“
Like the Muslim Brotherhood, which I investigated, if the yakuza express themselves in front of the camera, it is because they have a message to deliver.
In particular, exposing their grievances in the face of the current situation,”
analyzes Michaël Prazan.
The journalist, author of noted documentaries on the gulag and the Second World War, went for Arte to meet the Japanese mafia.
Carried by strong stories from the inside, this dizzying dive, available online until the end of June and soberly titled
Yakuza
, tells how the empire built by the Japanese underworld saw, in two decades, its supremacy waver.
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Along with the samurai, the yakuza are a Japanese institution that is the source of many fantasies.
Like many aspects of Japanese life, the history of this underworld and their code of honor (the ninkyôdô) remain little known.
Mysteries that this documentary unravels, where half a dozen yakuzas intervene.
Most openly, even if some of the facts described could harm them.
Interlocutors found over a year of approach thanks to the intermediary of an expert criminologist acting as an unofficial press officer.
A specialist in the Land of the Rising Sun, where he has covered organized crime since 1993, investigative journalist Jake Adelstein (
Tokyo Vice
) also provides his insight.
Tattoos, ten commandments of the good yakuza (who does not rob with weapons, does not sleep with the wife of a colleague, does not practice pickpocketing), the different ways of cutting one's little finger, as a redemption… The two 52-minute parts offer an immersion into the heart of their rituals and their contradictions.
A yakuza does not touch drugs even if he controls their sale, for example.
End of the golden age
The whole thing is teeming with details which suggest the courtesy as well as the unpredictability of Michaël Prazan's interlocutors.
Warm over a glass of sake, but also fussy and touchy.
They therefore exercised a precise right of review over the sequences showing the surroundings of their HQ, explains the director.
The subject of yakuza is sensitive: obtaining illustrative images was difficult.
Anxious not to give a bad image of the archipelago, Japanese television did not want to open its archives.
We had to dig into Western television news reports.
Coming from the poorest sections of the population, the yakuza appeared in the 8th century AD to regulate gambling.
Long accepted by society and the authorities as a necessary evil against the violence, which it claimed to contain, they played a crucial role in the reconstruction of post-war Japan, financing electoral campaigns, controlling drug trafficking , extorting traders, construction, hostess bars, also investing in entertainment and sports (sumo and baseball).
It is with a certain nostalgia that Michaël Prazan's witnesses recount this bygone golden age.
At the turn of the 2010s, laws targeting organized crime were passed.
After the impunity that gave rise to bloody score-settling and political assassinations, here came the twilight of the yakuza, supplanted by a new generation of more ordinary thugs.
One more reason to examine this portrait of a world in the process of transformation, if not disappearance.