The Underworld Podcast - The Rise and Fall of The Yakuza Devil's Child

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Mako Nishimura graduated from high school delinquent to kamikaze biker gang, street tough and, eventually, a fully made member of a yakuza syndicate - the first (or perhaps second?) woman to do so. Nishimura made her gang huge amounts of cash selling women plus selling, and taking, huge quantities of methamphetamines. But by the end of the 1980s, Nishimura’s life was unraveling into a mess of addiction, violence and madness. When Japan’s economic bubble burst at the end of the decade, the yakuza would be staring at a long and painful decline. And Nishimura had bigger problems: she’d fallen in love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're among fans. It's 1986 and an apartment in downtown Gifu, central Japan. Mako Nishimura's phone is ringing. She picks it up. A friend on the line. A mutual. A girl named Aya. She's in trouble.

Five guys have her cornered in a street nearby and she's pregnant. God only knows the friend tells Nishamura what they'll do next. Nishamura is 19 years old, bean pole thin, short enough to get ID at the Isakaya. But she's no wallflower with it. Having graduated from truancy to juvenile detention, she's been getting deeper of late into the nihilist subculture of biker gangs, so-called Bozozuku, who tear around Japan's major cities,

racing and robbing while dressed in the white jumpsuits, as white as driven snow, of wartime kamikaze pilots. But that's not all. In recent months, Nishamura's dived into way more serious crime, hooking up with a sword-scarred gangster to run call-girls around Gifu, a city of some half-million people near the industrial powerhouse of Nagoya, as well as dealing and taking vast quantities of methamphetamines. This has rubbed Nishamura up against far more organised criminals,

not least the Yakuza, Japan's feared and highly ritualized underworld. But all of this, especially the Yakuza, is a man's world. And there are a few Boozuku. far less Yakuza, who are thrilled at a woman selling sex and drugs on their patch. Lucky then, the Nishamura, all five feet and small change of her, doesn't mind going toe to toe on Gifu's mean streets. Loves it, in fact.

Queensby rules? Shmeansby rules. One whiff of a brawl and Nishamura goes for her opponent's undercarriage. First the legs, she tells me. You cut him down with a club or a plank of wood. Then she adds, you get to work. On this particular evening in 86, it's a baseball bat Nishamura grabs for as she hangs up the phone, runs outside and, moments later, spots Aya, stricken and surrounded by five goons. One of them kicks the pregnant girl in her belly.

Nishamura loses the plot. She wades into the men, lunging and clocking them with the bat like a champion slugger. By the time-cocked show, all five men are laid on the floor like bloody ten pins. Nishamura is already long gone. She gets picked up by the police she reckons and she'll be spending far more than a few months at a minimum security prison. She hops, therefore, on a train bound for Tokyo

and hides out in the capital city's bustling Asaksa neighborhood. But not for long. A week later, one of Nishamura's friends, a member of a major Yakuza syndicate, rats are out. Cops find her and bring her into custody. But a week after that, A mysterious individual foots the bill for Nishamura's hefty bail, and she's set free. Around the same time, the guy who snitched on her, he skips town.

That benefactor, though, a convicted murderer, gangster, and boss of a local affiliate to the Sumiyoshi Kai, Japan's second biggest Yakuza group. He's heard all about Nishamura's heroics to save her friend, and he banished the man who sold her out to the authorities. What's more, he's got a proposition for her. Even though you're a woman, the boss tells Nishamura soon afterwards, you should become a yakuza. It's an offer to borrow a phrase, she can't refuse. And it will change the fortunes of Mako Nishimura and the Japanese underworld forever. This is the underworld podcast.

Hello and welcome to the weekly audiovisual podcast experience that pits two beer-batter journalists against the world of organized crime, but chiefly their own sanity and personal relationships. I am Sean Williams in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and I'm joined by a New York City-based ad-marketing guru Danny Gold, who's quickly becoming this show's Don Draper. What you guys call love was invented by men like Danny to sell ads to armoured car executives. Just think about that. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if we can talk about that just yet. even though I mentioned it on the last episode. But yeah, it's true. I'm fast becoming a Renaissance man of employment, of jobs, of corporate skills, whatever you want to call it.

I'm there. And, Quincy. I just started watching Mad Men for the first time, like a couple months ago. I don't love it. I like it. I don't love it. That Don Draper, though, not a nice guy. It's kind of a dick.

No, that's a great review. Maybe we should do more of those for the Patreon coming up soon. TV reviews. We've been talking about for about five years. But anyway, I never got it yet. Jobs. What a thing. Anyway, have you thought about Danny B and Don Draper? Yes, we have. We've got over that.

So let's do some housekeeping. Bonuses up at the Patreon for subscribers, whom we love, who we love, whom we love, who we love, whom we love, Patreon.com, forward slash the underworld podcast, plus roundups, notes, add free shows, merch, underworldpod.com, and get in touch with us, the underworldpodcast at gmail.com. Oh, I'm contractually obliged to mention the fact that we post prodigious amounts of content to every social media platform except Blue Sky. So follow, like, subscribe there too. It's just way better, isn't it?

Yeah, it's kind of what we've accepted. We have to do. Sean's even doing TikTok dances like six years too late, but he's building a following. And everything you think you know about a British guy and rhythm when it comes to dancing is actually true. And you'll see that if you follow us on these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The guys in the, like, the crime-ridden barrier that I walked through my dog the other day really didn't appreciate me doing this, like pointing to the sky, going, this is the poorest neighbourhood in Buenos Aires. Yeah, didn't go down very well, but you can enjoy that coming up soon. So, to today's episode, some of you might remember where I was in Japan lost October reporting a long rea for The Guardian about the woman who might possibly be the only female ever to have officially joined the Akusa, or,

Although, as we'll learn in a little bit, that title is somewhat disputed. Right. And some of you might remember that I was in Japan in November, I think of 2024, and then talked about the toilets and how much better of our society it is for I think at least the next three months in every episode. And still feel that way. Yeah, it's incredible how wistful I can get sitting on a non-robot toilet these days, just dreaming of a heated seat and something that talks to me while I'm doing my blue Anyway, yes, that story, I think as we're publishing this, I think it came out a few days ago. And if you really love me, you're going to head over to the Guardian website and click on it so they think I'm the next cat person and give me more bylines. I never actually did very cat person, did you? I would have rather had an actual cat claw my eyes out.

But I think we've moved past that era of journalism, which is, or writing, or maybe not, I don't know. But writing a name bullshit for money, no. We're definitely not past that. No, definitely not past that. It's only gotten worse. Yeah. If you read that story, my story, not cat person, you're going to see some incredible photos of today's protagonist, Mako Nishimura, taken by Shoko Takayasu when we hung out in Gifu and Nagoya for a few days during the trip. And Shoko and I were also joined by Martina Baradale, Oxford University Academic,

author of the books, Yakuza Blues, and 21st Century Yakuza and longtime Japanese resident. Martina first discovered Mishamura, and I'm hugely indebted. her for introducing me to her too. And if you want to hear about me getting accosted by a group of sexually aggressive Nagoya drag queens, listen on because I interviewed Martina for today's show, and you'll hear some of her interviews sprinkled into this soon. So there's something for everyone today, even Japanese drag queens. But what makes Nishamura's story even more amazing is that it coincided with the fall of the Yakuza, from a shadow economy of almost 200,000 members to the rump state it is today stripped of its glamour and men.

members and subordinate in many ways to these new and formal so-called Tokuryu gangs, sometimes foreign-led that are taking over Japan's underworld. And Nishamura's attempts in later life to help others like her leave the Yakuza life, navigating all the stigma that comes from getting out of the gangs. So this is a proper roller coaster ride through youth crime, drugs, bikers, yakuza, and even our old friends, the scammers of Southeast Asia. In fact, there is so much incredible info here that I'm splitting it into two. parts, the rise and fall of Nishamura and Japan's Yakuza.

So, let's start at the beginning, because unlike most true crime podcast, we like to tell the stories the old-fashioned way, and the world the way no AI can do, beginning, middle, and end, take that, Sam, Alton. Nako, there you go. I just stalled them like the first word after saying that. That's the real humanity that you love to hear. Mako Nishamura is born in 1966 in the Tokyo. suburb of Setagaya. Her real name is Kizuyo. She gives herself the name Mako, which means devil's child

later on. So I'm assuming that's how the sharks got their name too, which makes them sound awesome. Like that's a pretty cool name for a shark or anyone. Yeah, and also a shark in Spanish is Tiburon, which is also a really cool name. For reasons, I don't fully understand yet, but it sounds cool. So maybe everyone loves sharks except for Aussie surfboarders with one arm. Seals. Seals. Tokyo, I don't have the seals like them. Seals, yeah, seals aren't big fans of them. No, not at all. Sorry, sorry to our SEAL fans out there.

Tokyo in 1966 is a pretty cool place to be. The Beatles have just played their first show in the city, and Setagaya is bathing in the afterglow at the 1964 Olympics, which has given it a brand new stadium in Olympic Park. But it's not all triple jumps and mop-haired quartets. Tokyo is a post-war mess of corruption and construction. According to one in the HK documentary of the time, no place for a human being to live. Only a robot with no sense could live in this rough,

coarse, harsh and dusty city that doesn't have any blue skies. Drug addiction soars in this environment, as do the Yakuza, particularly the Yamaguchi Gumi run by Kazuo Toyoka, Japan's godfather, who we profiled on this very podcast back in February. By the time Nishamura is born, Teoka's foot soldiers are making almost $150 million in today's money from Japan's docks alone. Remember these guys came from Kobe, one of the biggest dotlands in the country, and he even establishes a movie company to peddle the Yakuza's self-styled image as Robin Hoods. There's that phrase again, fighting the rich and powerful to help the week, which is, as usual, nonsense. Nishamura's parents don't stick around in Tokyo for long. They moved to Nagoya,

a metropolis home even then to over 6 million people, and manufacturing heavyweight home to companies like Toyota. Dentso, Brother, and NGK. Nishamura's mother is a housewife and her father a stern and serious civil servant, who raises her and her two younger brothers with an iron fist. Nishamura calls their life, quote, Spartan in the 2024, Tobolkofi she's written. If the kids get bad grades, their dad balls them out. If their posture at the dining table isn't right,

it clocks them on the shoulder with a bamboo stick. If they use their chopsticks wrong, they're slapped. It was more like a temple skisks. than a home she writes. By the way, side note, it's quite funny to watch Argentine people use chopsticks, maybe for another episode. Nishamura is good at science, but he gets good grades more she thinks to avoid her father's raft than to actually excel. I saw a guy scooped them up, scooped the noodles up with both chopsticks like a ladle. It was cool, actually. It was quite funny to watch. Anyway, she's good at foot races, Nishamura, and ranks first in her school's fitness tests. But increasingly,

she flat out refuses to do stuff she doesn't like. She's at enough of the Spartan upbringing and she often runs away from home, sometimes heading to her grandmother's house where she hides under the bed and cries. And then, in the second year of Nishamura's junior hire, she makes a new set friends, delinquents. Remember our show from back in 2022 about the so-called Sukaban, or girl boss gangs that flourished in 1960s and 70s Japan? Nishamura becomes one of them. She lets out the the hem of her skirt and dyes her hair blonde. She likes the way that her classmates are outraged at the new look. But when Nishimura's dad sees her new hair, he's furious and he clippers it. And the next day she goes to school with her head in a towel. It's around this time she learns to smoke

cigarettes and more importantly becomes a habitual runaway, sleeping in cars or under the eaves of temples. Before long, she graduates to stealing cars and staying away from home for days at a time. because of her father's violence, but because also she thinks it's just cool. The high point for this comes at Nishimura's high school graduation ceremony, which she's asked not to attend. Instead, her parents do, reading out loud an essay entitled Having a Delinquent Daughter, which is pretty brutal stuff. Around the age of 16, Nishimura joins a Bozazuku group. If you don't know about these guys, you really should.

Now, you may have well seen luridly dressed Japanese bifference. a cruise in the movie, Akira, or in blogs about fashion or subculture or whatever. Basically, every version of Heistnerbyte in Exilk has an essay somewhere or an American fashion student in Tokyo thinks they're the first person to notice this. But the truth of the Bozozuku is truly crazy. They're formed out of the asses of the Imperial Japanese Army, specifically its infamous Kamikaze pilots, guys who signed up for suicide missions, flying aircraft directly into enemy ships and infantry columns all in the name of the emperor.

Unsurprisingly, these radicals struggle to adapt to the mundanity of post-war Japan, not least being occupied by the Americans. Nothing hits quite like a death cult, so they turn, weirdly, to the US and start forming motorcycle clubs. Yeah, I think that was always the legend with the Hells Angels, right, that they were former World War II vets or pilots maybe, but I think it's actually not true. I think the outlaw archive guy who might be the most knowledgeable person

I think he is the most knowledgeable person on the planet when it comes to this stuff has pointed out that that it's not the case. I think Sonny Barger says it and he was like that's actually not true. I could be hallucinating all of this so definitely check me on that if I am in the comments

but I also could be right but I'm pretty sure I have like faint memories of him being like that's actually not true and I trust that guy probably more than anyone when it comes to that sort of stuff. Yeah, yeah, he's pretty amazing on this stuff. I mean, there's also, like, obviously, the Bozazuku come out of the idea of kamikaze, but, like, you know, how many kamikaze pilots were there? That's not quite enough. That's a really good point. How many kamikaze pilots actually, if you're a kamikaze pilot and you're still here afterwards, you're not a good kamikaze.

You're a failed kamikaze pilot. You're bad at being a kamikaze pilot. You probably shouldn't even call yourself. You're just a pilot. Exactly. You're a bad. pilot um yeah well maybe a good pilot but bad at your mission none like you only fly one surely right it's uh maybe they were the ones in training and this is this is this is good this is good this is good this is good five minutes on this we're gonna clip this up take the stand up we need someone to like give us banner in a in a crowd of some kind and then we're going to make millions um yeah anyway so the bozosuku these aren't like the harley davison appreciation society right these guys the kamikaze of them at least would condition to

think of planes as giant bombs. And they pretty much transfer that to two wheels. They're hurtling around major cities causing mayhem, having knife fights and occasionally doing more serious crime. Many of them dressed in the very same white jumpsuits they'd expected to dying during the war. These outfits are called Tokofuku, special attack clothing. And they're often accompanied not by helmets, because why, but kamikaze headbands with stuff like police be damned or bring it on, written on them only in Japanese characters, so obviously it looks cooler. The bikers called themselves Bozazuku or Speed Tribes, which is that not just because they ride like maniacs, but because they get into dealing speed, meth, and other drugs, often becoming a kind

of lower rung of organized crime below the Yakuza. Yeah, I think they were kind of like farm teams for the Yakuza. You know, they would recruit out of them when they saw people with potential in the motorcycle clubs because I don't think they were all, I don't think they were all criminals. the Bozosuku, right? It was more like a subculture sort of thing. But I think when they had potential Yakuza would reach out to them. Yeah, yeah, they were kind of feeder groups.

Yes. Just like the bikies are in like Australia, right, in Southeast Asia, that go around a place like ferry and drugs around those parts of the world, even today. By the 1980s, there were over 40,000 Bozazuku across Japan. Bear in mind, that is more than all the Italian Mafia families combined today. And that is a lot of nutcases on motorbikes. Here is a Bozazuuku speaking to the writer, Ikuya Sato, for his book Kamakazi Biker. Quote, I considered the accent for a second there in my head.

Do it. It's time, dude. You've earned it. No, I haven't got that much capital in the bank. So many bikes, so many people. My heart sounds like, ban, ban, bean, docky-dokey, like being stricken with polio. I cannot say it in words. I just cry.

Yow! You did it. You did it a little bit. You slipped in right there. I did. I lent in just enough that hopefully will get more popular online. Funny story, that's actually the exact same quote. Gambling.com got out of Danny Goal when he won $2 on the Yankees spread last week.

And he even said that bit about polio being great. Can you believe it? God, that Max Fried injury killed me, dude. I literally didn't know that Max Free got injured. He'll be back. I think he might be out of a game or two, but he left in the middle of a game. Oh, okay. And yeah, we'll get there.

Don't worry. Ouchy. Okay. Anyway, this, not Max Fried, but the bikers, is the world that Mako Nishamura is sinking into in her mid-teens. Bunking off from a factory job, her dad has made her take to go ride pillion with Bozazoku, steal cars and get wasted. She doesn't really like drinking alcohol or huffing glue with her fellow speed tribesters. She doesn't mind doing the odd joint, but what she really, really likes is meth. tons of meth, meth that's flooding Japan from the jungles of Southeast Asia and making millions of

dollars for the Yakuza, chief among them the Sumiyoshi Kai from Tokyo and Kobe's Yamaguchi-Gumi. Sean, I seem to remember when I first met you had a pension for both Huffinglu and meth. Which one did you actually prefer? No, I mean, you can actually mix them together. That's the thing. And you can get a higher that really sticks, if you know what I mean. Yeah, it's a different kind of speedball, but it's, you know, it's fun. Yeah. do you get that like stick you get higher that sticks i didn't but that's good that's actually god damn you're so witty sometimes just goes right over you know i can't even keep up just activate i want

another plane at the moment anyway as many as it might just be the massive massive schnitzel that is the lunch as many as a third of all yakuza drafted from the bozzerzuku during this time yeah like you said that is a hell of a lot of people and the leader of nishamura's bikea gang which is called the worst, as a young yakuza named Hitoshi, tall and imposing, Jim fit, and he's never lost a fight, just like you. Here is Nishamura describing, quote, he had a large sword scar on the right side of his face, and he looked intimidating and scary. However, for some reason, he was kind to me, and we became good friends. I think you're going to find out why they became good friends. Hitoshi doesn't seem to mind that Nishimura is a woman, even though Japan's underworld is

extremely male coded, to use a Gen Z phrase. It also reflects a wider Japanese society that has only just introduced gender equality laws a full decade after the UK, for example, and where women are expected to fulfil a traditional role as, quote, good wife, wise woman, which I guess that's the Japanese version of happy wife, happy life. But part of the reason Hitoshi doesn't mind is that Nishimura seems to revel in violence, going at rival gangsters with batons, knives, nun-chucks, baseball bats, anything she can get her hands on. And Hitoshi likes to fight. Writes Nishamura, quote, once he got violent, no one could stop him. We would go on a rampage together. Here's Martina Baradale, Oxford University Academic and author on Nishamura's

early years, and how it reflects on Japanese crime in the mid-1980s. This episode is brought to you by Activya. You might already be eating yogurt, but not all yogurts are created equal. Activia contains over one billion probiotics per serving to survive and reach the gut alive. When it comes to gut health, Activia is the number one family doctor recommended probiotic yogurt brand. Choose Activia. Feel good from the inside out.

Visitactivia.ca for more details. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Nagoya is very shameless for, I mean, it is, uh, let's say,

a hotspot of Yakuza, there is a very big office of the Kodokai, which is now the most influential group within the Yamaguchi Gumi. And that, it's a very big building and it's on the other side of the stations, but most of, um, so we went on the, let's say, it's not sketchy, I wouldn't say sketchy, but let's say not the most beautiful part of Nagoya. And on that, side of the station, there are a lot of activities that can be related to the yakuza or controlled by the yakuza. So that bar in particular that we went is a bar that I really like because it is, you know, if you go there, you can always observe a lot of interesting people. Yeah. So there are lots of XIACA because I think that's nice we went. There was these guys.

who usually is dressed up as a woman. So I didn't recognize him immediately, but he was also a yakuza. And he left a yakuza when the first anti-yakuza law came out in 1992, because that law gave a little bit, you know, it regulated more strictly the yakuza. And at that time, so violence had to be curved a little bit. And a lot of people who were in the yakuza for the money and for the fan of the, you know, for the violence as well, left the group in the first few years after that law. And he was one of them. And then he decided to explore this feminine part of his personality and still, you know, usually comes out dressed as a woman.

Yes, especially in the 80s and 90s, let's say, when Bosuzov, who were. still a big thing. Now Bosuzoku are a thing of the past. They are, you can still see sometimes, actually. I saw a group of around 100 Bosuzoku a month ago. I was in the countryside. And so I was so surprised to see there because it's really a site from the past. And it's really something from a little bit more from the countryside. In Nagoya, you can see like there are sometimes Bosu Zoku, but never this big gangs that used to be. So Bosu Zoku, at their height, to their peak, they had tens of thousands of members all across Japan, divided in, of course, different groups.

And they were the stepping stone today at because a lot of people would join the Bosu Zoku because it was something in between. It was you could be a little bit delinquent, but you could just be in the Bosu Zoku just to ride around, cruise around, make noise, which is the same deviant behavior, but it's not such a big, you know, a big crime. And then the Yakuza, of course, had connections with the groups because a lot of people came from the same group and so they would go and kind of scout for the people who are the best, you know, the skills to come and join the group.

And also what she was saying about, you know, somebody who, noticed her and then took her around to, you know, just to learn the ropes of Yakuza Nogi, of the, you know, to learn how to do Yakuza business. So I think at first it was just going to collect protection money and then also learning a little bit more about what she was doing, which was this deriheru, so these, let's say, well, sex work, you know, prostitution kind of services. So this is a very, a very, very common setting. It used to be a very, very common setting. So now it is not like that anymore because the Bosphu are not, you know,

a thing that young people are attracted to. So things changed, but they were a very, you know, fertile ground for entering the Yakuza. But the other thing as well, you know, that she said about the ability to use violence, which was what, you know, she was learning. She was already kind of like trying to step into that work, but what really, I think, made the difference for her, especially as a woman, was her, you know, ability, the fact that she proved. She was able to prove that she was also able to, you know, fight like a man.

And this is very important because, of course, we are talking about awards where violence is still a very important asset. And so I think as a moment that was particularly important for her to be able to show that. Unsurprisingly, this lands Nishima on the wrong side of the law, and she does several short stretches in juvenile women's prison. But if anything, the experience teaches her to be tougher, colder to get ahead. She lifts weights every day and studies karate. She learns from Hitoshi some of the finer points of organized crime too,

graduating from robbing and stealing cars to extortion, corrupting cops, and learning she could get a lot more out of people if she wields the threat of violence rather than simply wading in for the hell of it. Some men mocked Mishimura for being a woman, calling her, quote, a little man, or telling her to shut up. That doesn't go down well. She cuts her hair short and wears men's clothing, though, and she starts getting tattoos, lots and lots of tattoos.

Sometimes she plays an artist to do them, other times, like Danny, she goes at it herself with a stick and poke. I mean, ask him about the soprano's one on his back, like Peter Griffin is homemade. It's incredible, actually, on many fronts. That is not your best work. I do not have any stick and poke tattoos. I do have one bamboo one, but I got that in Thailand from like a monk so it doesn't count, you know. Technically, I want to know more about that. That's a big of an episode. Okay, we need to know more. If you want to see Nishamura's tats,

not Danny's tats, unfortunately. Head to that Guardian article. Shokko's pictures are pretty spectacular. Some of them are designed by Kenichi Shenot. I don't know. I'll let the people decide. Some of them are designs worn by Kenichi Shinoda, those tats, who is the sixth boss of the Yamaguchi Gumi. But it's not all just the tats that Nishimura loves about the yakuza. She loves pretty much everything, from the suits to the stories they tell about themselves, and the movies produced by their biggest bosses, especially the ones Kazua Toaka had made in the 60s. The suits really are incredible. I mean, I would love to find a yakuza-type tailor, but I don't know. I don't think I have the figure, Sean. I don't think either one of us do you to Rock and the Cruza style suit. I don't often agree with you 100%, but that is... That's true. You've been training.

Definitely the case. Yeah. I mean, that's like basically the first 200 results on suit on like eBay, right? A guy is dressed up in sort of like skin, like skin tight, beautiful... That's skin tight. They're like, they're not like super skin tight. You know what I'm saying? They're not like a, like, what is it?

When they have like the capri pants type suit, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's thin, it's like slim, but it's just like, I don't know, man. It hangs as well, right? Yeah, they look fantastic. Yeah, no, I definitely can't do that. You can't do that if you're anything under six foot. And I am not that. What are you talking about?

They're all like five foot six. They just like look cool. Oh, yeah, well, they were all taking loads of drugs and like subsisting solely on on comforts, right, host bars. Yeah, rules. Imagine having that case. Incredible. Anyway, yes, these guys, they're kind of swash, buckling.

honorable gentlemen criminals. You're kind of like Steve McQueen of the Yakuza world, right? They're impeccably dressed, well-mannered, protecting the weak from the powerful, giving to the poor, I mean, you know the drill, right? Of course, it is all nonsense. The samurai history, the noble causes, the Robin Hood persona. To learn more, go back to our first whopping two-parter on the Yakuza all the way back in 2021, which dives into the Middle Ages feudalism and how the Yakuza really kicked off. But none of that, of course, is on Nishimura's mind. And as she heads deeper into the underworld, she finds herself working more and more with the heavier, more organized criminals than the headcases she'd been riding with at the Boazazzookul. Nishamura leaves home for good and she lives at a Yakuza-owned bar in downtown Gifu.

Most people are, like her, gangsters addicted to meth. She's stealing some of the drug herself, but her biggest owner is girls. Nishamura opens a cool girl service, hiring girls she met behind bars, sharing the cash they get 60-40. She says she's selling up to five a day, making thousands of dollars, but she's spending tons of it too, not just on protection from a local Yakuza syndicate, but on meth, and she's often so high she messes up her bookkeeping. Now we're up to 1986 and the scene from the cold open. Nishamura grabs her baseball bat, defends her pregnant friend Ayah and goes on the run in Tokyo. She's ratted out, arrested, but bailed out by a Gifu Yakuza boss.

His name is Roryichi Sugino. and he's serious business. Boss of Agifu affiliate of the Sumiyoshi Kai, Japan's second biggest Yakuza syndicate, and a convicted murderer. He's impressed with her. And even though Nishamura is a woman, he makes her an offer.

Take Sakazuki, he tells her, become one of us. To show how vital the Sakazuki ceremony is for the Akusa, here is famed criminologist Hiroaki Iwai. Quote, An auspicious day is chosen, and all members of the organisation will attend, tend with Toramocininin or Akusanin or guarantors in English, present as intermediaries.

Rice, whole fish and piles of salt are placed in the Shinto Shrine alcove, in front of which the Oyabun and Kobun, that is, boss and underling, sit facing each other. The Toramocin arranged the fish ceremonially and filled the drinking cups with sake, adding fish scales and salt. They then turned solemnly to the Kobun and warn him of his ston. warn him of his future duties. Having drunk from the Oyubun's cup and he from yours, you now owe loyalty to the Ica or family and devotion to your Oyubon. Even should your wife and children starve, even at the cost of your life, your duty is now to the Ica and Oyabon. Or they say, from now on, you have no other occupation until the day you die. The Oyabun is your only parent. Follow him

through fire and flood. I think the TV show Tokyo Vice really shows this pretty well. It's based on a book by our friend Jake Edelson, who somehow we haven't mentioned yet so far in this episode, who is one of the foremost authorities on the Yakuza despite being a tall white guy from St. Louis, and who rules? Great guy, met him in Japan.

But yeah, that show is really, I can't believe they canceled it after two seasons. It's really phenomenal. And if any of this interest, you guys, you should watch that show because, I mean, it's modern day, Right, modern-day Yakuza and not the 80s, 70s, 80s stuff, but it's so incredibly well done that I don't know what HBO was thinking

when they didn't renew it. It's phenomenal, phenomenal show. Yes, and based off his book, which is a phenomenal, phenomenal book. It's like seminal crime book. And Jake's got a more recent book called Larsie Kuzer, which I'm going to quote a bit in part two of this show. So he's going to pop up somewhere. But yeah, get reading those books.

But they're just unreal. They're great. Like, I love them. Anyway, people call Sugino the little gangster because of his sighs, but there is nothing small about this guy's status. People fear him. Nishimura respects him. But also, he has this kind of avuncular father-like manner that she likes.

Perhaps it's got something to do with her own violent father. But Nishamura says yes. And in doing so, she makes history. Now, women have taken important roles in the Yucousa four. Here's Martina Barado again and this stuff is like super super fascinating. Yeah, so women have played important roles in the yakuza, although usually it's an official roles. So for the yakuza being a man, mainness, masculinity is a very important part of identity. And so this has always excluded women from being a part of the group.

Of course, being a very, let's say, sexist or traditional society, or very, they accept the role of women in the sense of wives and people who take care of other people. So the role of Amison, the wife of the boss, has been recognized. They were never members of the group. So to be a member, you need to do the Sakazuki, you need to do the ritual, and then you need to follow the rules and everything. Of course, women cannot do that usually. But the role was still important in the sense that they would help the husband in managing this new family. So the family, the yak is a family, not only the blood family. But women were still, you know, relegated to the role of taking care of other men.

So they would help younger men, they would help people who would go. got to prison, like members who, you know, if they went to prison, they would bring something, they would find the lawyer, they could help around with some of the tasks, but this is, you know, the kind of role of the mother of the family. So this is traditional role. There have been cases in which, because of extraordinary circumstances, some women had to do something a little bit more. So the first case is this of Matsuda Yoshiko, who was the wife of a boss. We are talking about the immediate post-war, so 46-47, and the boss was killed. And so she stepped up and she led the group, which was a small group.

But she led the group. She continued the work of the husband for one year. So it was very limited in time. and it was kind of like she was just covering until they found the new boss. But still, there was one of the first instances in which a woman was able to lead a group, which was already, as I said, it was a small group. We're not talking about one of these big national groups. But again, so we are talking about a period of turmoil, a period in which also a lot of men were still coming back

from the colonies, from the war. So it was necessary for her to do this. And then the other very big example is Taoka Funiko, who was the boss of Taoka Kazuo, the third boss of the Yamaguchi-Zumi, so the biggest, what became the biggest Yakuza group in the post-war, and still is the most prominent. and Chiakot group in today's landscape of Japanese underworld.

And Taoko Finiko, so the husband, he was shot at, a member of her rival group shot in, and he had a couple of years in which he was not, he recovered, but then he was not really completely healthy, and then he died in 1981. And at that time, there was a little bit of a problem from leadership because the person was supposed to follow. Taoka Kazuo was in prison, he died in prison. So they had at least a bit of trouble finding the next leader.

And in that case, the group was already very big. It's already had thousands of members. It was already present in the hall of the Japanese Archipelago. And in that case, they made Tauka Famico the face of the group. We are talking about the 80s. So, a era in which the yakuza was very open to the public, NHK would go and interview the Yakuza and Yakuza groups when there was something happening. So it's not the situation that we have now where the Yakuza is very more secretive. They were much more visible groups.

semi-legitimate groups. So in that case, they decided to have a group of high-ranking official who were trying to keep the group together and make the managing the group, make all the important decisions. And Calca Fumiko was also involved in this group, but then she was also, they also decided that she would be the public face. So when they decided for the next leader, the NHK went to Taoka Famiko's house, talked to the boss's house, and interviewed her. She was the one that gave, explained why they decided for this other boss and so on and so forth. In that case, she didn't really take any operative decisions. It was more like, Taoka Kazua is really a boss, which is, you know, a legend, let's say, in the Yakuza award.

He was really from 25 members. He was able to build a group that had influence all over Japan and had tens of thousands of members. So we're really talking about somebody who was an extraordinary influence in the world of the Yakuza. And in this case, it is acceptable that the wife was also seen as part of this power. But again, it's never a real, a real power. It's always a power that comes from the fame of your husband, the power of your husband. So it's never a direct thing. But despite all this, neither Yoshiku nor Fumiku had performed Sakazuki,

the sake-sharing ritual I just remarked on that marks a gangster's official initiation into the Kuzha, similar to how an Italian or American mobster becomes a made man in the mafia. Interestingly, Nishima isn't allegedly the only woman to have come. carried out the ritual. There is a woman in Osaka who is said to have become an underboss beneath Kizu Tooka. But she quit the mob soon after, and she now runs a restaurant in Japan's Second City, refusing to speak to the media. And actually, Maltina doesn't even think Nishamura's story is a feminist one at all. Here she is again. This episode is brought to you by L'Oreal Group. Beauty is a powerful force that moves us. That's why L'Oreal Group has built a business that is

inclusive at its heart with 100% of its brands, championing diversity. With 25,000 professional opportunities for people under 30 worldwide and 54% of leading positions held by women, diversity is a strength that helps L'Oreal Group create the best beauty products for all people. Visit laurel.com to learn more. Yes. So, and then we have a couple of cases of women who join the a yakuza as normal, full-fledged members. So this would be the cases of Nishimura Mako and Odairinami, who is a little bit older than Mako. But the difference, basically, is that they were able to take the Takazuki to do the ritual

and to become members as everybody else. At least that's what they say, that's what Makus said, and I think she was added. the month, when you also interviewed her, she was very eager to let you know, you know, everybody treated me like a man. I was never treated like a woman, which seems a little bit counterintuitive because you see her, even now, she's a little bit older, but, you know, she's a very beautiful woman. And if you saw pictures of when she was in her 20s, she was a very beautiful young woman. So, you know, you can think how, you know, it must have been so difficult to be in a room like

She was sleeping, eating, just spending all their time with men, and she's never, you know, and she's never had any romantic relationship with them. She says that nobody hit on her or was trying, you know, they were just treating her just as one of the guys. So I think, you know, it must be, to an external person, it is at least a bit difficult to believe that. Yeah, that kind of ties into the whole, like, you know, the drinking and smoking subculture in the yakuza, right? Because obviously, I mean, that's a lot of people organized crime, gangsters, gay members, drink a lot, smoke a lot.

But with the with the yakuza, it's kind of like it's almost like they force themselves to do it excessively, right? I mean, they're the only organized crime group I know where they all end up needing liver transplants. It's just a known thing that they all suffer. What do they get? Like, John Dis, right? Or they all have liver issues because of their. their massive amounts of drinking and smoking. Maybe it's also because they, I think they tend to live longer

than most other organized criminals and stuff like that. But it's a big part of being a yakuza. Yeah, because you're technically having a second family who's like entire sticcars that they run like clubs and hostess bars and whatnot. So you're always there and you're always supposed to be drinking and smoking, right? Right, but that's not, I mean, that's not, I think, too different from a lot of other criminal groups. I mean, other criminal groups are on strip clubs or, you know, they drink, they smoke, they go out a lot. But with the yakuza, I really feel like it's such an ingrained thing where they've got to force themselves to keep going and keep going and keep going.

Because I can't think of any organized crime group where they, I mean, it's a known thing, right? I'm not making this up. Yakuza are known for needing. That's the whole, that's the plot of Jake's book, right? And Jake himself, I think, Jake himself had liver issues because he had to keep up with them and was always drinking and smoking with them. He talks about that too in both his books, I think. Yeah, it kind of drifts into kind of Phillips K. Dick territory, some of the drinking stories in that book.

You're like, Jesus Christ, man, you're going to be dead soon. But yeah, like this is a part of it, right? And we're going to slip into a lot more of this kind of stuff as we go along this story. I mean, Nishamura at this age that we're talking about, is barely old enough to drink in the United States. But she has just become an official Sakazukidup member of the Sugino Gumi, the Gifu branch of the Sumiyoshi Kai. And Ryoichi Sugino is, in Yakuza terminology, her Oyabun,

which means boss, but it's kind of more paternal than that. Sugino is now a father figure, the father she arguably never had, and she must exercise absolute failty to him. Now, as a popular saying goes, if Sugino tells Nishimura a crow is white, she has to agree. Quote, everything that was Yakuza-like, she told me, I would do. At first, Nishamura lives out of the Sugino Gumi HQ in downtown Guifu, which is also her boss's home. This is at a time, remember, when Yakuza are fully institutionalized, part of the furniture.

They've got offices where their official logos over the door, gang magazines, and even employees of the month. They're not hidden away in any way, and they've managed to keep up the self-serving Robin Hood mythology with the Japanese public, to the extent that most Japanese think they're an antidote to the kind of chaotic, immigrant-led, organized crime that has long taken over the streets of the US, Europe and other parts of the so-called Western world. So when Nishimura's mother, Hiroko, discovers that her wayward daughter had graduated from juvenile detention to biker gang to Yakuza, it's not that difficult for her to locate Ria Rishi Sogino at his home and begged the boss to take care of his daughter. But she's too late. Nishimura has a second family now, and she lives the first two years of her life as a Yakuza in this kind of probationary

period, staying at HQ with fellow Yakuza and carrying out a list of chores that might include shopping, cooking, or walking Sugino's two Akita dogs, one of whom has supposedly killed four fellow canines and is therefore named perfectly Dog Killer Maru. Jesus. Gangster colleagues are fond of Nishimura's potato salad, which are loved as a little detail, and she manages to walk the dogs without a hitch. Life at Suggino HQ honestly just sounds more like a college frat than a major organized criminal. group, but it's not Nishamura's cooking that impresses Sugino the most. The Acusa don't function like the Italian or US mafias, where members kick criminal profits up a rigid hierarchy. Japan's syndicates are more like franchises. Nobody's getting paid a salary. Instead, they perform

Sakazuki so they can use the syndicates threat of violence to back their own freelance enterprise, paying a monthly tribute to the boss, just like McDonald's, but with less harmful chemicals. I mean, that does sound like the mafia, though, no? Like, they do their own, their own hustles, then to kick something profit up to the boss, or then keeps kicking it up the line. Like, how would you say it's different? It's like, it's less of a pyramid. Like, there's less sort of underbosses.

There's just a swill of Sakazuked up guys. Oh, okay. Just take it a cut of each thing that they do and passing it straight to HQ. More efficient, dude. That's why you get to your office. Yeah. It's a Japanese, man. Even management.

Like, they're just more efficient, man. It's flat structure. you know, it's like preceding the dot-com bubble. As she's been doing for years at this point, Nishamura is selling meth, and of course she's taking it. But her biggest asset to the Sugino clan is still selling sex. She ramps up her cool girl service, selling women from Gifu in the surrounding area to pimps

on an island 50 miles south called Watakano, which is one of Japan's biggest red light districts. In fact, most Japanese know the place simply as prostitute island, and it's packed full of brothels and go-go bars frequented by ferry-taking salarymen. We're going to go into this business in a bit more detail in the next episode. For now, though, we're into the late 1980s. And things are beginning to change in a big way for the Yakuza at large. They've been making bank for decades off the back of Japan's economic miracle,

expanding into other parts of Asia, Europe, even the US, buying real estate, golf clubs, company shares, extorting multinationals and shipping. vast quantities of drugs, weapons and women all over the world. Then Japan's economic bubble bursts. The value of the yen plummets, pricing yaku's are out of global markets and they retreat. The Yama Ichi War spills onto city streets, horrifying a Japanese public used to their gangsters sticking to the shadows. We covered the Yama Ichi War, by the way, in a Patreon episode, I think, at the start of the year. So you can listen to that if you're a subscriber. And at the same time, a series of corruption scandals

exposes just how Pali the Yakuza are with cops, politicians and big business. Famous Yakuza like Kazuo Taka and Yoshio Kadama, listen to the original show for more on him. Incredible character in the history of global organized crime are dead. And the public aren't so keen on their successors. Basically, the entire mask is beginning to slip.

Even the stories that Yakuza have told about themselves for decades are beginning to fall apart. Haygeographic movies like the ones Nishima had fallen in love with are replaced by ones which now focus on how brutal and venal they are. Here's Martina Baradale for more. The 80s were really the heyday for the Yakuza. If you think about on the economic side, of course, then probably people who are now in the Yakuza would see the hey day in a different period, which is more to do with the organization and the power of the organization. But on the economic side, I think there is, we can all agree that the 80s were, you know, big moments for Japan, for the economy in general,

leading up to the bubble, then put the Japanese economy in a slant for the next, you know, still going on. But the Yakuza were really able to exploit the economic system. So after the war, the Yakuza already had connections with politics. before the war, the Second World War. So they were already connected with that. As I said, their ideology is a very conservative right-wing ideology, so it was just natural for them to connect with people on that side of the political spectrum. After the war, Japanese police was very weak,

so a lot of Yakuza groups, let's say, supported the Japanese police in putting order, especially in black markets and some of the areas where the allied forces didn't want to go or they didn't, they couldn't control. So they were, again, another big feature of the Yakuza is this, that they've never worked against the state. They've always worked for the state or on the same side of the state. So we have these, so we have also the beginning of these myths of the Yakuza as protector of Japanese populations,

as protectors of the order. And these two things, so connection with the right wing, and these images as public, people who defend groups that defend the Japanese public, are something that allowed the Yakuza to maintain connections with the politics. The Yakuza was especially 70s, 70s, 80s, they were never really, of course, they were

The police knew they were a criminal group, but as I said, they were semi-institutionalized. So it was a group with whom you could do some sort of business, a group with whom you could talk. And so they had the connections, the connections to power and the connections to the economy as well. So in the 80s, they were able to also enter the financial system. of course, and a lot of the legal sector. Let's say that these, in the 80s, the yakuza were also becoming more and more aggressive. So there are a lot of cases in which the yakuza were dealing, you know, were doing their business, but with yakuza-like behaviors.

And a lot of cases started to come out in which the yakuza were, violent or they intervened in some, they intervened in a yakuza-like fashion. And so the population started to kind of get tired of this. There were also a lot of a few scandals, very big scandals that involved the yakuza as well. So the public opinion on the yakuza shifted in the 80s because they were becoming more and more predatory and more and more violent. So that and the other thing that we have in the 80s is also the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Yakuza, because they were so right-wing, they were always, you know,

Japanese government was always kind of very close to Russia, very close to China. So they were always very careful about Chinese influences coming into the state. And the Yakuza, when we have, you know, in the 60s and 7, especially when there were demonstrations of these student groups or worker groups, the Yakuza were always trying to, let's say, on the side of the police. So they were always very anti-communist and trying to limit the influence of these left-wing groups. But we don't have that anymore.

So at the beginning of the 90s, we have a situation in which the Aeqsa is not needed because the police now is strong. You do not need this extra legal enforcer of order. So the state doesn't need the acos anymore. The political influence of communism is finished. So you do not need their ideological strength either. And we have a situation in which the acos have been compromised because of their violent interventions, both in the economy and in politics.

And so it is just, again, we have an alignment of different conditions that made the Japanese state, okay, we need to regulate. So the approach was this, like they decided to have this approach that, you know, let's designate the group. We say, okay, Yamaguchi-Gumi with the headquartered in Kobe in the street and so on and so far. The boss is this one. and so on, and, you know, to have a list of all the proofs and then regulates their activities. So, okay, you can have an office, but you cannot have it next to the school. You cannot have it next to a health theater, next to university.

You cannot, of course, they limited a lot of the banking transactions with people with the Yakuza could have. They were a, the police started to also issue, for example, seize and desist. and the CIST order, if there are violent incidents, the police can ask the group to stop. So a situation in which the ACAAA can exist, but it's very heavily regulated in their public space. Of course, the legal activities cannot be regulated by the police. That 1990 anti-Yakuza law, Martina, just mentioned, this is absolutely huge for the gangs. Almost overnight it kills some of their ability to play in the world of big boy finance,

making the Yakuza life far less glamorous for anyone looking to follow Nishamura's path. The syndicates numbers dropped from almost 200,000 in the mid-60s to under half that by the mid-1990s. Mako Nishimura continues working for the Sugino Gumi, particularly getting more and more stuck into the meth trade. But she's now almost 30 years old, a veteran of the underworld, and she's got an even bigger problem on her hands. just fallen in love. And to hear the rest of the story,

you're going to have to wait a couple of weeks. And trust me, it is even crazier. Thanks for listening, guys. Remember to follow us wherever you get your podcast and social media clips. And don't, I cannot stress this highly enough. Do not Instagram your crimes. That was just, that was fantastic, man.

Just really well done. I'm excited to read the article. And I can't believe your cliffhanger for an episode of this podcast was the phrase she's just fallen. She's got an even bigger problem on her hands. She's just falling in love. I mean, that is just...

There you go. You're the best of what you do. Can't talk this guy. There we go. Praise. Oh, my God. It's so good. All right, we're going to end there

because it's not going to get better at this. So let's just cut. Yeah. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't have? hold up. That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no

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