Watada-rengo
The structure of a rengo changes according to who sits at the head of the table. The Watada-rengo is so well respected amongst the gumi because virtually nothing about the fundamental way they do business has changed since it was created well over a century ago. By definition that makes them Old School. The gumi that clung to Watada, and by default Ryumyo, did so more out of tradition than any particular loyalty to the rengo. Wanibuchi was pushing for too much change too fast, and this made many of the oyabun very uncomfortable. These traditionalists see themselves as a part of the local community and form a bond with it, and they’re highly discriminatory against non-japanese, women, metahumans, and the Awakened in the organization.
Maasaki Watada sticks to tradition when it comes to discipline (and everything else for that matter). He allows members to settle disputes among themselves, only stepping in if requested or if the dispute causes difficulties with other operations and relationships. To date, this has only occurred once when Chiaki Saitoh, daughter of Oyabun Masakazu Saitoh fell in love with the wife of a Mita wakagashira-hosa, or mid-level boss, named Natsuko Anzai and became her lover. When the two were discovered, Oyabun Saitoh accused the Mita-gumi of attempting to dishonor the Saitoh-gumi. Watada settled things over yabitsume, acquiring the fingers of Natsuko and her husband as a fair trade for dishonoring Chiaki Saitoh by lying about her sexual preference and virginal purity.
The Watada-rengo does not engage in any particular legal, quasi-legal, or criminal operations as a group, but its existence aids and abets many such operations among its members. In particular, the Watada-rengo is responsible for the merger of several independent unrated Yakuza businesses owned by disparate members, and it is complicit in attempts to streamline international smuggling on several fronts.
The Watada-Rengo led the way in the great purges which ejected Korean blood from the Yakuza in the early 21st century. They’re still rabid about ethnic purity.
That’s not to say you won’t ever see a female troll working for the Old School Yakuza, but you can be sure she worked her pretty little ass off and was six times better than anyone else.The Watada-rengo has a loose hierarchal structure: the oyabun of the Watada-gumi serves as the head of the organization, and all the other oyabun and kumicho pay him a small percentage of overall profits. In return, the rengo is obligated to aid the members, providing oversight for international operations, organizing additional support from members when violent conflict threatens, and mediating disputes between members, among other duties. In short, the Watada-rengo is a parent company, an international alliance of affiliated crime syndicates under the leadership of the oyabun.
Maasaki Watada sticks to tradition when it comes to discipline (and everything else for that matter). He allows members to settle disputes among themselves, only stepping in if requested or if the dispute causes difficulties with other operations and relationships. To date, this has only occurred once when Chiaki Saitoh, daughter of Oyabun Masakazu Saitoh fell in love with the wife of a Mita wakagashira-hosa, or mid-level boss, named Natsuko Anzai and became her lover. When the two were discovered, Oyabun Saitoh accused the Mita-gumi of attempting to dishonor the Saitoh-gumi. Watada settled things over yabitsume, acquiring the fingers of Natsuko and her husband as a fair trade for dishonoring Chiaki Saitoh by lying about her sexual preference and virginal purity.
It didn’t end there. The Saitoh-gumi received a small piece of the Mita-gumi’s nawabari for a period of three months, at the end of which the Saitoh-gumi offered up several of their top recruits to become kobun in the Mita-gumi. This is the type of stuff that’s supposed to happen in board rooms and sporting leagues, not in organized crime.As an umbrella organization, the Watada-rengo’s territory is the sum of territories claimed by its members. Watada-rengo leaves the defense, expansion, and policing of its territory to its member groups, again unless a member asks for assistance. But asking for assistance in this fashion, as with asking for assistance in settling a dispute, means losing face. Most members avoid it because it makes you appear weak to the other gumi. This is one of the fundamental problems of the Old School gumi—they don’t really have the structure to play off of each other’s strengths. Instead, each of the Neo-Tokyo gumi claims its own territory, designated as a nawabari or “roped off area.” These areas have been clearly defined, and in many cases they are clearly marked with AROs in augmented reality, a process first established by the Matrix-savvy Wanibuchi-gumi. AR marking for the rengo consists of watermarking the rengo’s symbol into the fabric of the gumi’s digital mark or AR color code, depending on the gumi.
The Watada-rengo does not engage in any particular legal, quasi-legal, or criminal operations as a group, but its existence aids and abets many such operations among its members. In particular, the Watada-rengo is responsible for the merger of several independent unrated Yakuza businesses owned by disparate members, and it is complicit in attempts to streamline international smuggling on several fronts.
Parent Organization
Subsidiary Organizations
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