CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

116 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
yakuza income, in the tens of billions of dollars, making Japan easily one of
the world’s largest consumers of the drug.
Human Trafficking. This is the seamiest side of Japan’s attachment to
yakuza syndicates. In the 1960s and 1970s, as income levels grew and commercial
and tourist travel soared, yakuza gangs launched sex tours, taking
businessmen on wild jaunts to Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, Hong
Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the United States, and elsewhere. Prostitution
and sexual slavery grew all over Asia, with estimates of sex workers
put at 700,000 in Thailand, 300,000 in the Philippines, 200,000 in South
Korea, and more in other countries. 129 Europeans were soon attracted to these
fleshpots as well. Protests in several nations, particularly by church and
women’s groups, curtailed blatant sex tours in the 1980s, a challenge which
the ever-resourceful yakuza met by reversing the trade and bringing women
and young girls instead to Japan. Whether enticed with promised jobs or purchased
outright from destitute families, tens of thousands of women are
flown every year into Japan from other parts of Asia, Latin America, and
Eastern Europe, usually admitted on visas as “entertainers,” stripped of their
identifications and forced into prostitution in brothels and clubs. They are
the central elements in Japan’s estimated $80 billion sex industry, 130 now believed
to employ as many as 150,000 non-Japanese. 131 Men are also imported
for sexual service. The U.S. State Department has condemned this traffic,
stating in a 2004 report: “The Government of Japan does not fully comply
with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.... The government
should pursue efforts to prosecute the powerful organized crime figures
behind Japan’s human trafficking. . . . Japan could do much more to
protect its thousands of victims of sexual slavery . . .” 132
Unpaid Loans. Perhaps the murkiest part of yakuza involvement in
Japanese business has to do with the “bubble economy,” which began in the
1990s, and the amount of unpaid loans owed by criminal groups. As land,
buildings, and corporate shares rose to dizzying heights in the 1980s, banks
and developers flush with paper profits often turned to criminal syndicates
to clear urban and farm areas for new real estate projects. Leveraging off of
their growing connections in the banking sector, many yakuza groups and
their hundreds of related construction companies went into property development
themselves. Financial institutions, desperate to put massive cash re-