacks. In January, there was a fire at the house of Kunio Inoue, head of the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi (a splinter faction), which the police described as arson. Inoue’s house had been targeted for several years by members of the main Yamaguchi-gumi, who had previously fired a gun at the building and poured petrol around the area.
Membership of the Yamaguchi-gumi and its splinter groups has continued to decline. At the end of 2014, the Yamaguchi-gumi had membership of 10,300, but by the time of the split between the main group and the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi in 2015 the original group had membership of only 6,000. This has continually decreased, until at the end of 2024 the main Yamaguchi-gumi had 3,300 members. The Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi had 2,800 members in 2015, which by the end of 2024 was down to only 120. Other splinter groups include the Kizuna-kai which had 400 members when they split in 2018, down to 60 at the end of 2024, and the Ikeda-gumi which split in 2020 with 80 members and now has around 60. However, the total numbers of people involved in gang activity is higher as there are also “associate members” of yakuza who are not yet promoted to become full members but who are involved in crimes.
Some yakuza gangs are simply disbanding. In 2022, the Anegasaki-kai gang based in the old Asakusa district of Tokyo, notified other yakuza gangs that it was disbanding. The Anegasaki-kai is believed to have been started in the early Taisho Era (1912-1926) in Japan, and its main business in recent years was as the leading ticket scalper in Tokyo (buying tickets for concerts and sports games and then selling them at inflated prices). Although the Anegasaki-kai was not designated as a crime syndicate under the Anti-Boryokudan Act (1992), it was monitored and targeted by the police as its members could be utilised to commit violent crime if required.
The decline in membership of the Yamaguchi-gumi has been part of a broader decline in yakuza numbers, with membership of designated bōryokudan (or yakuza) crime syndicates continually falling. The National Police Agency (NPA) of Japan reports that membership and associate members of boryokudan peaked in 1963, at approximately 184,100 persons, and declined until 1987 when there were signs of growth. That growth was halted, according to the NPA, by the Anti-Boryokudan Act in 1992 after which membership declined to around 22,400 at the end of 2022.
The Japan National Police Agency claims that yakuza membership is at the lowest level since the Anti-Boryokudan Act was enacted and attributes the number of people leaving gangs to the prolonged crackdowns. In the NPA white paper of 2024 the police claim that the number of gangs is also decreasing. As at June 2023, the NPA states that there were 25 organisations that were designated as gangs under the provisions of the Anti-Boryokudan Act.
From Yakuza to Tokuryu
Whilst membership of yakuza gangs and their organised activities are declining, crime is changing and seems to be rising. The NPA reported that in 2024 they took action against 10,105 people who were involved in crimes related to tokuryu, which are loosely connected anonymous crime groups. Of the total number of people arrested, 2,655 were for fraud, 991 for theft, 917 drug related, 348 for robbery, and 292 for violations of amusement arcade law. Around 40% of those arrested were recruited on social media.
Tokuryu groups (or networks) are linked to frauds, social media-based scams, violent robberies and exploitative male host clubs (the latter surely only being a Japanese phenomenon?!). Members of tokuryu are recruited through part-time job postings on social media, while the organisers remain anonymous.
This change in crime is leading to an increase in crime. In 2024 according to the NPA, reported crimes rose by over 100,000 to 703,351, the second successive year with an annual increase. The crimes increasing are homicides (up 59 year on year), robbery (up 213), and fraud (up 8,083).
Public awareness of tokuryu crime was heighted by the ‘Luffy gang’ robberies in 2022. At least 14 robberies that took place from October 2022 were arranged by a person nicknamed “Luffy” in the Philippines. Luffy and his associates in the Philippines used the Telegram app to send messages and recruit young men in Japan to carry out the robberies by advertising for “dark” part-time jobs. Luffy gave detailed instructions on how to carry out the robberies, with people tasked to carry out the crimes not knowing each other in advance. Many of robberies have been brutal home invasions. In February 2023, the four ‘Luffy’ robbery gang leaders were all repatriated to Japan from the Philippines. The Japanese police suspect that the gang conducted telephone scams in Japan from the Philippines, gaining over 6 billion yen (US$45.6 million) in proceeds of crime.
The ‘Luffy’ robberies raised attention in Japan to the ‘dark jobs’ in the black economy that have grown to facilitate such crimes. The ‘dark jobs’ in the black economy in Japan are related to the growing fraud epidemic in Asia. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department issued warnings regarding 3,480 offers of yami baito, (shady part-time jobs) posted on Twitter in 2022, up nearly 1.5 times from the 2,246 in 2021. These crimes involve young people who can be recruited separately via social media on the Internet, and for some social and cultural reasons seem to be willing to go to extremes when committing crimes.
In January 2025, the new Commissioner General of the NPA committed to take urgent action to eliminate of tokuryu criminal groups with more police crackdowns and cooperation with government ministries. The more urgent approach taken by the NPA comes as the total amount of financial loss to major frauds (largely involving the Internet) in 2024 amounted to over 200 billion yen ($1.28 billion). The Commissioner General stated that cybercrime is a great threat and hence the NPA plan to strengthen their National Cyber Department as well as strengthen laws relating to active cyber-defense.
Police enforcement action is correspondingly increasing, with the number of people arrested rising by 19,200 to 269,550. Of those arrested, 12,479 were for cybercrimes, 7,212 for specialised fraud (up 572 from 2023) and 8,232 for violations of the Cannabis Control Act as marijuana usage spreads among young people. As crimes involving tokuryu groups have increased, police action against yakuza has declined as the NPA took action against 8,249 members of organized crime syndicates in 2024, a record low and a decrease of 1,361 from the previous year. This new crime wave is not the yakuza that many people have associated with crime in Japan in the past.
However, are yakuza gangs retreating or are they engaged with tokuryu related crimes as a means of better evading police detection and scrutiny? Yakuza have historically flaunted their membership, status, and activity, not least by the use of brazen body tatoos and signs with the name of their organisation outside their offices. The NPA has speculated that some yakuza gangs are lessening their public profile but simultaneously collaborating with tokuryu.
The Sumiyoshi-kai yakuza gang, whose main membership is estimated by the NPA to be around 3,200, second only to the Yamaguchi-gumi, is in the process of selling its headquarters office in the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo. The departure comes after the Tokyo Metropolitan Public Safety Commission designated the Shinjuku condominium now on sale as the Sumiyoshi-kai headquarters in November 2023 and then the Tokyo District Court issued a temporary injunction banning use of the condo as the gang’s headquarters in June 2024. Pressure from the authorities is having an impact on the Sumiyoshi-kai, but it may be forcing them to adopt a more secretive approach. By effectively going underground, yakuza gangs such as the Sumiyoshi-kai will be harder for the police to monitor and conduct enforcement action against. Yakuza gangs may be becoming more like tokuryu, making use of the social media and other Internet based channels to clandestinely conduct their criminal business.
Yakuza from Tokyo to Thailand
Despite the decline in yakuza profile in Japan, there are more reports of Japanese criminals active outside the country. In February, the Royal Thai Police arrested a Japanese man known as “Yamaguchi” who is reportedly a leading member of the Yamaguchi-gumi. He was allegedly operating call centre based fraud operations in Cambodia and Myanmar, but was arrested whilst hiding in an apartment in Bangkok. “Yamaguchi” had been operating a website called “Last Samurai Japan” purportedly to sell art but in reality as a front for his online fraud activities and to launder the proceeds from online fraud. He is wanted in Japan on charges of physical assault, fraud, theft, and violations of organised crime control laws.
In April 2024, an alleged yakuza leader was murdered in the Nonthaburi area of Bangkok. Body parts of the victim, including his skull with a bullet hole, were found in an alley in plastic bags. The victim was identified by the Royal Thai Police as 47-year-old Ryosuke Kabashima, a leader of the Yamaguchi-gumi. By August 2024, two Japanese male suspects were arrested in Laos and later transferred to the Thai authorities. They are accused of shooting Ryosuke Kabashima in a warehouse in March 2024, dismembering his body, and tasking their Thai driver to scatter the body parts around different areas.
Thailand has for many years been a destination of choice for yakuza conducting overseas business or evading arrest in Japan. In 2018, then 72 year old Shirai Shigeharu was arrested in Lop Buri province in central Thailand and admitted that he had been a senior member of the Yamaguchi-gumi. He had fled to Thailand in 2003 after his alleged involvement in the murder of a rival yakuza gang leader and was arrested in Thailand after his distinctive tatoos were noticed in a Facebook video leading to his identification.
Tokuryu type crime is likely to be a worse problem than yakuza members hiding in Thailand or elsewhere in South East Asia. In March this year, Tomu Fujinuma, a 29-year-old Japanese man, was deported from Thailand and arrested when he arrived in Osaka for allegedly tricking a Japanese high school student into committing fraud from Myanmar. Fujinuma is alleged to have tricked a high school student who he met in an online gaming community to go to Myawaddy in Myanmar where the victim was forced to conduct online fraud. He is also believed to be linked to a Japanese scam group operating from Cambodia.
Yakuza gangs are declining, but anonymous tokuryu crime is rising in Japan and networked Japanese crime is active internationally. Whilst the prolonged police enforcement action against yakuza by the authorities in Japan is an admirable example of how to combat organised crime groups, it may also be leading to yakuza gangs changing their profile and joining the new tokuryu crime networks. The yakuza may be in decline, but tokuryu is rising.