Mako Nishimura: The Woman Who Became a Yakuza

In almost 40 years, Mako Nishimura never lost a fight. She told me this as if it were as obvious as night following day. Nishimura is 5ft-nothing and slight of build. She is also probably the only woman ever to have been a full-fledged yakuza, a member of Japan’s feared and rule-bound criminal underworld. She must have defeated many male gangsters. How, I asked her, did she do it? “First the legs,” she said, hands clasped, maintaining the calm demeanour of a village priest. “You cut him down with a club or a plank of wood.” Then you get to work.

Nishimura’s relaxed attitude to violence – you suspect, speaking to her, that it’s a little more than that – is what first caught the attention of yakuza members in 1986, when she was a 19-year-old runaway and former juvenile-prison inmate living in Gifu, a city near Nagoya. One night that year, Nishimura received a phone call. A pregnant friend named Aya was in trouble. Nishimura grabbed a baseball bat, ran down the street and found Aya surrounded by five men. When one of them kicked Aya in the belly, Nishimura yelled for her friend to run, then went for the attackers with her bat.

By the time the police arrived, the attackers were covered in blood and Nishimura had fled. She went into hiding 170 miles away in Tokyo. A fortnight later, when she returned to Gifu, a local man approached her in a nightclub. He was a member of the Inagawa-kai, one of Japan’s largest organised crime syndicates, and he wanted her to join. Nishimura was already in a biker gang called the Worst, who raced and robbed while dressed in the white jumpsuits of wartime kamikaze pilots. She was getting more deeply involved in serious crime, too, running sex workers and extorting local businesses, as well as selling – and taking – large quantities of methamphetamines. The Inagawa-kai man didn’t have the right energy, Nishimura thought. She turned him down.

Yakuza life nonetheless appealed. It offered respect, protection and, above all, the opportunity to make big money. A few days later, another yakuza sent for Nishimura. His name was Ryochi Sugino, and he ran a Gifu affiliate of one of Japan’s largest yakuza groups. Sugino was a convicted murderer but he was also charismatic and, somehow, paternal. Nishimura trusted him. “He had this aura,” she said.

Aged 20, she and an underboss shared sake at the gang’s downtown Gifu headquarters, a ritual known as sakazuki that formalised Nishimura’s entry into the yakuza, and established her loyalty to Sugino until death. Now, as the saying went, if Sugino told Nishimura a crow was white, she would have to agree. She was proud of her new identity, she told me. “Everything that was yakuza-like, I would do.”

Some of the men taunted her for being a woman. But they also appreciated the business she brought in, running girls and meth around Gifu. Unlike members of Italian mafias, who kick cuts of criminal profits up through a rigid hierarchy, yakuza operate more like franchises, with members paying a monthly tribute to trade off the syndicate’s threat of violence.

At the time Nishimura joined, the yakuza were thriving. Unlike many organised crime groups around the world, the yakuza did not consider themselves outsiders. They had long been institutionalised, having grown powerful with, rather than against, the state. They claimed a connection to feudal-era samurai and helped plunder Asia on behalf of imperial Japanese forces. By the middle of the 20th century, their image as patriotic felons had been further massaged by yakuza-owned movie and manga houses.

By the 1980s, when Nishimura became a member, the yakuza did not merely traffic guns, drugs and women; the gangs ran casinos, golf courses and high-rises, and extorted money from publicly listed corporations by threatening to disrupt their operations. The largest yakuza syndicates were worth hundreds of millions of dollars and were active on the stock market, with operations from Hawaii to Ho Chi Minh City.

But as Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 90s, and a succession of scandals laid bare organised crime’s cosy relationship with politics, the Japanese public increasingly demanded that police crack down on the gangs. These days, after years of increasingly tough lawmaking, plus competition from international and tech-savvy crime syndicates, the yakuza are widely seen as a spent force.

Nishimura is no longer a member. She lives in a small, ground floor apartment near Gifu’s railway station, surrounded by plants and photos of the two sons whose adult lives she has – because of her criminal past and her drug addiction – mostly watched unfold from afar. When we met, across three days last autumn, Nishimura, 59, wore her hair in a dyed-blond ponytail, pulled through a rhinestone-studded baseball cap and paired with a white denim jacket and drainpipe jeans. The most visible signs she was once a yakuza are the lurid tattoos that spill on to her neck and hands, and the little finger missing from her left hand.

Nishimura has no desire to become a feminist icon. “I was a man,” she told me. “I had to behave like a man.” Nonetheless, she speaks of feeling ashamed of her decades of crime – much of it targeted at women – and she is attempting to add redemption to her repertoire. She has written a memoir about the highs and lows of life in the mob, and works for a charity to help ex-yakuza ditch the gangs for good. As the fortune of Japan’s historic underworld fades, Nishimura hopes her life’s latest chapter may just pull her own family back together, too.

As a child, Nishimura devoured the stories yakuza told about themselves – particularly the swashbuckling rebels portrayed onscreen by stars such as Ken Takakura and Bunta Sugawara, who lived by a code: protect the weak and fight the strong. For Nishimura, that meant rebellion against her father, a disciplinarian civil servant whose parenting style, as she recalled it, involved flogging and flinging his children, half-naked, out in the cold. Anything from bad grades to slouching could be met with a beating. “Hard work,” he told Nishimura and her two younger brothers, “never betrays you.”

By the age of 14, Nishimura had joined a group of so-called “delinquents”, smoking cigarettes and cutting class. It was a “fresh experience”, she writes in her memoir, a “time of liberation and freedom”. But when Nishimura bleached her hair blond, it enraged her father. He shaved her head, and she arrived at school the next day with her head wrapped in a towel.

From then on, Nishimura became a habitual runaway, sleeping in cars or under the eaves of temples. She renamed herself Mako, meaning “the devil’s child”, and got the first of hundreds of tattoos that now cover almost her entire body. Some Nishimura did herself with a stick and poke – including the ones on her thighs, which hurt the most. “I can endure pain,” she assured me.

Aged 17, after a few months in juvenile detention for drug possession, Nishimura joined the Worst, one of hundreds of bōsōzoku (literally: “speed tribe”) biker gangs across Japan. Yakuza were often recruited from biker gangs, and it wasn’t long before Nishimura came on to the radar of a 40-year-old yakuza, who in turn introduced her to Sugino.

When Nishimura’s mother, Hiroko, discovered that her daughter had graduated from juvenile detention to become Japan’s sole female yakuza, she turned up at the gang’s HQ in Gifu. It wasn’t difficult to find: yakuza have registered offices, logos and even employees of the month. “Please take care of my daughter,” Hiroko begged Sugino. But Nishimura now had a second family – one that, she felt, accepted her for who she truly was.

For the first two years as a Sugino-gumi yakuza, Nishimura lived out a kind of probationary period, knocking off a list of daily chores that could include cooking (colleagues particularly enjoyed her potato salad), cleaning, laundry, working the reception desk or walking the boss’s two akita dogs, one of which had, according to legend, notched up four kills of his own and was thus named, unimpeachably, Dog Killer Maru.

The Sugino clan also taught Nishimura how to extort businesses, and to identify corruptible cops and politicians. (During the 1980s, a newspaper reported that one Gifu yakuza organisation retained a sitting member of the Diet, Japan’s legislature, as an “adviser”.) Nishimura used drug money to set up a sex worker service, then invested its profits in slot machines. She gave some of the cash she made to the elder of her two brothers, a struggling truck driver who himself had flirted with the mob. She lifted weights, learned karate and spent vast sums on tattoos, including designs worn by fabled kingpin Kenichi Shinoda.

One of the yakuza’s most profitable areas was the sex industry. Nishimura would deliver women to Watakano, a half-square-mile island 75 miles south of Gifu given the nickname Prostitute Island. Pimps might pay advances for good-looking girls, so Nishimura searched among Gifu’s indebted or drug-addled women for potential money spinners.

On one occasion, according to her memoir, just as Nishimura was about to close a deal for one of them, a young meth addict named Reiko, the girl ran away. Nishimura tracked her to Osaka, Japan’s second city, and paid a yakuza member to kidnap her again. Nishimura drove the terrified girl back to Gifu in her Mercedes, adding travel expenses, food and drug costs to her debt. You’ll have to clean up after yourself, Nishimura told her.

Nishimura then drove Reiko to a ferry terminal, where they boarded a dilapidated fishing boat before Nishimura passed the girl to a Watakano yakuza. Years later Nishimura ran into the girl. She had repaid her debt but she was vacant, and didn’t recognise Nishimura at all. Nishimura recognised her role in Reiko’s misery. But, she said: “If you are a yakuza, if you don’t do these sorts of bad things, you can’t really rise or become better.”

Rivals often called Nishimura the “little man”. She remains either the only or one of two women to have performed the sakazuki. (There is a woman in Osaka who may have done so before Nishimura, but she refuses to speak about her past.) Nishimura is the “exception that confirms the rule” of the yakuza’s strict patriarchal culture, according to Martina Baradel, an Oxford University academic and author of the books Yakuza Blues and 21st Century Yakuza. (In the early 1980s, the widow of the leader of Japan’s largest yakuza syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi, took over while her husband’s chosen successor languished in prison. But she never performed sakazuki.)

Occasionally Nishimura would make concessions to the underworld’s patriarchy – such as answering the phone at Sugino-gumi reception in a deeper voice. But she is insistent that nobody made a sexual advance on her, or treated her as anything other than a fellow member. Nishimura’s biggest threats arrived in other forms.

As her profits and status soared, Nishimura’s private life spiralled out of control. Drink had never agreed with her; neither had she enjoyed huffing paint thinner with her biker friends. But meth was another story. It kept her alert, and high, like her hair was standing on end, she said. The Sugino-gumi outlawed drug use, but Nishimura’s small apartment welcomed a rotating cast of gangsters and users, who sat around injecting meth.

It wasn’t long before Sugino discovered the gang’s addiction problem, and ordered Nishimura to apologise on their behalf in the yakuza way: by slicing off the tip of her little finger. Nishimura pinned the digit between a short sword and the ground, and stepped on the blade. But the sword slipped, and cut her finger diagonally. So she did it again, severing it a joint deeper, before heading to a nearby hospital whose staff filed the protruding bone, evened the bloody stump with nail clippers, and stitched it together. Then she returned to HQ, and handed the grisly remains to her boss. Seeing the nonchalance with which she’d performed the act, squeamish members would later come to Nishimura to perform it on them, too – which she did, gladly, and often for a fee.

Nishimura, now 21, had long since dropped out of contact with her father. Her mother, Hiroko, remained in touch, meeting her wayward daughter in secret, giving her money, and hoping that, one day, the family would reunite. But when police raided Nishimura’s apartment, they found methamphetamine, and a judge sentenced her to two-and-a-half years in prison for possession. While inside, she studied business law, and learned financial con-artistry from a fellow inmate.

When Nishimura was released in 1990, aged 24, she was met at the front gate by a yakuza guard of honour, driven to gang HQ, dressed in a suit and handed a million yen – about £4,700 today. The ceremony, known as demukai, “was an important rite of passage for the yakuza member,” according to an anthropological study from this period. “It was a symbol that the state’s rehabilitation efforts had failed.”

In prison, Nishimura had managed to get clean, but upon her release started taking meth again. She was renowned for her toughness, but inwardly the drug had made her a wreck. She grew paranoid, and suffered hallucinations. “I was worn out,” she writes. “Shadows looked like people; running water sounded like a human voice.”

By the end of the 80s, the yakuza had lost their status. For decades, Japan’s gangs had maintained a reputation as outlaws stealing from the rich, composed of burakumin, a low-ranking social caste historically confined to “dirty” roles such as butchery and undertaking. But a series of high-profile scandals revealed that the bosses were living extravagant lifestyles and corrupting politicians. Fed up with their influence and with gangland violence, the public turned against them.

Even the yakuza film genre, so beloved of Japanese audiences through the 1950s and 60s, had changed. The hagiographies had given way to newer films, such as Boiling Point in 1990, which parodied their thuggery. In 1992, a film called Mob Woman depicted a female lawyer who successfully faced down the yakuza. After it screened, a trio of gangsters set upon the director, Juzo Itami, and slashed his face with knives.

Itami recovered; the Diet nonetheless enacted an anti-yakuza law prohibiting them from involvement in the stock market, collecting protection money and working as loan sharks. The law – which was similar to the 1970 US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act – allowed authorities to designate yakuza as “violent groups”, enabling the seizure of assets and property.

It wasn’t just a matter of lost honour or prestige. The yakuza had ridden high on an economic miracle that carried Japan from postwar ruin to the world’s third-largest economy. But the bubble burst in 1990, wiping 60% off the value of Japan’s Nikkei stock index and devaluing the yen. Yakuza lost huge investments in global megaprojects, while foreign gangs outmusc