Tokyo Tokyo Old Meets New – 21st Century Crime Comes to Japan

The Asian Crime Century briefing nineteen

On Monday 8^th May, four teenage boys aged 16 to 19 years carried out a brazen daylight robbery of luxury watch shop Quark Ginza 888 in Tokyo. The boys charged into the shop at around 6.15pm carrying crowbars that they used to destroy glass cases and grab over 100 watches worth around 250 million Yen (USD 1.8 million). With the shop windows destroyed, the boys fled in a van but were arrested only three kilometres from the shop. The police believe that a fifth person may have been directing them.

The entire robbery is captured on a video filmed by a passer-by, available on the Japan Times website at the link below, and worth looking at to see the extraordinary woman who continually tried to shut the shop door whilst the robbers were inside:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/05/09/national/crime-legal/ginza-watch-story-robbery/

The teen gang members in the watch shop were all wearing black clothes and white masks, one of which was a Guy Fawkes mask, also known as the ‘V for Vendetta mask’, which has been used around the world by protesters and also the Anonymous hacktivism group during its 2008 protests against the Church of Scientology in the USA.

The teen robbers were not very good. They reportedly drove in their escape vehicle past the National Police Agency (NPA) headquarters and the national parliament, and were soon trapped in a dead end alleyway where one had to be talked off a ledge and another begged police arresting him not to hurt him.

The police have stated that the arrested teens claim to not know each other, indicating that they could have been recruited separately through the Internet, similar to people recruited for the ‘Luffy robberies’ that shocked Japan earlier this year.

The Luffy Robberies and 21^st Century Crime

The Asian Crime Century reported on the Luffy gang in January. At least 14 robberies that took place since October 2022 were all seemingly 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, the four ‘Luffy’ robbery gang leaders were all repatriated to Japan from the Philippines. Watanabe Yuki and Kojima Tomonobu were arrested on suspicion of fraud, and Fujita Toshiya and Imamura Kiyoto arrived in Japan several days later. 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 and the repatriation of the gang members from the Philippines has raised attention in Japan to the ‘dark jobs’ in the black economy that have grown to facilitate such crimes. Reporters from Mainichi, one of the oldest daily newspapers in Japan, recently contacted people advertising ‘dark jobs’ via Twitter, with responses via the Telegram app offering work mostly engaged in phone scams some of which were claiming to be based overseas with a monthly salary of up to $22,300 and all expenses paid. The ‘dark jobs’ organisers told Mainichi that they hire around 30 people per day as callers, most of them young people in their 20s and 30s trying to repay debts.  The Mainichi reporting illustrates that most of 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.

The Luffy gang robberies, the growth of yami baito shady jobs, and now an inept teen gang robbing a watch shop in Ginza in broad daylight, may indicate a wave of modern 21^st century crime that is developing in Japan. 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. This new crime wave is not the Boryokodan, or Yakuza, that many people have associated with crime in Japan in the past.

No more Bushido for the Boryokodan

Conversely, membership of designated bōryokudan (or Yakuza) crime syndicates reportedly continues to fall. 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 largest Yakuza gangs are the Yamaguchi-gumi with 8,100 members and associates, the Kobe Yamaguci-gumi with 760, the Sumiyoshi-kai with 3,800, the Inagawa-kai with 3,100, the Kizuna-kai (former Ninkyō Yamaguchi-gumi) with 200, and the Ikeda-gumi with 170. Interestingly, the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi, had 6,100 members when it was formed in 2015 and if the NPA data is accurate it has been decimated. The reported number of members and associates of the smaller Yakuza gangs suggests that they would be unable to mobilise any show of strength, which criminal gangs often do to demonstrate their power.

In addition, the number of Yakuza members and associates arrested in 2022 fell to 9,903, below 10,000 for the first time. The NPA suggest that this indicates the decline of organised crime, although it could of course also indicate the decline in police effectiveness against organised crime groups.

Yakuza gangs still compete and in April the owner of a ramen restaurant in Kobe who was also a leader of the kodai-kai, a group affiliated with the Yamaguchi-gumi, died after being shot in the head. The police reportedly believe that the killing was related to competition with rival Yamaguchi gumi, after the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi split from the Yamaguchi-gumi in August 2015.

Although Yakuza gangs may be declining, at least in membership, there are reports that quasi-criminal groups known as hangure are becoming more active. Hangure members reportedly differ from Yakuza as they are looser groups with less organisational structure and rituals. These gangs include the Kantō Rengō , which originated from motorcycle gangs, and the Chinese Dragons, whose members were descendants of Japanese children left behind in China after World War Two.

The traditional Yakuza benefitted from traditional Japanese values from the oyabun-kobun system (parent / child roles) which fostered loyalty, obedience, and trust amongst gang members. Yakuza have had a long association with giri, which refers to obligation and duty in Japanese society, and they have tried to associate themselves with chivalry and patriotism.  These values are not part of the hangure gangs and not at all associated with youth criminals who spend their days online.

Traditional Yakuza members are also part of the ageing society in Japan. In 2006, 2.3 percent of Yakuza members were aged 70 or older, but by 2019 this figure was 10.7 percent. The Yakuza have an ageing workforce: By 2019 over 51 percent are over 50 years of age, and the leaders were even older with the bosses of the Yamaguchi-gumi aged 83 and the boss of the rival Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi aged 79. The Yakuza leaders are ‘Boomers’ and their members are ‘Generation X’, all destined to see their role in society shrink as they are displaced by later generations.

The decline in Yakuza membership and activity does seem to be a success story for the authorities, attributed to the anti Yakuza laws that prevented members from opening bank accounts, signing contracts for mobile phones and credit cards or taking out insurance policies. However, enforcement action alone against does not stop the activity and it tends to be merely displaced. In Japan, there is now a risk that enforcement action against Yakuza gangs has displaced crime to less structured gangs that use technology to communicate and recruit people on a looser basis. These networks of people available for criminality may also be the result of more young people, mostly men, who do not have a sufficient stake in society and turn to crime as an alternative. This will be harder for Japan to combat, and requires a societal approach and not only enforcement action.

The new criminal gangs in Japan do not seem to have any such traditional cultural interest in anything similar to the Samurai bushido values. The future of organised crime in Japan looks different from the past. The new generation of criminals are younger, organised via the Internet, loosely affiliated (if at all), and willing to use violence on any victim. The types of 21^st century crime that we see elsewhere in the world are turning Japanese.