Susumu Kajiyama’s affiliation with Goryo-kai

Susumu Kajiyama’s affiliation with the Goryo-kai was both substantial and carefully obscured. The book portrays him as a central business operator for a subdivision of the Yamaguchi-gumi, yet distinguishes that practical role from formal membership: he was described as the group’s number two and civilian face, while another account says he was not technically a member. His case shows how organizational ties could persist even as paperwork and public claims made them difficult to prove.

Position within the Goryo-kai

Kajiyama was described as a corporate blood brother of the Goryo-kai, a subdivision of the Yamaguchi-gumi, and as a player in the organization since 1984. A video of a blood-brother ceremony in 1985 was cited as evidence of his standing. He was also identified as the group’s number two. These accounts place him well beyond the role of an independent lender merely doing business with gangsters: his financial enterprise and his position in the criminal organization were presented as closely connected.

That picture is complicated by a separate qualification. Kajiyama told police that he was no longer a yakuza, and reporters were instructed to describe him as a former member. A source rejected that description as a legal convenience, but also clarified that Kajiyama was not technically part of the Goryo-kai. Instead, he acted as the boss’s civilian face and front man. His charm and respectable appearance helped make that intermediary role credible to outsiders. The distinction between formal membership and practical service did not erase his organizational importance; it helped conceal it.

A business network serving the organization

Kajiyama’s affiliation took shape through an extensive lending operation. Beginning in 2000, he built a network of nearly a thousand loan-sharking outfits across Japan, associated with the Goryo-kai and the wider Yamaguchi-gumi structure. The network targeted people with poor credit who could no longer borrow from ordinary consumer-loan companies. Calls and email drew prospective customers to storefronts designed to resemble legitimate lenders; the loans could carry interest rates many times higher than the legal limit. When borrowers fell behind, collection pressure followed. The operation’s scale made Kajiyama a major financial operator rather than simply a gang member engaged in street-level crime.

Its corporate structure also blurred the line between the organization and apparently ordinary commerce. Many front companies carried the initials SK, including SK Housing and SK Finance. The network encompassed real estate and construction businesses, a marina interest, a sex parlor, a food supplier, and other businesses used to circulate or disguise proceeds. Employees at loan shops were directed to buy lunches from SK Shokuhin; managers were expected to dine at a restaurant owned by one of Kajiyama’s associates and to use designated hot springs and beach resorts. These required transactions routed business income through companies and services linked to the same network.

SK Finance illustrates how that commercial appearance worked. In Shinjuku, its storefront resembled a branch of a mainstream consumer-finance company, and it displayed a Tokyo government license. The business also operated in real estate: property could be taken as loan collateral and sold after default, without an outside broker taking part of the proceeds. Such arrangements joined lending, property, and affiliated businesses in one system. The book presents this integration as part of Kajiyama’s value to the Goryo-kai: the relationship was sustained not only by rank, but by an enterprise capable of generating and moving money.

Money, protection, and deniability

The financial connection reached the organization’s physical and political interests. Money Kajiyama kicked back to the Goryo-kai in Shizuoka helped fund a three-story headquarters, whose name was carved into stone and filled with gold. The account also records more than four million yen in contributions by Kajiyama to former Liberal Democratic Party politician Kamei Shizuka over several years, while cautioning that the recorded amount represented only what appeared on the books. These details connect the lending network to the organization’s infrastructure and to political influence.

The organization’s shifting presentation of Kajiyama’s status offered a way to distance itself from the liabilities associated with criminal activity. The book describes a broader practice in which a gang might announce that a member had been expelled after an arrest, framing the person’s actions as individual rather than organizational and limiting the boss’s exposure to damages. In Kajiyama’s case, however, the evidence cited against his supposed departure included the absence of an expulsion letter: without one, the source argued, he remained inside the organization. His name had begun disappearing from rosters two years earlier, a move presented as an effort to avoid a paper trail as the operation attracted scrutiny, not as proof that the relationship had ended.

Exposure and the meaning of affiliation

By 2003, police raids on Kajiyama’s corporate centers revealed rows of computer terminals and an operation built with substantial information-technology infrastructure. In October 2004, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had evidence linking the enterprise to the Yamaguchi-gumi and grounds to raid the group’s headquarters in Kobe. The connection that had been masked through corporate fronts and Kajiyama’s civilian role had become a matter for a major investigation. The raid’s timing also became known in advance to police, criminals, and journalists, underscoring how difficult it was to separate the formal organization from the networks surrounding it.

Kajiyama’s affiliation with the Goryo-kai therefore cannot be reduced to a clean membership label. The evidence combines a blood-brother ceremony, a reported senior position, an assertion that he was technically outside the group, and signs that his business remained financially useful to it. His public description as a former yakuza and his removal from rosters stood against the continuing organizational links described by sources and investigators. That tension is central to the relationship: the boundary between Kajiyama’s private enterprise and the Goryo-kai was not merely unclear; its ambiguity helped the network operate while making responsibility harder to establish.