It was the kind of peace declaration that doesn’t come with champagne or photo ops. Especially since the last monthly yakuza fan magazine closed in 2017 for good.
On April 7, several men in dark suits, some with only nine fingers, walked into the Hyogo Prefectural Police Headquarters. They weren’t lawyers. They weren’t lobbyists. They were lieutenants of the Yamaguchi-gumi—the biggest, oldest, and most famously fractious of Japan’s crime syndicates. And they were there to hand over a sheet of paper.
This piece was originally published in Tokyo Paladin.
A truce…if you can abide by it
The paper said the war was over. It was a unilateral declaration.
Specifically, it said that the Yamaguchi-gumi was calling a ceasefire in its nearly decade-long feud with the breakaway Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi.
That conflict, which burst into public view around August 27, 2015, has been a bloody war of attrition. That August, the Yamaguchi-gumi, founded in 1915, was supposed to be joyously celebrating its centennial as “a humanitarian organization.” A faction calling themselves the Kobe-Yamaguchi split apart the group.
The war has cost over 90 lives in blood-soaked scenes that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Takashi Miike film—men bludgeoned to death, knifed in alleys, shot at red lights, and once even run down like stray dogs. There had been more than 300 incidents of violence by the time this so-called truce was delivered.
The clear winner: the Yamaguchi-gumi. The Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi has fewer than 200 members left, according to some accounts. The Yamaguchi-gumi has thousands. When your opponent is on the ground, bleeding out, it’s easy to declare yourself the winner.
A PR move?
The cops weren’t impressed.
From their vantage point, this was a one-sided surrender, or at best a PR move. The Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi hadn’t made any similar gesture, and the police made it clear they’d keep both eyes open—and maybe a third, if they had one—on both organizations.
The Yamaguchi-gumi and its rival had both been designated as 特定抗争指定暴力団, or Specified Boryokudan Engaged in Conflict, back in 2020. It’s a bureaucratic mouthful with sharp legal teeth. The designation allows law enforcement to crack down harder on both sides—banning gatherings, tightening surveillance, and choking off the social oxygen that lets organized crime thrive in Japan’s margins.
In theory, it was supposed to cool things down. In practice, it just gave the war a different shade of gray.
Whether this ceasefire sticks is anyone’s guess. In the world of organized crime, peace is often just a pause—one that lasts until someone forgets what was agreed to… or remembers why the war started in the first place.
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