Does anybody know the origins of the Japanese Mob? How and when did it start? Do they have legendary mobsters like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and John Gotti, to name a few?
Their origins probably lie in organizations of merchants/street peddlers/gamblers during the Tokugawa Shogunate. Over time, they organized.
One of the legendary Yakuza members was a guy named Yoshio Kodama. He was born in Japan, but raised with family in Japanese occupied Korea, where he set up this ultranationalist group to assassinate politicians he considered “left wing” (such ultranationalist death squads weren’t uncommon in 1930s Japan.) He was caught and arrested. When he got out of prison, the Japanese government hired him to ship war supplies from Japanese Asia (Korea, Manchuria, Occupied China, etc), back to the Home Islands. He did, for which he was paid fairly well by the government, and, along with that, made an even bigger fortune smuggling heroin and opium to the Home Islands.
When the war ended, he was arrested by the Americans as a war criminal, and spent some time in prison, until the CIA let him out in exchange for his using the yakuza to break up labor unions and Communists. He did that, and also organized truces and agreements between yakuza gangs.
He managed to stay out of the public eye until the 1970s, really, when he was one of the people involved in the Lockheed Scandal (Lockheed had used him to bribe Japanese politicians to get government contracts), and died in the mid 80s. Interesting guy, and the guy who was probably most responsible for making the Yakuza what it is today.
Two other Yakuza legends were Kazuo Taoka, who turned his Yakuza family, which at one point only had 25 members, into the largest family in Japan, and Hisayuki Machii (born Chong Gwon Yong), who turned the Korean Yakuza in Japan into a force to be reckoned with.