Sang Sang-Min (1943-25 December 1980) was a Korean-Japanese gangster who served as the leader of the Jingweon Mafia during the 1970s and 1980s. He and the rest of his organization were massacred by the Dojima-gumi yakuza clan at a Christmas party in 1980.
Biography[]
Sang Sang-Min was born in South Korea in 1943, and he became involved in organized crime during Park Chung-hee's dictatorship and established the Jingweon Mafia. During the 1970s, the Jingweon Mafia established a foothold in Tokyo's criminal underworld, and Sang moved to Japan to lead his organization's expansion. The Jingweon Mafia came to rival the Tojo-kai yakuza clan for control of Kabukicho, and the dark-clad Jingweon Mafia gangsters became known for their proficiency in hand-to-hand combat and weapon usage, as well as for their ruthlessness towards those who failed the gang or chose to desert it. In 1976, Sang married Suyeon Jung and fathered a son with her, who would later be raised as Ryuji Goda.
Sang's body
In 1980, the Jingweon Mafia's war with the Tojo-kai was going well for the Koreans, leading to Dojima-gumi boss Sohei Dojima dispatching his lieutenants Futoshi Shimano and Shintaro Kazama to massacre the Jingweon Mafia at a Christmas party held at a warehouse behind one of their clubs. In the ensuing ambush, 36 Jingweon Mafia members were killed in the "Kabukicho Christmas Massacre". Kazama shot Sang several times with a pistol, and, after Kazama left, the responding police officer Jiro Kawara attempted to tend to Sang's wounds. A dying Sang asked Kawara to rescue his wife and child, and Sang succumbed to his wounds. Kawara would eventually go on to marry Suyeon and give Sang's son to yakuza boss Jin Goda to raise as his own son.