Tokyo’s gang scene, laid bare

The former yakuza Makoto Saigo has sat down with journalist Jake Adelstein to tell the gruesome, and blackly comic, tale of his career in the underworld

THE LAST YAKUZA by Jake Adelstein 416pp, Corsair, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £14.99

The American journalist Jake Adelstein has spent decades in Japan exposing the secrets of organised-crime syndicates, and anyone who has read his 2009 book Tokyo Vice, or seen the 2022 HBO television series based on it, won’t be surprised to learn that some people are after his blood. A few years ago, Adelstein thought it would be prudent to hire a bodyguard, and asked Makoto Saigo, a retired yakuza – a member of one of the syndicates that used to dominate Japan – to take on the job. Saigo agreed on one condition: that Adelstein write his biography. “I want my [baby] son to know who I was and what I did [and] I don’t think I’ll live long enough.”

The Last Yakuza is the resulting book, although some details have been altered to protect the identity of the man whom Adelstein calls Saigo. Only Adelstein knows how much of a composite “Saigo” is: whatever the facts, the latter emerges from these pages as a bizarre mixture of erratic, honourable, ruthless and hapless.

As a teenager, Saigo joined the Inagawa-kai, the third-most powerful yakuza group in Japan. A spell as a methamphetamine addict landed him in one of Japan’s hellish prisons. “You lost your human rights the second you walked in here” was the greeting he received from the

Body count: yakuza display their tattoos at a Tokyo festival in 2006

guards. Nevertheless, after his release, he became the leader of an Inagawa-kai subset of 150 men. It wasn’t exactly a normal job. When he wanted to secure a loan without collateral, he ordered his men to turn up at a local bank, each bringing a cat: they proceeded to tease the animals, the noise driving all the customers away, until the manager agreed to Saigo’s demands. (Saigo fined any yakuza who hurt one of the cats a day’s pay.) He was once obliged to cut off his own little finger to satisfy a debt owed by one of his men.

Adelstein tells Saigo’s story with a relish for its comic aspects – I enjoyed the detail of Saigo’s wife ruining the solemnity of the pinkiechopping by proffering a plaster with a cartoon frog on it – and an understated feeling for its pathos. Saigo was one of the last generation of yakuza to have a code of ethics; the younger yakuza were more reckless, leading to a police crackdown and the end of Saigo’s career. Ultimately, while Adelstein makes the appropriate tut-tutting noises when he describes the harm that the syndicates have caused, one still comes away from The Last Yakuza finding its subject not just sympathetic, but even lovable.

Saigo once had to cut off his own finger to satisfy a debt owed by one of his men