Like their Western counterparts, they derive most of their profit from extortion, Protection Racket, drug trafficking, and the like. Yakuza resemble The Mafia in that they are very organized crime syndicates, with strict codes of behavior and etiquette, and encompass many levels of ritual and formality. Some Yakuza groups have close ties with uyoku dantai, and a few have even adopted the ideology for real and dropped their criminal activities. Yakuza are also commonly associated with uyoku dantai groups (basically Japan's nationalist right wing militia fanatics), and are commonly accused of doing so in order to camouflage their criminal activities behind a political ideology, which would be protected speech.

Please note that real Yakuza never actually use the term 'Yakuza', but prefer more romantic kennings like Gokudo (the outermost path) or Ninkyo dantai (chivalrous society), tying into the romanticized view of the Yakuza. 8-9-3 is expressed as 'ya-ku-za' phonetically in Japanese. The worst hand you can get in the game is an eight, a nine and a three, totalling 20 = 0. Having two of the same card makes it the card number. note A 15 counts as 5, a 12 as 2, and a 20 as 0.

Like it, the goal of the game is to reach a total of 9, the last digit of any total over 10 makes your hand. The name ' yakuza' came from a traditional Japanese card game called Oicho-Kabu, which is esimilar to Baccarat. Unsurprisingly, methamphetamine is the most popular drug in Japan. Yakuza made good money on the illicit drug trade, and it still today controls the Japanese drug market. The Super Serum intended for military use then spread to the civilians, and while it did certainly aid on reconstruction of Japan so quickly after the WWII, it also caused a widespread meth addiction epidemic among the Japanese. Yakuza seized it, and began trading on it. When the military had collapsed, it left behind a Mt. Japan had lost the war, and one of the nasty little secrets of the war had been the Imperial military jacking up the senrin with methamphetamine. Yakuza has existed since the 19th century, but the real rise of the Yakuza happened after World War II. Those groups, though, were often associated with less legitimate organizations of gamblers. There is also an alternative hypothesis suggesting that Yakuza are descendants of legitimate organizations of tekiya, or peddlers of shady or stolen goods, whose leaders were even allowed to carry swords (when that was illegal for most people following the Meiji Restoration). Today, some 70% of Yakuza come from burakumin background, and 10% of Yakuza are ethnic Koreans (despite Koreans making up about 0.5% of the Japanese population), both of which are groups which have historically faced discrimination in Japanese society. The modern descendants of such gangs are the very Yakuza groups that are discussed here. The fact that these groups were often indistinguishable from criminal gangs is usually blissfully ignored. There, they mingled with and frequently joined local urban self-defense groups and mutual aid societies, and this is where their claim of the service to society comes from. Tired of robbing the penniless peasants, these Ronin bands often gravitated towards more affluent cities, where they sought employment as hired muscle. Not that these are mutually exclusive descriptions, though. BUT JAPANESE!! Yakuza note Emphasis on the 'ya', despite what English-language media might say are Japanese mobsters, sometimes known outside Japan as 'the Japanese Mafia', and euphemistically known inside Japan as 'anti-social organizations' or 'violent groups.' note Or, occasionally, 'those very kind people.' Yakuza insist that their organizations originated in Robin Hood-style groups of outlaws and vigilantes during Japan's feudal era, but scholars believe that they are in fact descended from roving bands of Rōnin who harassed and extorted the local peasantry. West, The Dark Side of Private Ordering: An Institutional and Empirical Analysis of Organized Crime

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