Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld, Expanded Edition by David E. Kaplan;Alec Dubro

Author:David E. Kaplan;Alec Dubro [Dubro, David E. Kaplan;Alec]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-05-06T10:38:00+00:00

The Gangster with the Golden Touch

Susumu Ishii was no ordinary crook. He was the elite of the keizai yakuza, Japan's top economic gangster. And the sheer volume of money he would attract was unparalleled. First came the corporate loans and loan guarantees, one after another. Then the huge advances from securities houses. Next, the golf course membership fees. When Ishii added it all up, he must have been the wealthiest gangster in all Japan-perhaps in the world. Before it ended, Japan's largest corporations would give 325 billion yen- $2.3 billion at the time-to one of the nation's best-known crime figures, and then turned the other way.

Ishii had the golden touch-quite literally, according to a favored psychic he consulted. Akio Matsui, a well-known soothsayer, was renowned for his ability to see gold powder around those with strong luck, a longtime Japanese superstition. And Matsui claimed he often saw the magic dust around Ishii, once even on a small Buddha near the godfather.

While other gangsters swaggered about Japan, flashing their tattoos and intimidating their countrymen, Susumu Ishii pursued a more refined path. Tall and slender with silver hair, the soft-spoken Ishii dressed in immaculate business suits and preferred "persuasion" to violence. By the midi 98os, with the Bubble Economy at hand, the gangster with the golden touch had risen to chairman of Japan's second-largest yakuza syndicate, the Inagawakai. With some help from his friends, he was now prepared to take the Japanese mob into business on a scale never before seen.

It all began modestly enough. Born in Tokyo in 1924, Ishii moved with his family to nearby Kamakura, where they ran a small noodle shop near the main highway. Neighbors remember the boy as a slight and shy fellow, but by his early teens he had become a force to be reckoned with. After gaining entrance to the respected Kamakura Middle School, he jumped into a knife fight and was expelled. With the Pacific War looming, the young Ishii went to work as a factory hand at a local naval arsenal and then entered nearby Yokosuka Navy Communications School. He graduated at the top of his class and found himself made a signalman with a kaiten, a human torpedo unit, in the spring of 1945. These fifteen-meter-long mini-subs were the marine equivalent of the kamikaze, designed to carry a ton and a half of explosive and one ill-fated sailor. The war ended, however, without Ishii's unit getting the call.

With the economy in ruins, Ishii found work wherever he could. He soon was hanging out with a Yokohama gang, which ran rackets in the booming black market and along the waterfront. His bosses found the young lad had a talent for making money. Before long, Ishii was put in charge of running the gang's recruitment of day laborers, a job at which he excelled. But after a decade of small-time rackets, Ishii was ready for something bigger. In 1958 he joined forces with the Inagawa-kai, an aggressive crime family then expanding into Tokyo and beyond.

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