Japan's gangsters esteem tradition and prefer to do things by the book. As a result, they appear to love manuals — they have manuals for committing certain crimes as well as guides on how to avoid punishment for carrying out those crimes. Lately, however, gangsters don't appear to be paying as much attention to the manuals as they used to.
The Yamaguchi-gumi, the country's largest crime syndicate, celebrated its 100-year anniversary in 2015. On Aug. 27 that same year, however, a number of powerful factions broke away from the syndicate and formed a new group called the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi.
On April 30, a charismatic executive of the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi, Yoshinori Oda, left the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi to form a splinter group that called itself Ninkyo Dantai (Humanitarian Group) Yamaguchi-gumi. Members of the new syndicate held a news conference in which they criticized the other factions for being old-fashioned and violent.
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