Yakuza try matchmaking business to make ends meet

These are hard times for us all; hardest of all, says Spa! (July 21), for the yakuza. Once, organized crime bands pursued glory, as they saw it. Now it’s a brute, inglorious hustle for mere survival. Nothing’s beneath them, as long as it pays. Couple this fact with a surging marriage boom, and you get… yakuza infiltrating the matchmaking business? Sure enough, the magazine finds.

The buzzword is “konkatsu,” meaning literally “marriage activity” and written with characters suggesting a similarity to job-hunting. Singles once content to be that way are suddenly in the market for marriage partners, and brokerages, inevitably, are springing up to meet the demand.

In a sense, it would be strange if the yakuza wasn’t involved, so obvious is the potential. One lucrative undertaking Spa! looks into is the “marry-a-celebrity” scam. When 15 people, including a yakuza member, were arrested as suspects in May, it appeared that 200 men across the country had been bilked to the tune of 1 billion yen.

They were drawn by Internet and tabloid ads placed by “celebrity marriage producers.” The ads started appearing in 2007. Their tenor was, "Yes, even celebrities are looking for husbands, and yes, even you can qualify!" It’s interesting, notes Spa! in passing, that the libidinous pitch you’d expect is missing. The appeal is strictly to the burgeoning desire to wed.

The alleged scam is a variation of the purely sexual lures of yesteryear. Men pay a “membership fee” in the neighborhood of 100,000 yen and are fixed up with young women known as “sakura” -- crudely, bait. Skillfully, the “broker” strings the client along: “She really likes you. She’s really getting serious about marriage.” Each date adds to the cost; then there are “deposits” to pay -- and so on. So tempting is it all presented, so cleverly do the brokers and sakura play their parts, that some victims reportedly lost as much as 80 million yen.

The countryside offers fertile ground of a different texture. Tastes being plainer here, celebrities are redundant, and the profits to be made are consequently lower. On the other hand, victims, having lost less, are less inclined to go to the police.

Twenty years ago, there began a trend of importing brides from elsewhere in Asia to replace rural Japanese girls fleeing the hardships of farm life in favor of the big cities. That worked when Asia was mostly poor and a Japanese husband seemed a passport to an almost unimaginably better life. Asia’s growing prosperity punctured that mystique; the “better life” was available at home. “Now,” says Spa!, quoting a broker of international marriages, “with China’s economy on the rise, Chinese women aren’t interested in marrying a Japanese unless he’s making at least 10 million yen a year.”

So the yakuza and their attendant sakura go rural to fill the void. The client’s hopes are fed, and his wallet emptied, until finally, “after a month or so, contact fades out.”

By this time, the mark has typically lost 100,000-200,000 yen -- “just this side of the line,” as one investigator puts it, “on which you bite your tongue and swallow your loss rather than face the embarrassment” of seeking legal redress.

© Japan Today