Yamaguchi-gumi

The Yamaguchi-gumi is presented as a major organized-crime group whose reach extends beyond direct violence into business, regional politics, and relationships with other gangs and institutions. Its expansion into eastern Japan brings it into conflict with established groups, while its affiliations give it the capacity to absorb rivals. Yet the organization is not depicted as a stable hierarchy: changing priorities, internal dissent, and the eventual expulsion of Tadamasa Goto expose the costs of its growing power.

Structure and territorial expansion

The account places the Yamaguchi-gumi at the center of a network of affiliated groups. Eiju Kim, head of the Osaka-based Kyoyou-kai, and Naoto Kametani, head of Rokkorengo, were both members of that wider organization. Their affiliation did not prevent personal ties or lethal conflict: after a heated exchange outside the Fujiya Hotel, Kametani shot Kim and his driver. The incident is presented as unusual precisely because violence between factions of the same larger group was rare.

The Yamaguchi-gumi’s expansion from Kansai into Kanto supplies the wider context for a separate conflict with the Kokusui-kai. In 1994, the Kokusui-kai first shot and severely wounded two Yamaguchi-gumi members who had visited its Tokyo office. The next day, the Yamaguchi-gumi retaliated, and the conflict spread across Saga and Yamanashi, into Shinjuku, and eventually to Saitama Prefecture. Sekiguchi explained the territorial stakes: the Yamaguchi-gumi dominated Kansai and held about 40 percent of its market, while its attempts to enter Tokyo made its presence unwelcome to groups already established there. Saitama had no Yamaguchi-gumi office at the time, but the fighting was understood as part of that larger contest over territory.

The Kokusui-kai was then the third-largest crime group in Saitama, behind the Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai, with eighteen offices and about 230 known members. Police were stationed outside each office. The conflict was not simply a dispute among gang leaders: it revealed how an organization’s effort to extend its reach could unsettle local arrangements and prompt sustained police attention.

Business networks and criminal revenue

The book places the Yamaguchi-gumi’s power within a broader criminal economy, describing affiliated groups’ activities rather than attributing every example directly to the organization’s headquarters. In an account of the Sumiyoshi-kai, Kaneko listed land-sharking, interference with property auctions, illegal waste disposal, and protection payments from the sex industry in Omiya. Extortion was described as its largest source of cash: gangs could sell silence about a business’s embarrassing information, or draw financially troubled companies into schemes involving assets, real estate, unpaid loans, and manipulated property auctions.

The same account describes front companies operating across staffing, loan-sharking, insurance, debt collection, pawnshops, ticket resale, adult retail, transportation, event security, and construction. Some ventures presented a political or commercial face while creating opportunities to collect money or disguise its source. These examples make the organization’s wider environment legible as a mesh of businesses, intermediaries, and criminal services, not merely a collection of street-level operations.

A later portrait of Susumu Kajiyama’s loan-sharking empire offers another example of how the book traces organized crime through apparently ordinary commercial arrangements. His network included real estate and construction companies, a marina interest, a sex parlor, and a religious corporation. Employees and managers were directed to spend or donate money through designated businesses and destinations, including SK Shokuhin and a Korean barbecue restaurant owned by an associate. The account does not identify every such enterprise as a Yamaguchi-gumi operation; instead, it shows the commercial ecosystem in which organized crime and ostensibly legitimate activity could overlap.

Conflict, merger, and changing loyalties

In recalling the Yamaguchi-gumi’s conflict with the Kokusui-kai, Sekiguchi described a struggle in which a traffic-related dispute became entangled with territorial pressure. The Kokusui-kai’s preferred fronts included real estate and construction, but it also operated private detective agencies. One such office in Konosu advertised in the yellow pages as an investigation business. The gang used infidelity inquiries to obtain information that could be turned into blackmail. The contrast between the respectable appearance of a listed business and its use as a criminal instrument echoes the broader account of organized crime’s commercial reach.

Sekiguchi later said that the Kokusui-kai had merged into his own group the previous year, bringing the Yamaguchi-gumi into Tokyo. He feared that once the organization took root in a prefecture, it would spread, and predicted that it might eventually control the whole country. That prediction is presented as his concern, not as a confirmed outcome. He also said that he would have preferred the Sumiyoshi-kai to the Yamaguchi-gumi, despite his own membership in the organization that had absorbed the Kokusui-kai.

His criticism was directed at a change in the group’s values as well as its growing scale. He recalled an older emphasis on loyalty to the oyabun, honor, endurance, and obligation, then argued that money had come to matter more. In his view, the organization he had joined was no longer the organization it had become: some members disregarded rules and ordinary citizens, and he singled out the Goto-gumi as especially troubling. His account gives the group an internal history of decline, told by someone who belonged to it and who had become increasingly doubtful of what it represented.

Goto, disclosure, and organizational rupture

The Yamaguchi-gumi’s relationship with Goto forms a later test of its internal discipline. In November 2006, Sekiguchi told the narrator that Goto had been allowed to enter the United States through an arrangement involving Jim Moynihan, a legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Japan who served as a de facto FBI representative. According to the account, Goto supplied authorities with names of gang bosses, documents, lists of front companies, and information about financial institutions used to launder money in the United States. Such cooperation with authorities risked being treated as betrayal within the organization.

Before publication of the story, the narrator contacted a person on the Yamaguchi-gumi’s board, explained the allegation, supplied the article in English and in translation, and asked whether headquarters had approved the deal. The board member read the material but showed no reaction. The episode places the organization not only in the role of subject but also within the process of reporting: its leaders were given an opportunity to respond, even though the account records no answer at that meeting.

Around October 14, Goto was officially expelled from the Yamaguchi-gumi. Police told the narrator that publication of Heisei Japan Taboo Compendium 2008 had been the tipping point, while the public explanation was that Goto had been removed for partying and neglecting his duties. Several associates were also suspended, expelled, or banished for life, and the Goto-gumi split into two crime families. Goto ceased to be a crime boss and became an ex-boss. The episode demonstrates that the organization’s authority could be used not only to expand and incorporate groups but also to remove a powerful figure and dismantle his position.

Narrative significance

Across these episodes, the Yamaguchi-gumi appears as both an organization and a system of relationships: affiliated gangs, commercial fronts, territorial rivals, police contacts, and reporters all help define its reach. The account resists reducing that reach to violence alone. Business structures provide one kind of power; affiliation and merger provide another; the threat of expulsion shows how internal discipline can redraw the boundaries of membership.

The organization’s expansion is therefore paired with a recurring question of control. Its advance into Tokyo provokes regional resistance; its commercial world blurs the line between criminal enterprise and ordinary business; and its conflict with Goto ends in a split rather than a simple demonstration of unity. Through Sekiguchi’s growing disillusionment and Goto’s eventual expulsion, the book presents a group whose growing scale may strengthen its influence while making its loyalties and rules harder to sustain.