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With her dyed-brown long hair and tight designer jeans, Shoko Tendo looks like any other stylish young Japanese woman - until she removes her shirt to reveal the vivid tattoos covering her back and most of her body.
The elaborate dragons, phoenix and a medieval courtesan with one
breast bared and a knife between her teeth are a symbol of Tendo's childhood as the daughter of a "yakuza" gangster and her youth as a drug-using gang member.
The author of Yakuza Moon, a bestselling memoir just out translated into English, the 39-year-old Tendo says that police efforts to eradicate the gangsters have merely made them harder to track.
"The more the police push, the more the yakuza are simply going underground, making their activities harder to follow than they ever were before," she says.
Police say full-fledged membership in yakuza groups fell to 41,500 last year, down from 43,000 in 2005, a decline they attribute to tighter laws against organised crime.
The number of yakuza hangers-on, including thugs and members of motorcycle gangs, who are willing to do their dirty work, though, rose marginally to 43,200.
More shocking for many in Japan, where gun-related crime is rare, were a handful of fatal shootings by yakuza this year, including the killing of the mayor of Nagasaki.
Tendo says the shootings are a result of the legal crackdown on yakuza, which has made it harder for them to ply their traditional trades of prostitution, drugs and bid-rigging.
"They're being forced into a corner, their humanity taken away," she says. "All the things they used to do for a living have been made illegal, so life has become very hard."
Experts say this is especially true for gangsters in less affluent parts of Japan, a reflection of the same sort of income gaps that increasingly plague the nation as a whole.
"Yakuza need a lot of money, but depending on where they are, business isn't going so well," says Nobuo Komiya, a criminology professor at Tokyo's Rissho University. "So they turn to guns."
Descended from medieval gamblers and outlaws, yakuza were long portrayed as latter-day samurai, bound by traditions of honour and duty and living extravagant lives.
Tendo's father, the leader of a gang linked to the Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest yakuza group, led a "classic" yakuza life replete with Italian suits, imported cars and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Raised with strict ideas of honour, she was both spoiled and scolded by the tattooed men who frequented her family home.
But she also faced prejudice and bullying because of her father. In response, she joined a gang, took drugs and became the lover of several gangsters before near-fatal beatings and drug overdoses convinced her to change her life.
Now a writer and mother, Tendo has distanced herself from the yakuza world, which she feels is rapidly losing its traditions.
Being a gang member is not illegal in Japan, and until recently the gangs were known for openness.
Their offices even posted signs with their names and membership lists inside.
Gangs co-operated with police, handing over suspects in return for police turning a blind eye to yakuza misdemeanours, but this broke down after organised crime laws were toughened in 1992.
The largest part of yakuza income now comes from pursuits involving stocks, property and finance.
"What we're going to see from here on is the yakuza becoming more structured, like the US Mafia, and dividing itself between business experts and violence experts," says Manabu Miyazaki, a writer whose father was also a yakuza.
- Reuters
