Goto-gumi

Goto-gumi is the organization led by Tadamasa Goto, portrayed in the book as a hierarchy held together by deliberate coercion, internal discipline, and pressure on the press. A confidential National Police Agency report describes not only how the group planned reprisals, but how Goto controlled members through rewards and punishment. Later, after the publication of Heisei Japan Taboo Compendium 2008, Goto was expelled from the Yamaguchi-gumi, associates were removed with him, and Goto-gumi split into two crime families.

Leadership and Internal Control

A 2001 National Police Agency report compiled with help from police organizations across Japan provided the book’s most detailed account of Goto-gumi. Its description of the organization’s internal order centers on Tadamasa Goto: members could receive family living expenses, cash, cars, gifts, or improved standing after prison. These benefits were not incidental favors; they formed part of a system for managing loyalty and conduct.

The same system had a punitive side. When a member’s individual criminal activity caused trouble for the organization, Goto could demote him. To make an example of someone, he could beat the member before his peers or compel those peers to administer the punishment. The account thus presents discipline as both personal command and collective enforcement: members were made to understand that status and security could be granted or withdrawn, while peers could be drawn into carrying out the organization’s decisions.

The narrator describes the consequences of that regime through a source inside the organization. One of Goto’s soldiers, who had been forced to cripple a friend, approached the narrator because he hated Goto more than he disliked the reporter. He became the narrator’s most reliable source within the group, though he was not the only one. In this way, the coercion intended to preserve Goto’s authority also created resentment that could be turned into information about the organization.

Reprisals and Pressure on the Press

The National Police Agency report characterized Goto-gumi’s reprisals as planned operations rather than spontaneous acts. It described extreme measures carried out without regard for other people present, including women or children. The report said that witnesses could be forced to watch violence in circumstances intended to discourage them from filing complaints. The book presents this as a method of intimidation with consequences beyond the immediate target: the threat could reach everyone made to witness the reprisal.

Planning was described as deliberate and extended over time. Roles were divided among people responsible for preliminary inspection, carrying out an attack, and keeping watch, while those involved were not necessarily told who was in charge. The report also noted the use of passenger vehicles bearing stolen license plates from outside the prefecture. These procedures, as the account explains them, complicated investigations by obscuring both command and the trail left by an operation.

The report separately identified intimidation of the mass media as a characteristic of the organization. Members could invoke the group’s name and power to threaten those responsible for unfavorable coverage, and the threats could be serious and persistent. This placed pressure on reporting within the same broader system of control as the reprisals: the organization sought not only to punish or deter people directly, but also to influence what could be publicly said about it.

Property Case and Investigative Pressure

In May 2006, Tadamasa Goto and eight others were arrested on suspicion of illegally transferring ownership of a building in Shibuya Ward. According to police, Goto, identified as the CEO of the listed company Ryowa Life Create, and the other suspects had falsely registered the transfer of a twelve-story property known as the Shinjuku Building. A Goto-gumi front company partly owned the building. The investigation had begun more than a year earlier, after Kazuoki Nozaki, a fifty-eight-year-old adviser to a building management company and a partial owner of the property, was killed on a street in Minato Ward in March 2005.

The narrator reports that police pursued property-law violations because they wanted to connect Goto to Nozaki’s killing, a suspicion the narrator says was widely understood. The account does not present the arrest as a conviction for that killing. Instead, it shows how the property case became a point of pressure around Goto while the police sought to investigate a more serious suspected connection. The National Police Agency report’s account of concealed roles and carefully planned reprisals gives context to the investigators’ concern, without establishing that Goto-gumi committed this particular killing.

Expulsion and Organizational Split

Around October 14, Goto was officially expelled from the Yamaguchi-gumi. The public explanation, as the narrator recounts it, reduced the cause to partying and playing hooky; police told him that publication of Heisei Japan Taboo Compendium 2008 had in fact been the tipping point. He was warned to lie low. The book’s account therefore links the publication to a consequential rupture in the organization, while distinguishing the stated party line from the explanation attributed to police.

The consequences extended beyond Goto. A number of his associates were suspended, expelled, or banished for life, and Goto-gumi divided into two crime families. Goto was no longer a crime boss but an ex-boss. The narrator received congratulatory calls from police officers, friends, other reporters, and sources, indicating that the organizational break was understood by people around the investigation as a major reversal. The group’s former unity under Goto had given way to fragmentation and the loss of his standing within the larger organization.

Significance in the Narrative

Goto-gumi’s story is told through documents, investigative reporting, and the testimony of people with access to the organization. The National Police Agency report makes its operating methods legible: authority rested on calculated rewards, peer-enforced punishment, planned reprisals, and the threat of retaliation against unfavorable coverage. The insider who approached the narrator illustrates the instability beneath that structure. A system designed to command loyalty could also produce enemies willing to disclose what they knew.

The later expulsion and split give those disclosures a political and organizational consequence, but do not erase the risks described in the report. Goto-gumi appears both as a disciplined hierarchy and as an organization vulnerable to resentment, investigation, and fracture. Its arc in the book turns on that tension: the same concentration of power that enabled control also made Goto and his organization consequential targets of reporting and, ultimately, of upheaval within the Yamaguchi-gumi.