End nears for Japan's marriage to the mob

WHEN the toasts are raised here next year at the opening of the world's tallest communications tower, yakuza gangsters will not be celebrating.

The yakuza, as members of Japan's criminal underworld are known, are banned from the construction of the 2,080ft tower. "The mob cannot come here," said Toru Hironaka, a lawyer who leads a legal team retained by the tower's developers to bar crime syndicates from the construction project.

The ban is part of a nationwide effort by the Japanese government and the business community to sever the deep-rooted ties between organised crime and corporate Japan, especially in the construction industry.

As part of the national crackdown, a top crime boss of Japan's largest crime syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi, was arrested last week on charges of extorting 40 million yen (300,000) from a construction company in the western city of Kyoto.

"Organised crime is threatening Japan's entire economy," Kohei Kishi, director of the organised crime division of Japan's National Police Agency, said. "And they have deep roots in construction."

The National Police Agency and other government departments are pressuring businesses of various sorts to stamp out mafia links. The country's finance ministry, for example, has directed banks to step up safeguards to prevent money laundering, cut off loans to mob-related companies and deny bank accounts to individuals with known gangster ties.

The big target, though, is Japan's 225bn construction industry, where the yakuza have long run rampant. In the 1990s, at the peak of yakuza involvement with construction, police estimate that gangs pocketed at least 2-3 per cent of all construction spending in Japan.

Across Japan, almost 83,000 gangsters operate in 22 crime syndicates, according to police data, contributing to a mob-controlled economy worth an estimated 145 bn a year.

In the construction industry, the yakuza's influence dates back to Japan's extensive rebuilding after the devastation of World War II, when the mob helped supply cheap labour to contractors. A modern-day yakuza boss pressures developers to pay "protection money" to cover construction projects or use front companies to win lucrative construction or procurement contracts, police say.

Sometimes it is the developers who reach out to the yakuza - to muscle reluctant owners into selling their land, for example.

"The construction industry was once tolerant of yakuza involvement," said Hiroshi Inuzuka, a lawyer and adviser to the nationwide Federation of Construction Contractors, a trade group.

"A good project manager was expected to smooth over ‘local relations,' which involved working with the yakuza so there would be no trouble," he said.

The industry's anti-yakuza effort, which began in 2008, has shifted away from its previous focus of going after the crime gangs themselves. Now the emphasis is on monitoring companies and imposing tougher penalties on those that do business with the mob.

The new Tokyo tower - the Tokyo Sky Tree - has become a prominent symbol of the crackdown. In late 2008, the companies working on the Sky Tree teamed up with local businesses to form an anti-yakuza committee. It is one of more than 100 similar committees that have been formed here in the past few years.

Hironaka, the tower's anti-mob lawyer, says movement to and from the construction site is closely monitored by guards and CCTV. Contracts are scrutinised to make sure no construction equipment or materials — not even boxed lunches or gloves for workers — come from companies with mob affiliations.

"The site is water-tight," Hironaka said. "It will take a lot to get past all that."

Local governments, whose public works projects account for the bulk of construction spending in Japan, have also joined the campaign to extract the yakuza from the building business. Next month, Tokyo is set to ban any company or individual affiliated with the yakuza from city contracts — from office supplies to public works — along with threats of penalties and public disclosure for companies found to have mafia ties.

Morio Umeda, who runs a public anti-yakuza advice centre in Tokyo, says inquiries are rising as more companies try to sever ties with the mob.

"I tell them that they should not be afraid, that they should go to the police even if they are warned not to," said Umeda, a former anti-yakuza officer with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. "But especially at busy construction sites, it can sometimes be difficult to be aware of who's coming and going."