On the afternoon of October 16 last year a brawl erupted between two groups of gangsters in a restaurant on the 58th floor of the Sunshine 60 high-rise building in Ikebukuro, a central neighbourhood ...

From secret assassinations to all out gang war in the streets! Today we're going inside the secret world of Japan's deadlist criminal organization, the yakuza! Find out some of the craziest crimes ...

Tokyo (CNN) — Japan’s largest yakuza crime syndicate has pledged to end its longstanding war with a rival faction and refrain from causing “trouble,” authorities said, as the mafia-like groups contend ...

Show more Show less Some of the letters Japanese gangster Takanori Kuzuoka wrote to AFP from prison A retired Japanese yakuza crime boss. Fingers are often cut off as punishments or to ritually ...

Kuzuoka gave AFP an extraordinary insight into the tokuryu mindset in a five-month exchange of handwritten letters from his prison cell. While the yakuza used to pride themselves on not preying on the ...

Instead he was drawn to the newer, tech-savvy "tokuryu" underworld, where shadowy criminal kingpins use social media and encrypted messages to recruit often naive foot soldiers to do their dirty work.

When Takanori Kuzuoka began climbing the criminal career ladder, he didn't fancy joining Japan's old-school yakuza, with their tattoos, rigid hierarchy and codes of honour. Instead he was drawn to the ...