JAPAN

Crime and The City

Brought low by endless scandals, police in Yokohama are struggling to cope with rising crime. But they will soon face a still-bigger challenge--the final of the soccer World Cup

By Velisarios Kattoulas/YOKOHAMA, KAISEI AND KAWASAKI

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT law and order, and about how the former failed to keep pace with a breakdown of the latter in Japan's second-largest city. Yokohama lies barely 30 minutes by train from Tokyo, but compared to the Japanese capital it feels like an easier, less-forbidding place to live. The city, its suburbs and the surrounding satellite towns boast beaches and mountains and a national park. A decade ago, many of the more than 3 million citizens living there looked down on the 10 million people crammed into Tokyo. How could anyone live there without suffocating?

Today, Yokohama is no longer so sure of itself.

Like the rest of Japan, it has suffered from the country's long-running economic stagnation. Five percent of the city's workforce are unemployed and another 40% work only part time. Many of the better restaurants are struggling. Some have closed. As Tokyo rents and house prices have fallen, affluent Japanese along with many of the foreigners who gave Yokohama a cosmopolitan edge have left. Maybe Tokyo was better than Yokohama after all, they seem to be saying.

And then there's crime. True, serious crime across Japan remains low compared to other developed nations. Yet a nationwide increase of more than 70% since 1990 has undermined Japan's image of itself as a safe nation. This year, for the second year in a row--and for only the second time since 1945--the number of crimes recorded between January and June topped 1 million. At the same time, the arrest rate has plummeted. In the early 1990s it approached 90%. The most recent statistics now peg it at 55%.

In Kanagawa prefecture, of which Yokohama is the capital, police say the arrest rate for serious crime is even lower: 44%. And including all crimes, it is lower still. "This year, the way things stand, Kanagawa police will be lucky to stop the arrest rate dipping below 20%," says a veteran crime reporter at a major Japanese daily.

Why? No doubt, the demise of local industry has exposed a social fabric torn from years of urbanization. Yet probably the biggest reason for the decline in the effectiveness of the local police is, well, the local police themselves. While the Yokohama force is not the first in Japan to suffer scandals, the 24 that have rocked it since September 1999 have set a new benchmark for police shenanigans.

So far, police say, 261 officers have been sacked, demoted or otherwise punished for improprieties, including the following: Selling classified information; burglary; drug use; hit and run; groping a high-school student; filming up a woman's skirt; attempted rape of a woman in detention; murder; and multiple cover-ups. In the most recent incident, on August 31, an officer was arrested for taking a ¥40,000 ($330) bribe from a gangster, and in a restaurant car park being introduced to a female escort "for pleasure."

"It really is no wonder local people shut their doors when police come looking for help with investigations," says the crime reporter.

No wonder, too, that those responsible for more than half of all serious crime in Kanagawa remain free. No wonder that organized crime and biker gangs view the situation with glee. And no wonder that many people worry about what will happen next June when the hooligan-plagued soccer World Cup final rolls into--and possibly over--the struggling city of Yokohama.

IN MANY WAYS, 24-year-old Shiso Okamoto is a tabloid embodiment of the new Yokohama. Okamoto was raised at Hofukuji Temple in Kaisei, a town an hour from the city centre. Apart from the local bosozoku bike gangs, he grew up in an environment redolent of less-troubled times. Behind the temple where his father is head priest, a stream trickles through rice paddies and a bamboo forest.

In adolescence, Okamoto experienced the usual struggle over which path to take in life but ended up choosing the Buddhist priesthood. Last year, he started dating a 24-year-old nurse. "He'd brought her home last autumn to introduce to us," his father recalls. Earlier this year, Eiko Matsuda (not her real name) and Okamoto decided to get engaged, and to marry early next year.

On July 31, Okamoto and Matsuda planned to meet to go over the details of their engagement party. Matsuda was on the evening shift. So after work, Okamoto drove to a friend's restaurant, from where he later set off to meet Matsuda.

Okamoto's fiancée arrived outside the convenience store where they had agreed to meet at just after 10:30 p.m. Five minutes later Okamoto called her on her mobile phone. "I'll be there any minute," he said. Fifteen minutes later he had yet to arrive. In the meantime, a blur of bosozoku bikes had raced by. Used to seeing them around, she gave them little thought, and headed back to her nearby apartment to wait.

A siren's wail started her running; first to the convenience store, then towards the spot where an ambulance had stopped 100 metres away. Alongside it, she saw a body face down. Its legs and torso were in the gutter, its head in the road. As she got closer, she saw blood, a deep indentation in the back of the skull and a crater above the left eye. "Priest dies in beating," the Kanagawa Shimbun, a local daily, declared in a headline the next day.

Immediately, suspicion fell on the bosozoku roaring around town the night of the attack. "Attacked by bike gang thugs?" the Asahi Shimbun, a national daily, asked.

The answer was yes. Three days after the attack a 17-year-old bike-gang member arrived at Odawara police station. "I did it," he declared; under Japanese law, police withheld his name because he was a juvenile. The next day, another bosozoku, 20-year-old Ken Nakamura, turned himself in as well. Soon eight more bosozoku were in custody.

The tone of the blanket media coverage had left Japan primed for a tale of unadulterated evil. But the story police heard presented a less straightforward picture of what had happened. According to the thugs, Okamoto had stopped his car across the street from where three members of the gang were parked, stepped out, attacked one of them and kicked over a bike. Using his mobile phone, one young thug called for the reinforcements Okamoto's fiancée watched roar by the convenience store. "I hit him in the head with an aluminum baseball bat because he hit one of my friends," the 17-year-old said, echoing his gang mates.

At first, the thugs' version of events was dismissed as self-serving. But then police discovered that when Okamoto was struggling with his own adolescence he too had been a hell-raising bosozoku. More damning, police learnt Okamoto had been drinking hard the night he died. Privately, people familiar with the investigation say that when he left his friend's restaurant he was drunk. Finally, prosecutors charged eight of the bosozoku with traffic violations and the two ringleaders with murder and manslaughter.

Such arrests aside, bike gangs like the one that killed Okamoto remain the most visible sign of the breakdown in law and order in Yokohama. When bosozoku first took to the streets in the mid 1960s, they were relatively tame. However, as Japan's birth rate declined and bosozoku grew smaller, they began to defend with violence turf that they had once guarded solely by force of numbers. The National Police Agency says serious crime by bosozoku has more than doubled since 1996, and now accounts for a stunning 80% of all serious crime committed by juveniles. Moreover, yakuza organized-crime syndicates increasingly target bosozoku as buyers for the amphetamines and other drugs that are now their biggest source of income.

On Kanagawa's streets, the fall-out from the police's inability to maintain law and order is felt almost nightly. Nationwide police are cracking down hard against bosozoku. Indeed, in parts of Tokyo bosozoku have disappeared--for now, at least. For Kanagawa, the trouble is that to escape rigorous policing elsewhere, bosozoku from across the Kanto region (which includes Tokyo) flock there, figuring that its police are too beleaguered to stop them.

The 1,700 bosozoku thugs that police estimate live in Kanagawa are organized into at least 81 gangs that have been warring for years. But on nights when they have out-of-town "visitors" they declare a truce and lead a procession around the prefecture. According to police, one such event on April 14 drew 400 bikes from Kanagawa, Tokyo, Chiba, Saitama, Shizuoka and Yamanashi prefectures. Police say the size of that convoy was exceptional, but that convoys of 300 blight Yokohama and the rest of Kanagawa year-round.

In the meantime, the Inagawakai syndicate that sells the bike gangs the drugs that keep them revved up till dawn has used the collapse of policing in Kanagawa to cement its control of the local underworld. The late Kakuji Inagawa founded the gang to which he later gave his name in 1945. At first, it specialized in gambling. But Inagawa quickly expanded into prostitution, racketeering, and drugs, and established Kanagawa as a stronghold.

In 1960 the ruling Liberal Democratic Party reinforced Inagawa's reputation as an underworld power by putting him on its payroll. That year, protesters rioted over plans for a military alliance with the United States. Through a mutual acquaintance, Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi hired Inagawa to assemble a 28,000-strong force of gangsters and ultra-nationalists to work alongside police to smash opposition to the U.S.-Japan security treaty.

Since the adoption of a tough new gang law in 1992, the Inagawakai's biggest rivals have suffered several setbacks. By comparison, the Inagawakai has survived the decade-long crackdown largely unscathed. When the Nibikikai, an independent gang based in Kanagawa, tried to ally itself with the Tokyo-based Sumiyoshikai in March this year, the Inagawakai pounced, and in 13 clashes and eight shootouts on March 16 and in the early hours of the next morning brought the Nibikikai under its control. In stark contrast, the Sumiyoshikai has already spent seven months trying to iron out a similar conflict in Tokyo. According to the latest Kanagawa police estimates, the Inagawakai's takeover of the Nibikikai means that now three out of every four of the estimated 3,900 gangsters in Kanagawa pay tribute to Chijiro Inagawa, son of Inagawakai's late founder.

IN JUNE next year, the beleaguered Kanagawa police face the unenviable task of policing the World Cup final, to be held at the 70,000-seat Yokohama International Stadium. The four sides most likely to feature--Argentina, England, France and Italy--all suffer from persistent, and at times deadly, hooliganism. Already, officials in London, Rome and Tokyo are examining ways to stop hooligans travelling to Japan. Yet if previous competitions are anything to go by, thousands will slip in undetected.

The fear now is that the Kanagawa police--already a laughing stock in Japan--will become the butt of jokes worldwide. But if history and a largely ignored but shocking recent crime are any indication, Yokohama police seem likely to avoid at least international scorn by entrusting the world's assorted hooligans to the care of the 10,000-strong Inagawakai.

Police deny this vehemently. But it's worth remembering how Prime Minister Kishi turned for help to the Inagawakai's founder when faced with a similar problem in 1960. "Police using yakuza to control soccer hooligans would be entirely consistent with what's happened in the past," says Laura Hein, a professor of Japanese history at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Moreover, in a column in the weekly magazine Shukan Post in June, Robert Whiting, the author of Tokyo Underworld and an expert on the Japanese police and organized crime, argued that Yokohama actually needed the yakuza. "Only the yakuza will be able to control the violence," Whiting wrote. "To police the World Cup, it's clear what's needed in Japan is not riot police, but a yakuza army like the one organized to protect President Eisenhower and the emperor during the security treaty demonstrations of 1960."

In fact, as 26-year-old Edward Alex Gonder discovered on October 6, unruly foreigners are already at risk from yakuza. A New York native, Gonder lived in Ebina, a bedroom town north of Yokohama, with his Japanese wife, Takako Yamaguchi. After a stint in the U.S. Air Force, police say, he taught English, and tended bar at a bordello in Kawasaki, a city bordering Yokohama. Just before 10 p.m. on October 5, Gonder arrived in Kawasaki's Isago red-light district with a male Japanese friend. According to police, Gonder, a burly African-American who was known in the area as a drinker and brawler, visited several bars before ending up at the Wild Cherry lap-dancing bar.

A pimp standing outside the bar recently claimed no knowledge of Gonder, or of what happened to him after he left. But the way police tell it, Gonder got into an argument with a pimp. Soon, two Inagawakai gangsters working protection in the neighbourhood arrived with aluminum baseball bats. Witnesses later told investigators the gangsters beat Gonder before pushing him into the back of a car. The two gangsters drove him seven kilometres to a deserted strip of the Kawasaki waterfront. There, they beat Gonder a second time, this time killing him.

Three days later, a 19-year-old whom officers could not name and a 23-year-old, Kentaro Suzuki, surrendered to police. The two gangsters said they hadn't intended to kill Gonder. Officers were not unsympathetic to the American's suffering but concluded he'd been asking for trouble by fighting with the pimp in the first place. Ultimately, following a police recommendation, the Kanagawa prosecutor opted to charge Gonder's killers with manslaughter rather than murder.

For soccer hooligans travelling to Japan next year, the message seems clear: They may face a more spirited local resistance than they bargain for.

This article first appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review, November 15, 2001