San Francisco Frontiers - Rare woman yakuza on path to redemption in Japan

The multi-billion-dollar yakuza organised crime network has long ruled over Japan's drug rings, illicit gambling dens and sex trade.

In recent years, the empire has started to crumble as members have dwindled and anti-mafia laws are tightened.

An intensifying police crackdown has shrunk yakuza forces nationwide, with their numbers dipping below 20,000 last year for the first time since records began in 1958.

Heavily inked with dragon and tiger tattoos, 58-year-old Nishimura navigated the yakuza's patriarchal hierarchy -- where brute force and authoritarian leadership reign -- on and off for three decades.

Rival gangsters "looked down on me just because I was a woman, which I hated," she told AFP at her cramped apartment in central Japan's Gifu region.

"I wanted to be acknowledged as a yakuza," she said. "So I learned to speak, look and fight like a man."

Nishimura says she was officially recognised by authorities as the first woman yakuza after she was jailed for drug possession when she was 22.

While no official police data verifies this, experts say women members are extremely rare.

Retired anti-mob detective Yuichi Sakurai said he had never seen a woman yakuza in his 40-year career but "it was possible a few are included" in the annual numbers tracked by police, which do not give a gender breakdown.

Nishimura,skinny with dyed-blonde hair, finally put the syndicate behind her around five years ago.

She now ekes out a living at demolition sites -- one of the few jobs that tolerates her full-sleeve tattoos.

She also supports other mafia retirees, taking huge pride in leading the Gifu branch of Gojinkai, a non-profit dedicated to helping ex-criminals.

Yuji Moriyama is among the posse of middle-aged tough guys -- one has a prominent knife scar across his belly -- that Nishimura takes out for monthly litter-picking trips.

"She's like a big sister. She scolds us when we deserve it," 55-year-old Moriyama said, recalling a time he skipped the trash collection and she made him kneel on the ground to apologise.

"She scared the hell out of me," he said, laughing.

For Nishimura, "the idea I'm doing something good for other people gives me confidence", she said.

"I'm slowly returning to a normal human being."

- 'King of villains' -

Nishimura grew up in a strict family, with a civil servant father who heavily pressured her academically.

As a teen, she ran away from home and fell into crime, joining a major yakuza clan by the age of 20.

Brawls, extortions and selling illegal drugs soon became routine. She even cut off her own finger tip as part of the yakuza's ritualistic self-punishment for blunders.

But in her late 20s, Nishimura absconded from the syndicate and was "excommunicated," putting gangsterism behind her to marry and raise her son.

"For the first time, I felt a gush of maternal instinct. He was so cute, I thought I could die for him," she said.

The determined new mother studied her way into the care and medical industries, only to be fired over her tattoos.

Unsure where else to turn, she relapsed into selling stimulants.

In her late 40s, she rejoined her old yakuza organisation but found it poor and bereft of "dignity".

The yakuza had thrived in the post-war bedlam of Japan, when it was at times seen as a necessary evil to bring order to the streets.

It still exists in a semi-legal grey area, but harsher anti-mafia laws have left fewer people willing to do business with the mobsters.

"Yakuza used to be the king of villains," she said, but seeing her old boss struggling to scrape money together disillusioned her to the extent that she quit the underworld shortly after her 50th birthday.

Today, Nishimura has found a new mentor -- Gojinkai chairman and prominent former gangster Satoru Takegaki -- with proceeds from her recently published autobiography helping her make ends meet.

"I think yakuza will keep shrinking," she said.

"I hope they will become extinct."

J.Scott--SFF