Abstract
Yakuza are Japanese organized crime groups represented by several syndicates in the whole country. They also have got many networks in the world especially in the Pacific zone, The United States as well as in Germany. The modern Yakuza derived from two distinct formations: the bakuto involved in gambling – one of the most lucrative activities of the modern yakuza – and the tekiya mainly involved in peddling. But the term yakuza comes from a Japanese card game – Oicho-Kabu – in which players should do a row of numbers, it refers to the lose-handing ya-ku-sa meaning “eight-nine-three”.
At the beginning, yakuzas were recruited among rural dwellers but today they come from different environments. There are many different bands into the Yakuza; those different groups are often called Boryokudan which means “violent gang”. But they frequently refer themselves as gokudo which literally means “ultimate path” (Adelstein, 2009). They are “close societies in their individual groups but the groups are interlinked through a widespread underworld syndicate” (Takahashi and Becker, 1985: 3).There are three main yakuza syndicates; together they would be the largest organised crime group in the world today. First, the largest boryokudan is the Yamaguchi-gumi, it is gathering more than half of the yakuza members, it was created in 1915 and actually continues to grow; it dominates the industrialized part of japan that is Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe area as well as Tokyo area and other powerful centres across the country.
The second one is the Sumiyoshi-Kai with more than 20 000 members divided in about 280 clans so it is more a confederation than a united group, and finally the third one is the Inagawa-kai, it is also a confederation of several clans which was the first to expand its illegal activities abroad.
