Yakuza membership has declined so much that the Tokyo Metro Police have closed their Organized Crime Control Department; Yamaguchi-Gumi Yakuza newsletter proclaims, “The police will go easy on the yakuza from now on…Spring has finally arrived”

This is misleading (and not the actual headline). Firstly, its quoting a Yakuza group’s own internal newsletter. More importantly, the organized crime group wasn’t shut down so much as it was reorganized and renamed and this was just for Tokyo and not as clearly as the article claims.

The National Police Agency (NPA/Keisatsu-cho) has a general organised crime division which overseas national policy but most enforcement happens at prefectural level, which tends to have divisions for Yakuza/Boryokudan, drugs and firearms, international crime, fraud, cybercrime and the new Tokuryu groups (which are loosely organized often temporary criminal operations organized through social media networks). Each prefecture can organize them in different ways and have different names for its sections. Lasy year the Tokyo police did a restructuring, they didn’t stop investigating the Yakuza they just made them a less dominant focus in recognition that the crime architecture is shifting in Japan. In effect, one group changed from purely Yakuza to “Yakuza and..” and other threats have been added. The Yakuza newsletter is trying to put a positive spin on it for their members but the main outtake is that they’re simply not as all-pervasive as they once were.