When news broke that Japan's most powerful yakuza crime syndicate - the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi - was about to split into two groups, police departments around the country braced themselves for the gang war that was expected to follow. There was precedent for such fears. A similar factional split among the Yamaguchi-gumi in the mid-1980s "led to Japan's bloodiest gang war ever, with more than 300 shootings, 25 dead and a fortune wasted on firearms, legal fees, security, and funerals", wrote David Kaplan and Alec Durbo, authors of Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld, the definitive reference on the subject. No surprise then that the first related killing came just a week later, on September...
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