The Yakuza, also known as the Gokudo, are the traditional organized crime syndicates of Japan, originating in the 18th century. The yakuza originated from the bakuto itinerant gamblers and tekiya itinerant peddlers of Tokugawa Shogunate-era Japan, who formed organized gangs and served as muscle for ultranationalist groups and conservative politicians during the late 19th and 20th centuries. The yakuza developed a similar hierarchial structure to the Mafia, and also obeyed traditional codes of honor, such as the oyabun-kobun relationship. While the yakuza originally made most of their money from gambling, they came to dominate Japan's entertainment industry, including sports and pornography, as well as drug trafficking, racketeering, and extortion. By the 21st century, it was estimated that a third of yakuza were drawn from bosozoku biker gangs, while their ranks were also filled with large numbers of ethnic and societal outcasts, namely Japan's 700,000-strong Korean sangokujin community and 3,000,000-strong traditional burakumin caste (and, to a lesser degree, the 200,000-strong Chinese sangokujin community). The yakuza were not only powerful within Japan's underworld, but also because of their deep involvement in business circles (using front companies to make massive profits from the prosperity of "Japan Inc.") and their traditional infiltration of conservative politics through the far-right uyoku dantai movements and their longtime alliance with the ruling LDP party from 1955 to 2007 and from 2012 on (briefly interrupted by the Yamaguchi-gumi and Inagawa-kai's realignment to the opposition-turned-government DPJ from 2007 to 2012). By 2020, Japan had an estimated 28,200 yakuza; at their peak in the early 1960s, yakuza membership was estimated at 200,000.
History[]
Early forerunners[]
The name yakuza refers to a losing hand in the card game hanafuda, essentially meaning "good for nothing"; the yakuza themselves are considered to be the successors of the bakuto itinerant gamblers and the tekiya con men of the Tokugawa Shogunate era, inheriting their organized structure and secrecy from both groups and their violent practices (especially yubitsume, the severing of the little finger at the joint) from the bakuto and the earlier kabuki-mono bandits (while claiming to be the heirs of the chivalrous machi-yakko vigilantes of the early 17th century). These organizations gave the yakuza its enduring hierarchy: similar to the Roman patron/client relationship, the oyabun served as the patron to the kobun, who gave his undying loyalty and fealty to his boss in exchange for being let into the organization. The tekiya and bakuto gangs of the 19th and early 20th centuries came to be powerful organizations due to their pervasive reach (recruiting thousands from the burakumin "untouchable" caste) and their alliance with ultranationalist secret societies (the uyoku dantai) and even conservative parties, such as the Seiyukai Party before World War II, who worked with the yakuza to suppress liberal and socialist discontent and labor strikes in exchange for government sanction and favors. It was at this time that the yakuza formed an enduring alliance with Japan's far-right, granting them political influence in addition to protection from crackdowns.
Rise of the yakuza[]
After the end of the Allied occupation of Japan in 1952, from their strongholds in Osaka/Kobe in the west and Tokyo/Yokohama in the east, yakuza gangsters began to consolidate their forces. Out of the thousands of gangs, some began to dominate. In the Kanto region, around Tokyo, names like Kinsei-kai, Tosei-kai, and Sumiyoshi-kai began to sound familiar to newspaper readers. In the Kansai region around Osaka and the nearby port of Kobe, the Yamaguchi-gumi and the Honda-kai began to overshadow their competitors. As Japan recovered from defeat and destruction, the gangs were forced to move from control of necessities to control of luxuries.
As credit and abundant foodstuffs became available again, the yakuza were pushed out of the black market, but they found that there was money to be made in non-essentials such as drugs (especially amphetamines, already popular among war veterans), prostitution (especially targeting American foreigners), and entertainment; gambling had been legalized by the government to bring in more tax revenue. The Korean War gave a huge boost to the Japanese economy, sparking a boom that continued through the 1950s, and large construction projects and heavy demand for shipping impacted areas controlled by the yakuza and poured money into the underworld. Some gangs started their own contracting firms, while others functioned as labor brokers and hiired muscle. As Japanese workers gained both money and leisure time, the yakuza moved into extortion and protection rackets, forcing theater, cabarets, and the movie industry to yield control to the gangs.
While the police often cracked down on the yakuza and made arrests, high officials, particularly those in the right wing of the LDP, were less concerned with the day-to-day rackets of the yakuza, and were often more interested in making alliances with them. Throughout the 1950s, the right and the new, powerful gangster organizations began to assume each other's coloration; by 1959, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported "Hoodlum Gangs Become Rightist Organizations". The largest of the three new political parties was the Kokusui-kai, founded by Home Minister Tokutaro Kimura's associates with the objective of raising an anti-communist army of 200,000 yakuza (a plan which was ultimately vetoed by Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida in 1952). The confluence of rightist and gangster led to the rise of several right-wing politicians to promising political careers and, occasionally, to the very top of politics.
By the early 1960s, yakuza membership peaked at 200,000, but changing market opportunities and legal and social developments in Japan over the next several decades led to a gradual decline in the yakuza ranks. While the yakuza continued to be shunned by everyday society in Japan, they became a part of the establishment, with six fan magazines reporting on their activities. The yakuza were long considered the paramilitary wing of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, founded in 1954, as they were hired to suppress leftist dissidence, and were deeply involved in corrupt dealings with LDP politicians. The yakuza continued to influence Japanese politics into the 21st century, even after the Democratic Party of Japan rose to power, forming ties to Transportation Minister Shizuka Kamei, Justice Minister Keishu Tanaka, DPJ leader Seiji Maehara, Finance Minister Koriki Jojima, and even Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. In the summer of 2007, the DPJ received the coveted endorsement of the Yamaguchi-gumi and Inagawa-kai, with over 90 top bosses of the Yamaguchi-gumi being given direct orders to support the ascendant DPJ in exchange for the DPJ turning a blind eye to the yakuza's activities and not cracking down on them as promised. In addition, the Yamaguchi-gumi feared that a strong LDP might turn against the yakuza, as Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara had already cracked down on the yakuza in Shinjuku and Roppongi. The Yamaguchi-gumi and Inagawa-kai agreed to require its members to vote for candidates and contribute funds to the DPJ, including corporate donations from front companies and individual contributions from their employees, and the yakuza also provided the DPJ with informants to humiliate their LDP rivals and strong-arm any oppostition party members who might try to damage the DPJ's reputation. As one-third of the yakuza were of Korean descent, they were useful in securing the support of ethnic Korean groups in Japan and getting political funding from the lucrative Korean-dominated pachinko gambling industry, as well as mobilizing local community leaders and associates to "get out the vote". Previously, Komeito had used the Goto-gumi, led by Tadamasa Goto, to keep its party strong and squelch dissent. In the spring of 2010, the yakuza helped the DPJ suppress civil dissent and gather support for the party's proposal to move some American military facilities to Tokushima Prefecture. By the summer of 2010, however, the Yamaguchi-gumi grew unhappy with the DPJ's failure to restrain its "dogs" from cracking down on yakuza bosses, and the DPJ was swept from power by the LDP in the 2012 general election. By the late 2010s, the rightist-yakuza nexus had resumed, with the yakuza continuing to dominate the uyoku dantai and use them to stir up trouble if needed.
Yakuza abroad[]
Korea[]
The yakuza first ventured abroad during the 1920s and 1930s in partnership with the ultranationalist Black Dragon Society and other rightist groups, raising havoc across mainland Asia. During World War II, the yakuza went to China and helped pillage the continent, engaging in the opium trade. After the war, the yakuza were relatively late in exloring opportunities overseas, compared to Italy's Mafia and China's Triads.
During the late 1960s, the yakuza finally began to expand overseas as ethnic Koreans in Japan, who joined yakuza gangs in substantial numbers, opened the criminals doors to their homeland as Japan and South Korea normalized relations. The history of the Korean yakuza dated back to the 1940s, when hundreds of thousands of Koreans were shipped to Japn for forced labor during the war, and many of them who stayed in Japan after the war turned to the black market and organized crime, forming gangs that were eventually absorbed into the larger Japanese syndicates. The yakuza were among the few institutions to open their doors to Koreans in Japan, as, while the majority of Japan's 700,000 ethnic Koreans were born in Japan, they were still legally considered aliens. Many of them were driven into the yakuza, and, durirng the 1960s, many of them were ready to act as intermediaries between Japan and South Korea. During the Korean War, Korean Tosei-kai boss Hisayuki Machii backed the staunchly anti-communist Mindan association as Koreans in Japan fought violently over which Korea to support; the Mindan opposed the communist and pro-North Korea Chongnyon. The Tosei-kai grew to 1,500 members by 1960, but it was shut down by police in 1965; Machii went on to form the "East Asia Friendship Enterprises Assocaition" to serve as its "legitimate" successor.
During Park Chung-hee's military dictatorship in the 1970s, the Korean yakuza had a strong connection with the Mindan (the South Korean residents' association) and the KCIA intelligence agency. On 8 August 1973, the KCIA kidnapped opposition politician Kim Dae-jung from Tokyo's Grand Palace Hotel, and Tokyo police tied the kidnapping to the KCIA. However, leading members of the yakuza were suspected of taking part in the kidnapping, with the most powerful Korean yauza, Hisayuki Machii, at the center of suspicion, having leased the entire hotel floor from which Kim was taken and made the rooms available to the KCIA. Jiro Yanagawa's Yanagawa-gumi, a subsidiary of the Yamaguchi-gumi, was also suspected of involvement.
Sex trafficking[]
During the 1960s and 1970s, some of the yakuza's younger members picked up the mandatory English taught in Japanese schools, while other yakuza became managers of multimillion-dollar companies. The explosion of Japan's tourist industry in the late 1960s and 1970s, along with a strong yen, the easing of currency export controls, and increasing amounts of disposable cash in their pockets, the Japanese traveled abroad as never before, with many men embarking on pre-arranged three-day junkets to engage in drinking and whoring. Japanese sex tourism led to the yakuza expanding into Seoul, Taipei, Manila, and Bangkok to enter into the sex industry, forcing thousands of poor Third World women and children into prostitution at home and abroad. The yakuza engaged in sex tourism, prostitution around military bases, traffic in women and children, "mail order" marriages, and pornography, helped out by local crime syndicates in the poorer countries of East Asia. From the mid-1970s to 1980s, the center of sexual slavery shifted from Western Europe to East Asia. After Taiwan and its cheap brothels were closed off to Japanese tourists in 1972 following Japan's recognition of the People's Republic of China, Japanese sex tourists flocked to Korea instead. No less than 80% of Japanese tourists attended kisaeng (prostitution) parties during their travels to Korea by the late 1970s. In every major Korean city, large and government-registered kisaeng houses sprang up, accommodating 800 men at one time. Most of the women in the houses were impoverished migrants from the countryside, sold as minors on the black market for as little as $200 and forced into a life of prostutiton and being treated as "unpersons".
At the same time, Thailand and the Philippines also became usual haunts for aggressive Japanese businessmen; in Thailand, daughters from remote areas were sold for a pittance, while other women sought work in big cities and found no doors open but those of the local sex clubs. Sexually-transmitted diseases and sexual violence were commonplace, and most of the money the prostitutes made ended up in the hands of tourist agencies, hotles, club owners, pimps, and organized crime syndicates. The yakuza took part in the sex trafficking industry by accompanying overseas tours, setting up contacts with local pimps and guiding their fellow Japanese towards women, drugs, and other vices, and even financing clubs catering to the Japanese and trafficking the women overseas.
Opposition to the Japanese sex tours grew at the same time; in 1973, Korea's political student groups protested at Kimpo Airport outside Seoul, and they were joined by Christian women's organizations, Japan's Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and Filipino women's and church groups in fighting against the sex trade at the height of the sex junkets. By 1981, Thailand and the Philippines experienced a 25% drop in Japanese male tourists, and, that same year, Japan's four major labor organizations appealed to Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki to halt the sex tours. The yakuza were thus forced to stop exporting men and start importing women.
By thet 21st century, between 700,000 and 2 million women were trafficked each year, a third of them from Southeast Asia, the yakuza's prime hunting ground; Japanese recruiters also trafficked women from Eastern Europe and the former USSR. The yakuza promised Japanese women well-paid, legitimate jobs, only to force them into prostitution once they left Japan. These women became known as the karayuki-san, while foreign women esconced in yakuza bars and brothels were called the Japayuki-san, "Japan-bound prostitutes". Japan's male-dominated institutions tolerated the sex trade, which continued to be one of the yakuza's most lucrative industries.
Drug trafficking[]
While the sex trade first lured the yakuza abroad in large numbers, Japan's most lucrative criminal enterprise was methamphetamine (shabu) trafficking. By the 1980s, Japan's estimated number of meth users was between 500,000 (roughly the same amount of heroin users in America) and 1 million (by 1998); in that same survey, up to 2.2 million Japanese were reported to have used stimlant drugs. One Tokyo drug abuse expert labeled Japan the "meth capital of the world", as a Japanese scientist discovered methamphetamine, methamphetamine was doled out to workers and soldiers (including kamikaze pilots) during World War II, and methamphetamine was credited with keeping people on the fast treadmill of Japanese work life.
The yakuza gangs controlled virtually the entire meth market in Japan, with the Yamaguchi-gumi and Inagawa-kai running vertically integrated networks for meth production and distribution. Local gangs and lower-ranking yakuza ran the drug deals, but the traffic provided a major source of capital moving through yakuza offices. From the 1970s to the early 1980s, at least 70% of the yakuza's meth supply came from South Korea (especially the Pusan to Shimonoseki smuggling route), where local crime gangs manufactured vast stores of the drug. From 1975 to 1983, the number of drug-related arrests in Japan tripled, and among the leading offenders were housewives, students, taxi drivers, firemen, and soldiers. The bribery of Korean officials and anti-Japanese feelings within the Korean government enabled Korean drug trafficking into Japan until the nearing of the 1988 Olympics led to Korean law enforcement crackign down on the meth industry, corrupt police, and meth labs. The trade was driven to Taiwan, where local criminal gangs solidified their ties to the yakuza. Korean chemists visited Taiwan to teach their Taiwanese counterparts how to cook crystal meth, and the Taiwanese smuggled meth into Japan in frozen tuna, cans of fruit, and boxes of tea. The local authorities also cracked down, leading to production moving to the Chinese mainland and North Korea. During the 19980s, record shipments poured into Japan. By 1990, the Yamaguchi-gumi had allied with Colombia's Cali Cartel to traffick cocaine into Japan, whre the wholesale price of cocaine ran between 40% and 70% higher than in the United States, according to the DEA. The Medellin Cartel also used Japanese banks and brokerage houses to launder money, while the rival Cali Cartel set up distributors in Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, and Kobe. Smuggling and selling the cocaine included Latin American drug dealers from Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Bolivia.
Expansion abroad[]
By 1989, the Japanese government reported that 3,696 yakuza were opearting abroad; however, the Asahi Shimbun claimed that, of the 87,000 yakuza operating that year, an estimated 10,000 went abroad, with half of them heading to South Korea, and the rest to the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Saipan, and Guam (only 35 said they were going to the United States). During the early 1990s, the US Customs Yakuza Documentation Center discovered that nearly 200 yakuza travelling from 1986 to 1993 had entered into 21 nations, ranging from the Pacific islands to Turkey and India, as well as to the Americas and Western Europe.
Since arriving in the Philippines with the sex tours of the 1970s, the yakuza found the Philippines as their tropical home away from home, second only to South Korea. Widespread corruption and a developing economy enabled the dollar and yen to go very far, and English was widely spoken. The yakuza made important political connections with local businessmen, bureaucrats, and those who ruled over the country, and yakuza bribes ensured that they avoided jail and extradition, maintained dubious business ventures, and repeatedly cleared Customs with no questions asked. By the mid-1980s, senior members of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Inagawa-kai, and Sumiyoshi-kai had opened luxurious offices in Makati, the so-called "Wall Street of Manila". The gangs' biggest early investments were in the Ermita red-light district of Manila, where at least 30 clubs and restaurants were owned by the yakuza by 1982. Fronted with Filipino dummy owners, those businesses served as fronts for gunrunning, drug smuggling, and sex trafficking. By 1988, it was estimated that 100 yakuza were active in the country, mostly around Manila. The yakuza worked with increasingly sophisticated Filipino gangs and expanded into gambling, fraud, and money laundering, as well as acquiring small islands for their meth factories. The Philippines supplied thousands of handguns to Japan, and a cottage gunsmith industry developed on the Cebuan town of Danao, where 5,000 artisans made cheap knock-offs of Magnums, Uzis, Colts, and Berettas. These guns were sold to communist and Muslim rebels, local warlords, and crooks of various persuasions, and the yakuza also frequently bought these guns.
The yakuza were also attracted to Thailand by the sex trade, as well as by Thailand's instability due to the presence of guerrilla movements in neighboring Burma, opium barons in the north, and rampant corruption throughout the nation. Thailand was also home to a vast prostitution industry, lucrative arms traffic, and a thriving drug trade. By the early 1980s, the yakuza were already well esconced in Bangkok, where they operated out of first-class hotels and moved into nightclubs, jewelry shops, and import-export firms which they used to smuggle guns and drugs. The yakuza also trafficked endangered species and exotic animals from Thailand. By 1990, more than 200 yakuza and associates were believed active in Thailand, with every major syndicate from Japan and every cirme being represented. As Thailand's under-paid police were notoriously corrupt, cracking down on the yakuza was not a high priority for Thai law enforcement.
By the mid-1970s, yakuza activity was reported not only in Thailand and the Philippines, but also in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, where they procured guns, drugs, and women, invested and laundered cash from Japan, and worked with the Chinese triad societies. Taiwanese corruption during the 1980s and 1990s enabled the yakuza to enter into formal alliances with Taiwanese triads, such as that between the United Bamboo Gang and the Yamaguchi-gumi. Mainland China's opening in the 1980s led to illegal drugs, arms, and aliens streaming out of China and into Japan. During the 1990s, Chinese-made Tokarev pistols flooded Japan.
Following the Dissolution of the Soviet Union, the rise of the Russian Mafia (including thousands of gangs of gangs from Russia, Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine, and elsewhere) led to theformation of tentative ties between Japanese and Russian organized crime. In Japan's onrthernmost ports, Russian sailors traded automatic weapons and hand grenades for Japanese cash, cars, or consumer goods. Russian women also joined Southeast Asians in the international sex trade, and 5,000 Russian women were given visas for "entertainers" by the Japanese government in 1995.
The yakuza also expanded into Latin America, where Japanese diaspora communities existed. In Brazil, where a huge wave of Japanese immigrants (many of them former soldiers seeking a new life abroad) arrived after World War II, a rising cocaine trade spilling over from Bolivia and Peru, active associations with the Italian Mafia, and Japanese foreign investment attracted the yakuza. During the late 1970s, Japanese and Korean gangs battled in the Liberdade district of Sao Paulo, where 250,000 Japanese lived in a 20-square-block neighborhood. The Japanese gangsters were called the gurentai (hoodlums), but they worked in tandem with yakuza from abroad to establish fronts at restaurants, bars, import-export companies, and floral shops. In 1994, Brazilian police found a Yamaguchi-gumi boss hiding out in Parana, where he had been running cocaine, prostitutes, and laborers to Japan. The yakuza also conned women from Mexico to Brazil into trips to Japan to work as prostitutes and hostesses. Yakuza gunrunning operations were tied to Argentina, Bolivia, Panama, and Brazil; Brazilian-made handguns were a source of Japan's gun-smuggling route from Yokohama to Cape Town, South Africa.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the yakuza also expanded into Western Europe, where they shook down their countrymen, smuggled guns and hardcore porn, stole art, bought up real estate, and toured the continent. The yakuza were attracted to Germany for meth and France for ecstasy, and yakuza-owned trading companies moved into Germany to export expensive cars to Japan. The popularity of Southeast Asian women among Dutch and German men led to the yakuza setting up sex trade backdoors in several European cities. During the 1980s, the Sumiyoshi-kai smuggled harcore porn out of Northern Europe and into Japan, where they were illegal at the time. The yakuza's favorite scam was fleecing Japanese corporations, where they blackmailed subsidiaries of Japanese companies, set up shop at nightclubs and restaurants, and engaged in extortion and insider trading alike. Paris became a popular destination for Japanese tourists and leading mobsters alike, and, in 1988, two yakuza were invited to appear on national TV before 3.5 million viewers in a special nicknamed Yakuza en Paris, in which the yakuza said that they broke up labor stirkes and marched to demonstrate opposition to the leftists.
Australia became another attractive destination for the yakuza, where, starting in the early 1980s, the yakuza invested millions of dollars in real estate, set up various front companies, and continued to visit. The yakuza extorted money from Japanese tourists in Queensland, a state with a nagging problem with corruption, illegal gambling, drugs, and prostitution. From 1986 to 1996, at least 200 known yakuza had entered the country, with most going to Sydney and Brisbane. The yakuza not only engaged in financial crimes, but also trafficked Southeast Asian heroin.
Rivalries with foreign gangs[]
During the 1990s, the growth of illegal immigration into Japan brought the spread of foreign crime gangs. In 1991, Tokyo police found over 1,000 froeigners active as members or associates of the city's yakuza gangs, with most of them being Korean, followed by Chinese, but also including a number of Filipinos and Thais, seven Americans, a Russian, a Turk, and an Australian. By the mid-1990s, Korean gangs ewre involved in everything from pickpocket gangs to the meth trade, Thai gangsters smuggled drugs and ran gambling dens for illegal Thai workers, Vietnamese crooks engaged in the theft of jewelry and vehicles as well as heroin trafficking, Iranian hustlers engaged in counterfeit phone cards, Nigerian con artists fleeced unwitting Japanese, small-time Israeli racketeers arrived in the mid-1980s and trafficked drugs, arms, counterfeit goods, and stolen property, and a French gang pulled off Japan's largest bank robbery in 1987, revenge for the yakuza's theft of French art.
During the 1980s, the first wave of chinese crime swept into Japan via Taiwan, as gangsters from United Bamboo Gang and Four Seas Gang opened restaurants in Tokyo and used them as fronts for drug deals, prostitution, and gambling. Hong Kong's top triad societies followed, as, by the late 1990s, the Sun Yee On and 14K had established strong bases in Japan's big cities and allied with major yakuza syndicates. The influx of desperately poor immigrants from China filled the ranks of the most troublesome gangs as hundreds of thugs from Shanghai, Beijing, and Fuzhou set up rackets in Japan, leading to bloody turf wars. Chinese gangs took part in the widespread theft of jewelry, watches, and designer clothes, and fences sold goods from Shanghai's boutiques to Tokyo's discount stores. Other crimes included credit card fraud, pachinko fraud, software piracy, armed robbery, kidnapping, murder, and the smuggling of drugs and illegal aliens. From 1992 to 1996, foreign crime jumped fivefold in Japan, and half of the arrests were Chinese. This resulted in a growing backlash to the presence of illegal immigrants in Japan; in 1993, rightists in Tokyo plastered the city with swastika-marked posters and called for the expulsion of all immigrants. Ruthless Chinese thugs were said to have pushed the yakuza out of their old haunt of Kabukicho, with one poster reading "Kabukicho is no longer part of Japan." In 2000, Tokyo mayor Shintaro Ishihara warned that, should an earthquake strike the city, foreigners would cause a riot. However, organized crime in Japan remained very much a yakuza affair, and the far smaller, less organized, and relatively unsophisticated foreign gangs were uanble to do anything withouth elp from the yakuza. The yakuza worked with Chinese snakeheads, Israeli drug dealers, and Iranian fraud artists while continuing to dominate racketeering, extortion, and organized vice crime.
The New Yakuza[]
By the start of the 2010s, the new yakuza had become more violetn, less obedient, and interested in honoring fat profits over feudal traditions, as the yakuza tradition was fading due to a generation gap. The structure, insular yakuza world of giri-ninjo, tattoos, finger-cutting, total-obedience, and gangster chivalry neared obsolescence, as the criminal world of the 21st century did not require ideology, chivalry, or absolute loyalty, but cunning. The rightist kuromaku powerbrokers of 20th-century Japan passed away, and the new powerbrokers were trade businessmen rather than ultranationalists, as there were no longer American occupiers in need of yakuza spies and strikebreakers and no need for the formation of an anti-communist militia from the underworld.
However, the underworld remained closely tied with the far-right, which was still alive and active. Should Japan fall into economic ruin, should leftists come into power, or should the nation be threatened militarily, the far-right could become a major force in the country again, and theh rearming of Japan's long-dormant military made the prospect more worrisome than ever in the postwar era. Politicians continued to use gangs to raise money and do dirty work, but political figures increasingly avoided any connection with gangsters or ultranationalists. The public had also become more aware of yauza involvement in politics and was less forgiving of yakuza-connected politicians, and the continuing shakedowns of the country's biggest corporations, the mushrooming drug traffic, and the increasing violence eroded the longtime social accpetance of the gangs. As public pressure increased and political protection for the gangs decreased, the police more freely attacked their most serious crime problem, passing new laws which criminalized yakuza practices such as handing out name cards and collecting protection money.