Kakuji Inagawa (November 1914-22 December 2007) was a Japanese yakuza boss and the founder of the Inagawa-kai syndicate.
Biography[]
Kakuji Inagawa was born in Sengen-cho, Yokohama Prefecture, Japan in 1914 to an impoverished family, and he never attended school. He became a yakuza gangster while he was a teenage judo student, and he served in the Imperial Japanese Army's 29th Regiment during the February 26 Incident and World War II. After the war, he was mentored by Masajiro Tsuruoka, whose territory included Atami. Inagawa organized a smalll gang to fight the Chinese and Koreans in Yokohama alongside Tsuruoka's men, and Inagawa's gangsters displayed a legendary ruthlessness. Within several years, Inagawa had built his own gang to equal that of Tsuruoka. By 1950, both men had come to the attention of the American occupation authorities, as Inagawa was engaging in blackmail and intimidation, the collection of protection money, and the control and direction of bands of thieves who were placed aboard foreign merchant ships calling at Yokohama and Shimizu in the guise of cleaning crews. Inagawa founded his own gang in Atami, Shizuoka in 1949, becoming a powerful leader of the yakuza in the Tokyo area. By the early 1960s, his gang had spread from its initial territory in Yokohama and Atami to Tokyo and even parts of the northern island of Hokkaido. By 1964, more than 2,700 yakuza stood under his command. In 1963, Inagawa changed the name of his gang, the Kakusei-kai (which applied for political party status), to the "Kinsei-kai", later renaming it to the Inagawa-kai. His syndicate shared the yakuza's gut-level ideology of anti-communism and a rightist outlook, but alliances were hard to come by. In December 1963, Kodama oversaw the union of seven gangs in a coalition fored in Atami, although murderous vendettas would later develop between the gangs, demanding Kodama's participation as a peacemaker. Ultimately, Inagawa and Kodama founded a federation of the Kanto region's yakuza organizations, the 13,000-strong Kanto-kai, with Inagawa arguing that the bakuto (itinerant gamblers) could not walk in broad daylight, but that they could still serve their nation by fighting communism. Inagawa died in 2007 at the age of 93.