<
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/may/21/the-devils-child-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-only-female-yakuza>
"In almost 40 years, Mako Nishimura never lost a fight. She told me this as if
it were as obvious as night following day. Nishimura is 5ft-nothing and slight
of build. She is also probably the only woman ever to have been a full-fledged
yakuza, a member of Japan’s feared and rule-bound criminal underworld. She must
have defeated many male gangsters. How, I asked her, did she do it? “First the
legs,” she said, hands clasped, maintaining the calm demeanour of a village
priest. “You cut him down with a club or a plank of wood.” Then you get to
work.
Nishimura’s relaxed attitude to violence – you suspect, speaking to her, that
it’s a little more than that – is what first caught the attention of yakuza
members in 1986, when she was a 19-year-old runaway and former juvenile-prison
inmate living in Gifu, a city near Nagoya. One night that year, Nishimura
received a phone call. A pregnant friend named Aya was in trouble. Nishimura
grabbed a baseball bat, ran down the street and found Aya surrounded by five
men. When one of them kicked Aya in the belly, Nishimura yelled for her friend
to run, then went for the attackers with her bat.
By the time the police arrived, the attackers were covered in blood and
Nishimura had fled. She went into hiding 170 miles away in Tokyo. A fortnight
later, when she returned to Gifu, a local man approached her in a nightclub. He
was a member of the Inagawa-kai, one of Japan’s largest organised crime
syndicates, and he wanted her to join. Nishimura was already in a biker gang
called the Worst, who raced and robbed while dressed in the white jumpsuits of
wartime kamikaze pilots. She was getting more deeply involved in serious crime,
too, running sex workers and extorting local businesses, as well as selling –
and taking – large quantities of methamphetamines. The Inagawa-kai man didn’t
have the right energy, Nishimura thought. She turned him down.
Yakuza life nonetheless appealed. It offered respect, protection and, above
all, the opportunity to make big money. A few days later, another yakuza sent
for Nishimura. His name was Ryochi Sugino, and he ran a Gifu affiliate of one
of Japan’s largest yakuza groups. Sugino was a convicted murderer but he was
also charismatic and, somehow, paternal. Nishimura trusted him. “He had this
aura,” she said.
Aged 20, she and an underboss shared sake at the gang’s downtown Gifu
headquarters, a ritual known as
sakazuki that formalised Nishimura’s entry
into the yakuza, and established her loyalty to Sugino until death. Now, as the
saying went, if Sugino told Nishimura a crow was white, she would have to
agree. She was proud of her new identity, she told me. “Everything that was
yakuza-like, I would do.”"
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
