Toshio Arita was a Japanese yakuza gangster who served as a lieutenant of the Shinkai-gumi subsidiary of the Yamamori-gumi family of Hiroshima during the 1950s. On 6 December 1954, he was arrested and wounded at a police traffic stop and sentenced to life in prison for murder and attempted murder.
Biography[]
Toshio Arita was born in Hiroshima, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan, and he became a member of the Yamamori-gumi yakuza family during the 1940s. He eventually became a subordinate of Uichi Shinkai, an underboss of the Yamaguchi-gumi, and he ran a burgeoning methamphetamine trafficking operation during the Korean War. This drew him the enmity of Shinkai's rival lieutenant, Tetsuya Sakai, but Arita persistently reminded Sakai that he had his own turf, preventing Sakai from interceding. As the Shinkai and Sakai factions of the family became more divided due to Sakai's increasing disapproval of Yoshio Yamamori's leadership, Arita suggested to Shinkai that they should assassinate Sakai, with Arita lying that Sakai and Yamamori sold their confiscated methamphetamine for their own profit; in fact, Yamamori acted alone in doing so. Sakai later interrogated Arita after the 28 October 1954 murder of Shinichi Yamagata, and Arita revealed Yamamori's side hustle. Sakai used this information to convince Toru Ueda to join him in demanding Yamamori to leave the operation of the family to them, and to step down. This act of rebellion resulted in Ueda being murdered in a retaliatory hit a day later, which set off a series of gangland killings.
Toshio Arita being arrested
The war quickly turned against Shinkai's faction as Sakai assembled an army of killers who tracked down and killed the Shinkai-gumi enforcers and the remnants of the Doi-gumi. On 6 December 1954, Arita attempted to plow through a police traffic stop on the outskirts of Hiroshima, only to crash after narrowly avoiding hitting a pickup truck head-on. The wounded Arita exited his vehicle, only to be arrested by the police; he was later charged with murder and with the attempted murder of the policemen who stopped him, and he was sentenced to life in prison.