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much wiser beyond her years, did the right thing and responded as briefly as possible before the other announcer could step in and redirect the interview. However, even in such a brief exchange as this, Kotani managed to send Japanese women back about twenty years.
But an even lower point for media coverage came when the Reuters news service ran a story on Japan's yakuza agreeing to a ceasfire for the duration of the Olympic games. Displayed prominently in The Daily Yomiuri's Olympic coverage section, the article went on to detail how two fierce yakuza groups, the Yamaguchi-gumi and the Nakano-kai had declared a truce for fifteen days, putting their recent infighting temporarily behind them and letting Japan and the rest of the world go about their business, which - as the story demonstrated by comparison - even the United States and Iraq could not officially observe. But it is exactly this kind of comparison that is worrisome. The yakuza, as they "called off gangland hits" for the Games, and "banned its men from visiting the central Japanese city of Nagano," continue to garner the kind of respect one wouldn't usually accord to a crime organization. After all this is the same crime syndicate that recently stormed a Kobe hotel and killed one if its own while also accidentally putting a bullet in the head of a 69-year-old innocent bystander, the 13th innocent victim of Yakuza warfare since 1975. Much like their philosophical brethren the mafia, the yakuza continue to be seen as a necessary evil, a group that is equally praised and despised, but one that generally works "harmoniously" within Japan. Like the old woman who was quoted on TV following the Great Hanshin Earthquake - and stood in line for supplies being handed out by a major Naka-ku yakuza member - she said it was all about "giri ninjoo;" duty and humanity. Overcoming the mythology of organized crime is one of the many steps in removing such a presence from a particular culture. Unlike the yakuza, the Italian mafia came under heavy fire at the hands of two progressive prosecutors; Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who, throughout the 80's and into the early 90's, worked hard to overturn toothless laws, reveal connections between key politicians and other benefactors of the mafia, but most importantly, to remove the "Robin Hood" ethos from the eyes of many, who for so long had seen La Cosa Nostra as an invaluable part of the community. Their work was to culminate in a series of trials known as the Maxi trials. In Maxi I, after years of preparing Italy for a new way to look at the mafia, they scored a complete and total victory: 344 defendants found guilty with sentences totaling 2,665 years. Of the major bosses, 19 were served with life imprisonment. And as well in America, where a young District Attorney named Rudolph Giuliani worked in conjunction with the Italians to share evidence and tackle the increasing power of the mafia in New York. Today, since Giuliani has been elected Mayor of New York, and has considerably more power over the police force, he has continued to whittle down the power of organized crime. Most New Yorker's have since been shocked to find out how cheap garbage service and seafood could be, once kickbacks to the mob were stopped. In Japan, however, a major attempt to take on the yakuza and the cultural attachments that surround this group has yet to happen. As journalist Bozono Shigeru puts it, "If there is to be such change, it must come from a change in the attitude of the Japanese public, breaking away from a mindset that has long tolerated the existence of yakuza." This is obviously easier said than done: the yakuza, in their current incarnation, formed after the war when a beaten Japan was ripe for exploitation by criminals in blackmarket activities such as drugs, prostitution, gambling, until those involved began to consolidate their power to create well defined groups or gangs. But it didn't all just merely begin after the war. The origins of this kind of criminal activity date back as far as the Edo era, when small time hoodlums ran with each other in the crimes of that day. A firm hold on the country started long ago, but it eventually resulted in a peak post-war high (1963) "of 184,000 gangsters affiliated with 5,216 groups." At around this same time, while the size of their numbers might have only best been known by the National Police Agency, the yakuza would soon be brought to national prominence in the shape and form of film; yakuza films. Whereas the mafia as a subject for film has been dealt with in a handful of major productions, stories of the yakuza have been told countless times. Some figures: Toei films, in the years 1963 to 1972, produced forty different yakuza films of varying thematic degree; Nikkatsu films, in one significant move to compete with Toei's lineup, produced twenty-eight yakuza films in one year, 1969. Not only have the yakuza been clever enough to know how to offset their image with public relations, but in a period when their stories dominated the film community's attention, they had the perfect medium to deliver their message: a code of ethics that would strike a familiar chord in all Japanese, one of loyalty, honor, and duty, something that harked back to better times, emulating a time when the Samurai way of life was the norm. In this the filmmaker's had the perfect paradox to exploit: the good yakuza, and his long honored ways of duty, and the bad yakuza, tainted by western ways and incapable of matching the honorable pattern of his kin. Although the film production companies probably had little concern beyond what this meant to the nation at large besides profits, it most likely contributed to a sense that even the yakuza were as duty bound as "we," the Japanese, are. But this is not to say that the Japanese have completely given up on limiting the power of the yakuza. Due to the fact that over the years Japan's economy went from war-torn to juggernaut, it gave many yakuza a reason to leave their club membership behind and enter legitimate money making enterprises elsewhere. Also, in 1992 the Japanese Government made their first overt attempt at limiting yakuza power by enacting a tough Anti-gang law. Both economics and new laws have now lowered club membership to a little less than half their number thirty years ago. Today, their numbers stand at around 80,000 members of 3,120 gangster groups. Still a menacing size that has obviously been able to create as much mayhem as before, when their power and popularity was at its peak. The new laws have helped to take a bite out of those areas where yakuza traditionally had done business - prostitution, pachinko, drugs - but it unfortunately forced them to reinvent themselves for the modern age and sent them into businesses that have made the authorities uncomfortable in new ways, such as in the acts of sokaiya, or those who extort money from companies in exchange for their commitment to prevent displays that might otherwise embarrass officials at company stockholder meetings. Sokaiya, housing loan fraud, protection of buildings taken as collateral, and construction (where the yakuza are believed to have a stake in over one-thousand construction companies), could now be listed as the new "industries" of the yakuza. The scandals that have riddled the financial sector as of late would probably testify to this. Like Ryuichi Koike, the "don" of the sokaiya, who started out working as a street peddler (tekiya) for the yakuza before turning himelf into a powerful sokaiya who most recently bilked Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank out of 30 billion yen in loans without sufficient collateral, and then turned around (with their money) and literally bought his way into Nomura Securities' shareholder meetings, where he then extorted more money from them. His current image is one of defiant arrogance, as on TV he moves from court hearing to court hearing, gleefully pushing over cameramen and photographers on his way to the ever present taxi and patient driver. To what extent the Japanese Government and National Police Agency will continue to crimp the style of the yakuza is yet to be seen. For a country that abhors and is even deeply embarrassed by violence, further pressure applied to the gangs might only result in this, not necessarily amongst themselves, but it could result in a striking out - in retaliation - at the general public. In Italy this was the tradeoff that they had to live with: For every move made against the mafia, the mafia responded with violence directed at prosecutors and innocent victims alike. Eventually, Gianni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino paid for their efforts with their lives. Both were killed by separate car bomb explosions. And for all their work, if pressure is not applied regularly in the fight against organized crime, the mafia can rebound quickly. Today, in the city of Naples, an ongoing mob war has claimed 130 lives in a year of infighting. What does this mean to Japan and the Japanese? Not much probably, but it does suggest two choices: to either continue in their staus quo stance of accepting the yakuza as they are, or to take that bold next step, one which will determine whether patience can sustain a process that is bound to be painful. Note: In the February 23 issue of the Japan Times, they published an editorial by Grant F. Newsham entitled, "Japan's 'spineless' press does the nation a disservice." In it his research led to the discovery "...that 10 percent of the estimated $500 billion in bad bank loans were made to the yakuza, yet virtually no details have been reported."
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