Yakuza Awareness Classes

This August, Police in Fukuoka have started conducting organized crime education and awareness classes at middle and high schools in the prefecture. Prefectural police report that the current cultural tolerance of the yakuza often results in admiration of them by misinformed youth; indeed, many yakuza first participated in gang activities in their formative early teens. The police have therefore created this program to educate middle and high school students about the realities of yakuza life.

The curriculum includes ways of dealing with yakuza confrontations (for example, what to do when approached in the workplace by a yakuza demanding to be payed off), a run-down of how the yakuza make money (through drug smuggling, loan sharking and other illegal activities) and general advice on how not to get entangled in a gang.

Of the 69,000 students who had taken the class before June of this year, 24,000 were asked to participate in a survey. According to the results, 40% had some yakuza presence in their lives. 2% had reported they were even invited to join a gang. 97% of students reported that the classes were easy to understand, and that “they now understood the truth about the yakuza.”

In the space allocated for comments, some reported that there were shootings near their house, and that they were afraid of being hit by a stray bullet.

Seven teachers have a special license to teach the class. They plan to visit 545 public and private schools at least once by March of next year.