The one statistic I never understand
Regardless of how long I live here, and how often people try to explain the Yakuza to me, I always shake my head in disbelief when I see stories like this one on the guys who put the Organised into Organised Crime.
Crime syndicates in Japan had around 86,300 members as of Dec. 31, down some 700 from a year earlier, marking the first drop in 10 years, the National Police Agency said Thursday. The Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi, accounted for 50.1% of all the members, passing the majority threshold for the first time.
What sort of questionnaire got these answers? Do the gangs submit annual reports? I can only imagine the text: “The chairman reports that outstanding bad debts are down 22.9% due to a 16.3% increase in the number of kneecaps broken. Workforce loyalty is also strong, as indicated by a two-thirds reduction in pinkie removals.” Three significant figures of accuracy suggests relatively detailed numbers are being obtained from somewhere, but where?
Note that the graph above may not, in fact, be truthful. In fact, I may very well have made it all up!
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mirai said,
February 11, 2006 @ 01:31
Hello Ken san!
Well, I cannot believe the result about Yakuza. I checked the meaning of ” Terrific ” once again.
really? ,,hmm. I am always surprised at your great research ! How do you find that? Thanks. mirai
Ken Y-N (Seron) said,
February 12, 2006 @ 01:41
mirai, sorry to disappoint you, but that graph is ウソつき! I just made it up. The “I like hospital food” is from a slang expression, “Do you like hospital food?”, which people say when they are trying to start a fight, or at least threaten people.
mirai said,
February 13, 2006 @ 21:51
Oh! I guess I did not read your last sentence ~~~~! haha ~
Janne said,
April 6, 2006 @ 14:54
Well, Yakuza isn’t illegal in Japan. I mean, the organizations themselves, and being a member is legal. And it’s all organized like a multi-level marketing scheme, where the big gangs (yamaguchi-gumi) has sub-gangs as members, by virtue of the sub-gang leader becoming a member; they in turn have sub-gangs… until the bottom feeder wannabes at the bottom that actually do most of the illegal activity. Yamaguchi-gumi is five levels deep, I heard, not counting the wannabes.
So yes, since they are organizations I expect they do file tax reports (not entirely truthful of course) and have various info available on their structure. And being a Yakuza isn’t apparently a stigma the way we’d think it is. They have denounced their own families to be taken in by their new one, and many seem to want to flaunt it. Counting them is probably not all that difficult. It’s only recently, after a police murder some fifteen? years ago that the perception really has begun to change.