Murder, drugs, violent loyalty – inside Japan’s feared yakuza

Jake Kerridge
Mon, 29 January 2024 

Yakuza members show off their tattoos at a Shinto festival in Tokyo - Jiangang Wang

The American journalist Jake Adelstein has spent decades in Japan exposing the secrets of organised crime gangs. Anybody who has read his 2009 book Tokyo Vice, or seen the 2022 HBO television series based on it, won’t be surprised to know that there are people after his blood.

Prior to Tokyo Vice coming out, Adelstein thought it would be prudent to hire a bodyguard, and he asked Makoto Saigo, a retired yakuza – the term for a member of one of the crime syndicates that used to dominate Japan – to take on the job. Saigo agreed, on one condition: that Adelstein write his biography. “I want my [baby] son to know who I was and what I did [and] I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see him grow up.”

The Last Yakuza is the resulting book, although some of the biographical details have been merged with those of other yakuza to protect the identity of the man Adelstein calls “Saigo”. Only Adelstein knows how much of a composite Saigo is: he certainly emerges from these pages as a bizarre mixture of erratic, honourable, tough and hapless.


Born around 1960, Saigo was a large youth who “towered over his classmates like a bear among deer” at school. He “became a yakuza… because he didn’t like strait-laced Japanese society”. There was also the matter of his taste for upmarket sex-workers, which left him with debts of 60 million yen (then around $60,000) when he was barely out of his teens. Only joining the Inagawa-kai, the third-most powerful yakuza group in Japan, protected him from the loan-sharks.

Saigo’s career was chequered. A spell as a methamphetamine addict saw him convicted of possession in the early 1980s, and landed him in one of Japan’s hellish prisons. “You lost your human rights the second you walked in here” was the greeting he received from the guards. It also nearly saw him expelled from the Inagawa-kai; but he redeemed himself sufficiently after his release from prison to become leader of an Inagawa-kai subset of 150 men.

Jake Adelstein, author of The Last Yakuza

Saigo’s dodgy schemes could be ingenious. When he wanted to secure a loan without collateral, he ordered his men to turn up at a local bank, each bringing a cat: they proceeded to tease the cats, the noise driving all the customers away, until the manager agreed to Saigo’s demands. At heart, though, Saigo was a softie, and when the bank manager lost his job as a result, Saigo gave him five million yen. (He had also insisted that any yakuza who hurt one of the cats would be docked a day’s pay.)

In Saigo’s heyday, the yakuza saw themselves as part of the community: they demanded protection payments from local businesses, but as they were effective in seeing off petty criminals, they were thought to be worth the money. Different Yakuza gangs fought each other, but their code forbade them from harming ordinary people, and they didn’t indulge in the vulgar American gangster habit of carrying guns. Saigo was content, if he was attacked, to see off his enemies with whatever came to hand, such as (in one instance) a “For Sale” sign. Anti-yakuza laws were passed, but the police didn’t see much point in enforcing them.

Adelstein shows how much these gangs depended on rituals and hierarchies as much as any other sector of Japanese society. Once, Saigo was obliged to cut off his own little finger to satisfy a debt owed by one of his men: Adelstein makes this solemn deed into one of the book’s excellent comic set-pieces, as he describes Saigo hopelessly hacking at his pinkie, rejecting his wife’s offer of a sticking plaster with a cartoon frog on it, and then visiting the creditor and chucking the mangled lump of gristle into his coffee.

The Last Yakuza is set in the Japanese underworld - Greg Nicod

As well as telling Saigo’s story, Adelstein gives us a potted history of the yakuza, and how they survived by keeping politicians in their pockets. He’s unimpressed with the latter: “I’ve come to feel that the only difference between Japan’s [ruling] Liberal Democratic Party and the yakuza [is that] some of the yakuza have a code of ethics”. He’s a serial info-dumper: when Saigo gets a tattoo, Adelstein launches into half a dozen pages’ worth of the history of Japanese tattooing. But what he tells us is always interesting, whether or not it’s pertinent, and he always keeps the human story of Saigo’s triumphs and travails in focus, however large his canvas becomes. His deadpan prose proves well-suited not just to the story’s comic aspects, but also its pathos.

Even when Saigo was young, he already seemed old-fashioned in his devotion to the old yakuza codes – apart from the bit that forbade drug use. The generations that came after him, from the early 1990s on, were greedier, more reckless, more trigger-happy. The police began to enforce the laws that forbade people from paying the yakuza protection: unable to bring in funds, Saigo was expelled from the Inagawa-kai. Yet the yakuza habit proved more difficult to shake off than the drug addiction, and the end of the book finds Saigo, to Adelstein’s dismay, seeking a way to return to his old life.

Adelstein makes the appropriate tut-tutting noises when he writes about the harm that the yakuza have caused over the years, and insists that he doesn’t want to romanticise them. Even so, the main effect of The Last Yakuza is to make one nostalgic for a time when criminals had standards of decency. One comes away from it finding Saigo not just sympathetic, but even lovable.

The Last Yakuza is published by Corsair at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books