His left little finger is missing and tattoos cover his torso down to his neck and hands. These are two of the distinctive signs of the Yakuza, Japan’s famous criminal syndicate. But Nishimura Mako is not like the other members. She stands out because she is the only woman to have formally joined the organization since it was created in the 18th century.
It was decades ago, when the men who dominated her clan invited her to the sakazuki ceremony, the most important ritual of the Yakuza, in which its participants pass a glass of sake during a banquet, symbolizing a pact of mutual trust.
The role of women in this famous criminal group is “informal”, as explained by postdoctoral researcher Martina Baradel, from the University of Oxford, in an article published in the magazine The Conversation. “Members’ wives and partners support the group peripherally. Although some get involved to the point of running clubs or dealing drugs,” she says.
Nishimura Mako’s, now in her fifties, beginnings with the clan were not very different from those of other women. When she became involved with the Yakuza at age 20 she dedicated herself to blackmail, collecting debts, resolving disputes between rival gangs and finding girls for prostitution.
But one night, the young member of the organization who had recruited her called her in desperation. She was in the middle of a fight and he feared for her life. Mako “ran to the rescue and using a club turned the scene into a bloodbath,” Baradel explains. Her performance impressed the head of the local group, who called her into his office and told her, “Even if you are a woman, you must become a yakuza.”
Nishimura had been born into a rigorous family of government officials. Her father was extremely authoritarian and regularly used a bamboo stick to discipline her. In high school, she joined motorcycle gangs that taught her how to fight and went through several juvenile centers, which permanently separated her from her family. So her offer to join her clan didn’t seem bad at all.
She then began to live the rigorous life of a yakuza apprentice. She joined a group of male recruits, performed daily tasks, and eventually participated in the group’s criminal activities. She finally underwent the sakazuki ceremony dressed in a male kimono and swore her life to the path of the organization.
“When he cut off his little finger – says Martina Baradel – to apologize for a collective mistake in a ritual known as yubitsume, he realized that he had a gift for it. Members who could not perform the amputation themselves asked Nishimura to do it for them, earning her the nickname ‘master finger cutter.'”
The Italian researcher has been studying Japanese organized crime for almost 10 years, which has led her to interview many members of different clans, although she is prohibited from eating or drinking with the gangsters. Trained in sociology and criminology, she highlights that the members of the union usually defend that they are not a criminal organization and that “they are not like the mafia.” But back to Mako.
By the time he was thirty, methamphetamine became his group’s main business and his own addiction to the drug began to take a heavy toll. She ran away from the clan and set up on her own, which caused her to be kicked out of the gang. At that time she began a romantic relationship with a member of a rival group. A pregnancy led her to cut ties with the yakuza world in exchange for a quiet life raising her child.
But, despite his efforts, his past – marked by his tattoos – prevented him from getting any kind of regular job. She married the father of her son, now a yakuza boss, and returned to the prostitution and drug trafficking businesses. After a second pregnancy, her fights with her husband became increasingly violent, to the point that the police were called every time she broke out.
When they finally divorced, he took custody of the two children. Mako rejoined his old group, but meth had changed his old boss and within two years he left the crime syndicate for good.
Nishimura had lived as a male yakuza and retired as such. She found a job in the demolition business and a modest house where she now lives alone, trying to be accepted by the community. With the help of other former members of the organization she runs a charity dedicated to providing housing and assistance to former yakuza members, ex-convicts and addicts. She is still the only woman at the table.
“I was great at fighting, I never lost against a man,” Nishimura Mako revealed to Martina Barandel in one of her interviews. “Her story redefines the limits of gender roles and loyalties in the brutal world of Japanese organized crime: a unique journey of identity and belonging,” concludes the researcher.
