Yakuza in Japanese Society

I live and work in Japan and apparently every large company has a full time employee dedicated to dealing with the local yakuza to pay for the protection money - so that the rest of the business is not exposed to it in an obvious manner.The yakuza also acts as a form of local police. They know their quarters well and when there non-yakuza crime going on they try to suppress it as well. That's also the reason why Japan is a relatively safe place. As for yakuza-related murders, it does happen o

The problem you have is that you don't have practical experience living and working in the country and haven't been able to develop a feel or "bullshit radar" for how things work there. The 1991 act was just another sham which was set up for show, i.e. to convince Japan's overseas trading partners that it is cracking down on organised crime. It's just a document Japan can always point at and say "see we have outlawed the Yakuza, aren't we just like you?&qu

I've always found the relationship between Japan and the Yakuza to be fascinating. You have a country with an ostensibly lawful-good alignment, collectivists with a strong sense of social order and responsibility, where what would be minor drug crimes anywhere else carry hard prison time, and guns and knives are strictly regulated. Actors and politicians with Yakuza ties are scandalized by the media, yet the Yamaguchi-Gumi give out candy to kids for Halloween as if they were Boy Scouts, if

Don't wank too much on Japan, they have Yakuza who are actually doing the turn that the Corleone family was trying to make towards hedge funds, without doing the jail time is normally required in between the two activities. Nothing is perfect.

Is Japan really that incorrupt when they have zaibatsus and Yakuza?

I heard that Yakuza have business fronts that are open secrets. If that's the case, then they probably are.

IIRC a number of Japan's corporations still work fairly closely with the Yakuza, don't they?

>I imagine these people would be quite successful if they aimed at more legal areas of business.As I understand it, the Yakuza basically have their hands in everything related to entertainment (especially gambling and porn) in Japan, including the video game studios. There's a story about a certain four-letter video game studio that had a developer's sister kidnapped to keep them from working for Nintendo[0], a company that had its own Yakuza connections when it sold hanafuda car

The Yakuza is heavily integrated into the government and it has become tolerated by the people. A few decades ago the government cracked down on the Yakuza as they had too much hold on how the government was run, so they splintered and different chapters took different parts of crime (ie Yamaguchi-gumi are heavily against drug trafficking and Dojin-kai are heavily involved in it).Japan is one of the most crime-free countries in the world, because serious crime is monopolised by the criminals

Calling them a business describes it spot on.Afaik they are pretty much to most "corporate" like crime syndicate out there. Complete with charity drives for good PR [0][0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yakuza/yakuza-among-first...