Susumu Kajiyama

Susumu Kajiyama, called the Emperor of Loan Sharks, appears as an architect of organized crime conducted through the forms of ordinary business. Beginning in 2000, he built a network of close to a thousand loan-sharking outfits across Japan, using corporate fronts, civilian employees, and overseas financial channels to turn predatory lending into a sprawling enterprise. His story is not only about a criminal leader: it is also about how an operation could look like a consumer-finance franchise while extracting money from indebted borrowers and circulating it through legitimate-looking commerce.

Identity and Expansion

Kajiyama was a corporate blood brother of the Goryo-kai, a subdivision of the Yamaguchi-gumi. His national network grew by targeting people with heavy debts and poor credit histories who could no longer borrow from consumer-loan companies. The operation acquired databases of such potential customers, then used personal phone calls and email to draw them in. Shops presented themselves as familiar consumer-lending businesses, with reception staff and storefronts that gave the transaction a conventional appearance. The loans, however, carried interest rates described as between ten and 1,250 times the legal limit.

The scale of the business became a police and press story when the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department announced a warrant for the leader of a nationwide loan-sharking operation. The case was being handled by the Community Economic Safety Division rather than the Organized Crime Control Bureau. Kajiyama was suspected of violating the Investment, Deposit, and Interest Rate Control Law. His operation was associated with the Yamaguchi-gumi, whose reach into high finance and stock-market activity formed part of the broader context for the investigation.

A Franchise of Front Companies

Kajiyama’s operation extended well beyond lending. The narrator describes a portfolio of front companies that included real estate and construction businesses, a share in a marina, and a sex parlor. The range mattered: the loan shops generated revenue, while connected enterprises supplied ways to move or disguise it. The arrangement drew civilian workers into the operation, leading the narrator’s editor Harry to identify their participation as a story in its own right. The criminal organization depended not only on yakuza but on hundreds of non-yakuza willing to do work within the lending business.

Some of the system’s mechanisms made spending itself part of the financial circuit. Employees at loan shops were required to buy lunches from SK Shokuhin. Managers were expected to dine at a Korean barbecue restaurant owned by one of Kajiyama’s associates, and employees and managers were directed toward designated hot springs and beach resorts. The narrator presents these required purchases and trips as ways of laundering money from the shops. The fronts thus served more than as names on corporate paperwork: they organized a network in which employment, consumption, and leisure could all be made to carry funds through businesses linked to Kajiyama.

SK Finance in Shinjuku demonstrated how convincingly that network could resemble ordinary commerce. Its white lettering against a blue background recalled a mainstream consumer-loan company, and the firm displayed a Tokyo government license. It had received the tōichi rating for consumer-loan businesses, even though the narrator notes that most firms had been allowed to operate without a meaningful background check. SK Finance also dealt in real estate. Property could be accepted as loan collateral and, after default, seized and sold without an outside middleman taking a share. The company therefore joined lending to property transactions within the same operation.

The Money Trail

Despite the visible scale of the enterprise, investigators faced a central question: where had the profits gone? More than sixty thousand people had paid illegal, exorbitant rates, and police estimated the group’s revenue at several billion dollars. A substantial share was thought to have gone to the Yamaguchi-gumi, but the money did not appear in Japanese bank accounts. Kajiyama’s repeated release and rearrest on different charges yielded no confession. The absence of an answer about the funds made tracing them essential to the case.

A conversation with Cyclops pointed investigators toward Las Vegas. Kajiyama had lost a couple of million dollars gambling at the MGM Grand, and Cyclops suggested that the losses might also have served as a form of money laundering. The account described Kajiyama as moving cash through a safe-deposit box in Japan and withdrawing it during visits to the United States; he was also said to have overseas bank accounts. Further reporting established that he had visited Las Vegas for more than ten years, held casino accounts, and had used a bank in California. After a tip from U.S. authorities, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had been examining his Las Vegas transactions since the summer. The Department of Homeland Security, Nevada Gaming Commission, and FBI were investigating suspected violations of U.S. money-laundering laws, while the MGM Grand was making a limited effort to cooperate.

The reporting and police investigation were coordinated. Chuckles arranged with a division chief for the newspaper to publish its account of Kajiyama and Las Vegas first; the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department would then announce the seizure of more than two million dollars attributed to him in Tokyo, followed by a rearrest on Japanese money-laundering charges. The newspaper would also receive information about the FBI investigation. A Las Vegas reporter contributed local reporting in exchange for information, allowing the Japanese story to appear first and the American scoop to follow. By mid-November, the newspaper had published a sequence of stories about the seized funds, the FBI investigation, and Kajiyama’s spending in Las Vegas.

The trail also included money that investigators did not seize. Around the time of Kajiyama’s arrest, one of his associates arranged for a Caesars Palace representative in Tokyo to bring one million dollars in cash to a parking lot in central Tokyo. Earlier, Cyclops had estimated that Kajiyama had about four million dollars between two casinos and another million in U.S. bank accounts, in addition to two million dollars deposited with the MGM Grand’s Tokyo offices. These reported sums reveal the transnational scale of the investigation, but they do not establish that authorities recovered all of the money.

Arrests, Silence, and Sentence

Kajiyama’s legal course was marked by release and renewed arrest. He was arrested, released, and arrested again on different charges; each time, he confessed to nothing. The newspaper’s reporting followed the investigation as it shifted from Las Vegas to Switzerland, after which other members of the newsroom took over the story. The narrator moved on to other reporting, leaving the question of Kajiyama’s remaining assets unresolved.

On February 9, 2005, Kajiyama was sentenced to seven years of hard labor. The Tokyo courts initially chose not to impose a five-billion-yen fine, an amount the account equates with fifty million dollars and identifies as the total Kajiyama had taken from people. The sentence therefore brought a formal punishment without resolving the financial mystery at the center of the case. The narrator believed Kajiyama might still have money hidden away and could emerge from prison wealthy. That remains a reported expectation, not a confirmed account of what happened to his assets.

Significance

Kajiyama’s portrait draws its force from the gap between the ordinary appearance of his businesses and the coercive financial system they served. A licensed storefront, a real-estate company, a restaurant, and a resort could all appear separate from organized crime; within the account, they are connected by ownership, compulsory spending, lending, collateral, and the movement of proceeds. The structure also complicates a simple division between criminal actors and the surrounding civilian economy: the operation relied on non-yakuza labor as well as organized-crime affiliation.

The investigation exposed parts of this network through cooperation among journalists, Japanese police, casinos, and U.S. authorities. Yet publication, seizure, and imprisonment did not produce a complete accounting. Kajiyama’s defining feature in the narrative is therefore not only the scale of his lending operation, but the durability of its financial obscurity: his system could be described in detail while much of its money remained beyond view.