TOKYO (Reuters) - With her dyed-brown long hair and tight designer jeans, Shoko Tendo looks like any other stylish young Japanese woman — until she removes her shirt to reveal the vivid tattoos covering her back and most of her body.
Shoko Tendo author of "Yakuza Moon" poses after an interview with Reuters in Tokyo August 28, 2007.
Gangster daughter sheds light on Japan underworld
Elaine Lies
TOKYO (Reuters) - With her dyed-brown long hair and tight designer jeans, Shoko Tendo looks like any other stylish young Japanese woman — until she removes her shirt to reveal the vivid tattoos covering her back and most of her body.
Shoko Tendo author of "Yakuza Moon" poses after an interview with Reuters in Tokyo August 28, 2007. Tendo, 39, the author of "Yakuza Moon", a best-selling memoir just out in English, says that police efforts to eradicate the gansters have merely made them harder to track. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
The elaborate dragons, phoenixes and a medieval courtesan with one breast bared and a knife between her teeth are a symbol of Tendo’s childhood as the daughter of a “yakuza” gangster and her youth as a drug-using gang member.
The author of “Yakuza Moon,” a best-selling memoir just out in English, the 39-year-old Tendo says that police efforts to eradicate the gangsters have merely made them harder to track.
“The more the police push, the more the yakuza are simply going underground, making their activities harder to follow than they ever were before,” she told Reuters in a recent interview.
Police say full-fledged membership in yakuza groups fell to 41,500 last year, down from 43,000 in 2005, a decline they attribute to tighter laws against organized crime.
The number of yakuza hangers-on, including thugs and members of motorcycle gangs, who are willing to do their dirty work, though, rose marginally to 43,200.
More shocking for many in Japan, where gun-related crime is rare, were a handful of fatal shootings by yakuza earlier this year, including the killing of the mayor of Nagasaki.
Tendo said the shootings were a result of the legal crackdown on yakuza, which has made it harder for them to ply their traditional trades of prostitution, drugs and bid-rigging.
“They’re being forced into a corner, their humanity taken away,” she said. “All the things they used to do for a living have been made illegal, so life has become very hard.”
SOCIAL DISPARITY
Experts say this is especially true for gangsters in less affluent parts of Japan, a reflection of the same sort of income gaps that increasingly plague the nation as a whole.
“Yakuza need a lot of money, but depending on where they are, business isn’t going so well,” said Nobuo Komiya, a criminology professor at Tokyo’s Rissho University. “So they turn to guns.”
Descended from medieval gamblers and outlaws, yakuza were long portrayed as latter-day samurai, bound by traditions of honor and duty and living extravagant lives.
Tendo’s father, the leader of a gang linked to the Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest yakuza group, led a “classic” yakuza life replete with Italian suits, imported cars and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Raised with strict ideas of honor, she was both spoiled and scolded by the tattooed men who frequented her family home.
But she also faced prejudice and bullying because of her father. In response, she joined a gang, took drugs and become the lover of several gangsters before near-fatal beatings and drug overdoses convinced her to change her life.
Now a writer and mother, Tendo has distanced herself from the yakuza world, which she feels is rapidly losing its traditions.
Being a gang member is not illegal in Japan, and until recently the gangs were known for openness. Their offices even posted signs with their names and membership lists inside.
Gangs cooperated with police, handing over suspects in return for police turning a blind eye to yakuza misdemeanors, but this broke down after organized crime laws were toughened in 1992.
Shoko Tendo author of "Yakuza Moon" poses after an interview with Reuters in Tokyo August 28, 2007. Tendo, 39, the author of "Yakuza Moon", a best-selling memoir just out in English, says that police efforts to eradicate the gansters have merely made them harder to track. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
AGEING GANGSTERS
The largest part of yakuza income now comes from pursuits involving stocks, property and finance.
“What we’re going to see from here on is the yakuza becoming more structured, like the U.S. Mafia, and dividing itself between business experts and violence experts,” said Manabu Miyazaki, a writer whose father was also a yakuza.
“As the world becomes more borderless, they’ll need experts who can deal with this too, speaking Chinese and English.”
Like Japan as a whole, gangsters are also ageing, and fewer young people look to organized crime as a career option.
Police figures showed fewer than 20 percent of yakuza were in their 20s in 2005, a trend both Tendo and Miyazaki attributed to young people’s dislike for the tough life involved.
“They think being a yakuza is like joining a company,” Miyazaki said. “There’s a joke about a young man going to a gang office and asking what the salary was, and would he get insurance.”
But while today’s yakuza are eschewing tattoos and amputated fingers — cut off to atone for mistakes — in favor of more mainstream lifestyles, they are unlikely to disappear altogether.
“Fewer people want to become yakuza,” Miyazaki said. “But those who do will be very logical, very scary — and much, much more dangerous.”
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Yakuza Moon: Memoirs of a Gangster's Daughter: Shoko Tendo ... - Amazon.ca
https://www.amazon.ca/Yakuza-Moon-Memoirs-Gangsters-Daughter/dp/1568364385
Yakuza Moon: Memoirs of a Gangster's Daughter: Shoko Tendo, Louise Heal: ... Tendo lives in Tokyo with her baby daughter and works as a freelance writer.
Missing: escapes | Must include: escapes
Interview: Shoko Tendo on growing up in the seamy world of ...
https://www.independent.co.uk › News › People › Profiles
Nov 11, 2007 - But, as Shoko Tendo explains, she's now escaped her violent, ... daughter who she is raising while writing the follow-up to Yakuza Moon.
Yakuza Moon: Memoirs of a Gangster's Daughter by Shoko Tendo (Paperback, 2009)
Description
- Tiny, frail and beautiful, it is hard to believe the hardships endured by 37-year-old Shoko Tendo. But the dragon tattoo that peeks from her sleeve is a hint that she has spent most of her life living on the fringes of mainstream Japanese society, as a me member of a yakuza family.One of four children born to a wealthy and powerful yakuza boss, Tendo lived the early years of her life in luxury. When she was six, her father was sent to prison and the family fell into terrible debt.Bullied by her classmates because of her father's activities, and terrorized at home by her father who became a drunken, violent monster after his release from prison,Tendo rebelled.From the age of 12 she started going to nightclubs with her elder sister, becoming a drug addict and a member of a girl gang.At the age of 15 she spent eight months in a juvenile detention centre after getting into a fight with ather gang.In the nineteen-eighties, during Japan's bubble ecomy, Tendo started working as a bar hostess, attracting many rich and loyal customers, and earning money to help her family out of debt.But there were also abusive clients, one of whom beat her so badly that her face was left permanently scarred.Her mother died, plunging Tendo into a depression so deep that she twice tried to commit suicide.Somehow, Tendo overcame these tough times.A turning point was getting tattooed, from the base of her neck to the tips of her toes, with a design centered on a geisha with a dagger in her mouth, an act that empowered her to start making changes in her life.She started going to beauty school to learn how to hide the scars on her face and she quit her job as a hostess. On her last day as a hostess she looked up at the full moon.She never forgot the sight, and it became a symbol of her struggle to become whole, and the title of the book she wrote as an epitaph for herself and her family.Now in paperback, the powerful and moving story of one woman's struggle against discrimination and hardship to create a better life for herself.A fascinating insight into the closed world of Japan's yakuza society.This book features 16 pages of never-before-seen photos of Tendo's youth, family and tattoos, as well as a new foreword by the author, describing her life since the book was first published four years ago.
- Author BiographyYakuza Moon is Shoko Tendo's first book and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Tendo lives in Tokyo with her baby daughter and works as a freelance writer.
No comments:
Post a Comment