Yakuza Diary: Doing Time in the Japanese Underworld

Based on taped conversations and journal entries made during three months in 1993 when Seymour, an American freelance journalist, interviewed Japanese gangsters, this report makes no claim to objectivity or exhaustiveness. But it is a revealing glimpse of mob influence on Japanese society. Although their operations are not dissimilar to those of the mafia elsewhere, local legend has it that the yakusa are several times as large as their American counterparts, vastly wealthy and powerful in politics, the stock market, drugs, gambling, prostitution and other legitimate and illegitimate businesses. In one interview, a yakusa boss describes how his gang dispossessed the tenants of buildings that some real estate developers wanted to replace with parking lots. Other interviewees discuss mob hierarchies, their clients and their views on violence. Seymour gives a colorful account of his informers and their molls, many of them foreign women, and of the more ordinary life and ambience of Tokyo. He is amusing about his troubles as a long-haired foreigner whose business card lacked the requisite company connection, which in Japan establishes one's status and legitimacy. World rights: Atlantic Monthly Press. (Aug.)