The Hangure and a Transforming Underworld — Violence Made Invisible

Last time, we watched the organized crime exclusion ordinances spread nationwide, shutting the yakuza out of bank accounts, contracts, and every corner of corporate activity. Designating groups by law, severing their money and ties through the rules of society: this two-layered encirclement truly worked. The number of members kept falling, and the web of protection-money rackets once strung across the streets thinned, at least on the surface.

And yet the ‘room for profitable crime’ that exists within society, and the ‘machinery for deceiving and robbing the vulnerable,’ did not vanish along with it. Into the void left by exclusion, something of a different shape crept closer. In this chapter we take up the weakening, splintering crime groups, and the new collectives that move without belonging to any organization — the hangure, and the criminal groups that in recent years have come to be called ‘anonymous and fluid’ — and we trace, within the bounds of what has been reported, why the modern underworld has become so hard to see.

Squeezed, and Splitting Apart

Two decades of the Anti-Boryokudan Law and the exclusion ordinances steadily shrank the yakuza, both in numbers and in substance. According to National Police Agency statistics, the combined force of full members and quasi-members fell for eighteen straight years, and at the end of 2022 it was reported to stand at around 22,000 — the lowest since records began in 1958. Compared with the roughly 180,000 of the early 1960s, considered the peak, that is barely a tenth of the level.

As the organizations grew leaner, internal conflict also rose to the surface. When funding sources thin and the balance between tribute payments and rewards collapses, an organization begins to creak from within. There were reported cases of large groups splitting and turning against one another, and the very framework of obligation and rank that had held them together began to waver amid economic deadlock. The self-image of chivalry was no longer a strong enough adhesive to bind an organization into one.

Those Who Carry No Sign — the Hangure

What gained presence in the age of exclusion were the collectives called hangure. Not designated groups like the yakuza, and holding no clear gang or membership roll, they are people said to profit through violence and unlawful means — and reporting and police came to call them by that name.

What characterizes the hangure is the vagueness of their outline. They have no fixed mechanism of admission, no exchange of sake cups to enter a gang; instead, within the loose ties of acquaintances and former associates, they gather for a given job and scatter when it is done. Because they are hard to fit into a framework that regulates designated groups as organizations, the National Police Agency explains that in 2013 it positioned such collectives as ‘quasi-boryokudan’ and strengthened its vigilance. They are said to be involved in special fraud and in illegal fundraising in entertainment districts, at times linking up with the yakuza, and were pointed out as making the methods of crime more malicious and more cunning.

The Shape of Crime Changes — Special Fraud and the Anonymous, Fluid Type

What changed was not only the look of the organizations. The very methods of making money shifted. Its symbol is special fraud — deceiving the elderly and others by phone or in person and swindling them out of money.

There is no need to recount the methods of special fraud in detail here. What matters is that it is built on a ‘division of roles.’ The one who delivers the deceiving words, the one who goes to collect the money, the one who gives the orders — none knowing the others’ faces or real names, each carrying only a fragment of a role. This form of division differs in nature from the older organizations with their clear hierarchies. The collectives that cause harm changed shape, from pyramid-type groups into networks loosely bound together.

In recent years the National Police Agency has come to call such collectives ‘anonymous and fluid criminal groups,’ or tokuryu for short. The central figures hide behind highly anonymous means of communication, while those who actually do the work are explained as being gathered, swapped in and out, through so-called ‘dark part-time jobs.’ The directing figures issue commands through highly confidential apps, and the executors move without knowing one another’s identities. Only the lowest-level executors get caught, while the core remains hard to reach — a structure reported to generate both the spread of harm and the difficulty of enforcement.

What we should note here is that the yakuza, the hangure, and the tokuryu are not necessarily separate existences that can be cleanly divided by a line. Former yakuza members may engage in hangure-like activity, and there are reported cases in which the yakuza entrust such collectives with fundraising and are said to maintain ties with them. The statistical fact that ‘the organizations have weakened’ and the reality that ‘the harm of being deceived and robbed remains severe’ do not contradict each other — they hold true at the same time.

What It Means to Have Become Invisible

Looking back this way, the greatest feature of the modern underworld may be its ‘invisibility.’ The yakuza of old kept offices, hung out emblems, and displayed their presence in the streets, combining a kind of order with intimidation. Precisely because that form was visible, society could confront it head-on through the encirclement of law and ordinance.

But collectives that carry no sign, and crime scattered in network form, leave no way to see from the outside who is where. Until one falls victim, it is hard even to notice their existence. As a result of pushing back the visible threat, the invisible threat has come to the fore — this should be called not a failure of enforcement, but a new phase brought about by the success of enforcement. That is exactly why its assessment is not simple.

A group that has carved its presence into the streets for a century is now, in terms of numbers, certainly fading. Yet the structure of harm behind it survives by changing its shape. In the final chapter that follows, we will look at the present of a yakuza that has sharply declined and is aging, and at the challenge of social reintegration faced by people who cannot return even after washing their hands of it, and we will quietly close this long story while avoiding easy conclusions.