Yakuza
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. With their recent infringe- ment on cyberspace, the Yakuza is certainly my enemy. Save for Mihoshi Oni, many of you have an equally unpleasant relationship with the organization. The Yakuza treats shadowrunners in the same manner that it treats metahumans. Recent upheavals have done much to repair old animosities, but these changes have also sparked a shadow war between what can be described as the old and the new Yakuza. To complicate matters, this dichotomy is fueled by the split between Ryumyo and his once-ally spirit Jurojin. To learn more, I purchased an agent in the Wanibuchi-Rengo. I will not share his name, but I will share what he learned.
This little exposé is going to make Otaku-Zuku Mr. Public Enemy in Neo-Tokyo. I can’t imagine he thought the Yakuza won’t find out about this file.
Of course he knew. If he wanted to make himself a target he would have posted this fi le on Undernet Prophet. He put it here so the Yakuza would know how he felt without forcing them to lose face.
The linguists among you will have noticed that most translation software bungles the use of “gumi” when referring to a Yak clan. In Japanese “gumi” is correctly used as a suffi x, otherwise a Yakuza clan is correctly referred to as a “kumi.”
Recent History
I don’t pretend to understand what goes on in the mind of a dragon, but Ryumyo has to be seriously pissed off. By 2070 he had all but a handful of the gumi under the control of the Watada-Rengo. Fast forward one year and a sizeable chunk have pledged themselves to the Wanibuchi-Rengo, drawn in by a new way of doing business. However, the Old School Yakuza haven’t gone away quietly. As you’d guess, this ideological rift between the two sides has led to violence. That split has trickled down into the shadows creating more bloodshed than opportunity. Though they are too proud, too professional, to ever let the public know it, the Yakuza are at war. Each side is concerned with reining in the unaligned gumi in order to have the upper hand in a conflict that is much larger than a disagreement on how to do business. It turns out that the upstarts broke away from the Watada-Rengo with a lot of help from Jurojin. If rumors are true, the free sprit is still pulling strings behind the scenes, helping the Wanibuchi Rengo push large amounts of South American drugs onto the street.Got your scorecard? As it stands there are three sides to the Neo-Tokyo Yakuza scene: the Old School, the New Way, and the Unaligned. Between these groupings there are rifts, blood feuds, power plays, backchannel alliances, even an illicit marriage to complicate things. But it all started with the long-awaited death of Akira Watada and the short lived ascension of Hitori Hanzo.
After Hitori Hanzo quashed the Shotozumi uprising back in the early 60s, it became a waiting game of when Watada was going to die and Hanzo was going to take over. It finally happened in 2067. Akira Watada had become too ill to continue serving as Oyabun, and Hanzo was appointed acting warboss. He was still answerable to Watada, but everyone understood that Hitori Hanzo was in charge.
The Shotozumi massacre let everyone know that Hitori Hanzo would not permit anyone standing in the way of his success. It should have sent up red flags that this was the way that he intended to do business.By 2068 the Watada-rengo was in a period of rapid expansion. Hitori Hanzo began consolidating the position of the Watada-rengo throughout Japan by coercing—and in some cases, forcing—independent Yakuza organizations to join. Under the direction of the oyabun-no-oyabun, the members of the Watada-rengo displayed unprecedented cooperation both in business affairs and in forcing independent organizations to submit. This historic joining of the gumi was supposed to make business easier for all of us, but we already had our chosen, and sometimes contested, nawabari, which often pressed up against each other creating conflict in the spaces in between that nobody really owned. Battles were still being fought between the various gumi but now they were by proxy through street gangers desperate to become kobun themselves.
None of this quiet infi ghting bothered Hanzo. He was making us look good from the outside by increasing our stranglehold on criminal operations in Neo-Tokyo. By ’69, other local organized crime syndicates weren’t present beyond the gang level, or were fringe groups like the Snake Head Triad and the Bratva (a branch of the Vory v Zakone) who are only represented by a handful of members. The policing of these organizations was left to our discretion, especially in the poorer neighborhoods where citizens are more likely to turn to a local kobun than a cop.
It is important to note that Yakuza members see themselves first and foremost as businessmen, not criminals, and the local community and police work with them to a great extent. While the police and national law enforcement agencies crack down on Yakuza for a number of operations—especially dealing in illegal substances—the groups cooperate to limit random violence and street crime. If violence breaks out between two Yakuza groups, the chief of police will often attempt to mediate the dispute first before arresting the individual members.Hanzo had tasted fame and already turned his eye towards reining in the international gumi, thereby legitimating the title oyabun-no-oyabun. Meanwhile, his lieutenants, particularly Maasaki Watada and Tomu Wanibuchi, were left to the business of keeping the gumi in line. Watada and Wanibuchi had vastly different ways of carrying out their duties. Watada was insistent on sticking to the principles of the old way, while Wanibuchi was New School. He was willing to let the gumi experiment with new operations, especially when it came to the Matrix. Hanzo was a bottom line man, so when Watada and Wanibuchi had a disagreement about how business should be handled, Hanzo sided with the choice that would bring him more profi t. That generally meant siding with Wanibuchi. This would have gone on for years if not for the arrogance of Hitori Hanzo.
Watada died in his sleep March 18, 2070, and the following day Hanzo was invited to a special session with Ryumyo. That is where all the trouble started. The story of his death was told to me as follows, and based on his behaviors up till the end I’m willing to believe it. Ryumyo sent Jurojin to request a meeting with the new oyabun-no-oyabun to discuss infighting that had broken out between the Mita-gumi and the Watada-gumi during Neo-Tokyo’s reconstruction, which ended with the capitulation of the Mita-gumi and the death of the former Mita oyabun, Hoshi Mita. Ryumyo was concerned with Hanzo’s refusal to recognize thirteen-year old Hiroshi Mita as heir to the Mita-gumi. Hitori Hanzo turned Jurojin down flat.
Not to be denied, the dragon showed up on Hitori Hanzo’s doorstep in human form, posing as one of the human agents the dragon often used as a go-between and asked why Hanzo had refused to meet with the dragon. At that time Hitori Hanzo informed Ryumyo that the Yakuza was no longer under the influence of the dragon and drew his trademarked matched pair of blades to cement his point. Unfortunately for Hanzo he picked the wrong fight.
No way a dragon gets his hands dirty like that. I bet Hanzo got offed by the Shotozumis or someone else who could bankroll ninjas to do a revenge killing. > Winterhawk
True or false, Hanzo was found decapitated in his home. How he got that way is anyone’s guess. According to the police report, there was no sign that anyone other than him had been in the house.
Sounds like ninja work to me. Word is Ryumyo retains a group of adept ninja he calls Shuriken. These are precisely the kind of silent killers he could have used to do the job if he felt that he was about to lose influence over the Yakuza.The chaos that ensued left us where we are today. Maasaki Watada was named as Hanzo’s replacement, much to the dismay of the Wanibuchi-gumi. All of the business practices they’d enacted under the New Way were immediately rescinded, and yabitsume (finger cutting) was demanded from Tomu Wanibuchi himself. Wanibuchi refused to succumb to the Watada rule and escaped from the ceremony in a gun battle that left many senior kobun dead. That was the end of the oyabun-no-oyabun. Wanibuchi’s supporters split to pursue their New Way while the traditionalists started picking up the pieces of their syndicate.
This is where Jurojin re-enters the picture. Though it is unclear how it happened, he is no longer bound to the dragon, an action that seems to have fueled the Yakuza splintering. He convinced several of his pet gumi to leave the Watada-rengo and join with Wanibuchi. He also remains as Wanibuchi’s chief advisor behind the scenes. How that affects his relationship with Ryumyo is not truly known.
Subsidiary Organizations
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