Secrets, power, and brutality: Explore the Yakuza empire under Kazuo Taoka - Part 2 - Dana Truppiana Mob Times

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Secrets, power, and brutality: Explore the Yakuza empire under Kazuo Taoka - Part 2

April 30, 2025 • 79 mins

Watch Part 1 here:

Secrets, power, and brutality: Explore the Yakuza empire under the iron fist of Kazuo Taoka - Part 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRDx1p06DHg

Japanese gangsters, members of what are formally called bōryokudan (“violence groups”), or Mafia-like criminal organizations. In Japan and elsewhere, especially in the West, the term yakuza can be used to refer to individual gangsters or criminals as well as to their organized groups and to Japanese organized crime in general. Yakuza adopt samurai-like rituals and often bear elaborate body tattoos. They engage in extortion, blackmail, smuggling, prostitution, drug trafficking, gambling, loan sharking, day-labor contracting, and other rackets and control many restaurants, bars, trucking companies, talent agencies, taxi fleets, factories, and other businesses in major Japanese cities. They are also involved in criminal activities worldwide. Taoka Kazuo (born March 28, 1912, Sanshōmura, Japan—died July 30, 1981, Amagasaki) was Japan’s major crime boss (oyabun), who, after World War II, rose to head a giant crime organization, the Yamaguchi-gumi. Though centered in Kōbe, it had interests and affiliates nationwide and consisted of more than 10,000 members (known as yakuza) divided into more than 500 bands. Kazuo Taoka was born to a poor farm family in a village on the island of Shikoku; his father died before Taoka was born, and his mother died when he was four years old. Raised by relatives, he left school in his early teens and in 1929 began associating with yakuza gangs in Kōbe; in the early 1930s he became an apprentice and then a member of Yamaguchi-gumi. During World War II the organization fell apart; Taoka restored it in the postwar years and made it into a giant cartel, dealing in extortion, labor racketeering, gambling, prostitution, loansharking, smuggling, show business, and other enterprises both legal and illegal. Ideologically he was ultra-rightist and ultra-nationalistic.

⏳𝐕𝐈𝐃𝐄𝐎 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐒 ⏳

0:00 – Intro

01:07 – Part 1 Recap

07:14 – Being ‘made’ into the Yakuza

09:53 – Murder charges

16:07 – Kazuo Taoka takes over the Yamaguchi Gumi

18:27 – Kazuo meets Fumiko 30:11 – Labor Unions

33:06 – The jobs the government gave to the Yakuza

35:34 – The legit jobs of Taoka

36:43 – The expansion of the Yamaguchi-Gumi

39:32 – The Castellammarese-like war that broke out in the Yamaguchi Gumi

45:30 – Kazuo Taoka is attacked