On the evening of 16 October 2022, an incident caught the public's attention. The NHK reported:
"On the evening of 16 April 2022, a brawl broke out between some customers in a restaurant on the 58th floor of the Sunshine 60 high-rise building in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, resulting in one person bleeding from the head and sustaining minor injuries. According to the Metropolitan Police Department, the brawl broke out during a party of about 100 people, and most of the customers had left by the time police officers arrived following a call from the restaurant. The investigation carried out by the Metropolitan Police revealed that the party was probably held by members of the Chinese Dragons, an organised crime group made up of the second generation of Japanese orphans left behind in China after World War II." (NHK, 17/10/2022)
Most of the media reported the brawl as being caused by the "quasi-yakuza" group 'Dragons, a.k.a. Chinese Dragons', which seemed rather dubious, as will be explained below.
In 2013, the Metropolitan Police Department in Tokyo designated the Kanto Rengo, Chinese Dragons, Uchikoshi Spectre and Ota Rengo as quasi-yakuza groups.
The group known as the Chinese Dragons was formed in Kasai, Edogawa Ward, around 1988. The members could not speak Japanese and had no place at school or in the community. They formed a 'group without a leader', similar to a street gang. At first, this gang was named 'ronditsuren' (Descendants of Dragons), because they needed to decide on a sign for their graffiti, which imitated a biker gang. They used simplified Chinese characters so that the Japanese could not read it.
Wang Nan, a founding member of the Chinese Dragons, in his book "The dragons and I" recounts how it was pointed out to them that this would make no sense as a graffiti signature, and suggested instead the notation 'dragon' in Japanese characters. However, members born and raised in China could not write Japanese characters, so the name was changed again to Chinese characters with a Japanese reading, and the current name was settled.
The group was initially created for people in the same situation to gather and protect each other against external pressure, but it eventually became a biker gang, and then transformed into a criminal group (what in Japan is called hangure). Wang Nan said that the group did not start out with the intention of committing crimes. Rather, they became increasingly involved in the criminal underworld as they started meeting and fighting Japanese gangsters: "We ended up learning that violence generates money".
In Wang's case, a minor fight led to his transition into hangure. When Wang was in his second year of junior high school, he got into a fight with a young delinquent on Kasai Bridge. The other party surrendered and offered him a wallet containing about 3,000 yen, saying 'please give me a break'.
'I don't know exactly at what point I switched from defending myself against bullies to violence for money. I think the 3,000 yen I received in the second year of junior high school was the starting point for me. I was in the depths of poverty and had no food to eat on a daily basis, so it was a very powerful experience for me"
In this sense, the Chinese Dragons started as a delinquent group born within Japanese society, and consequently became a criminal group designated by the police as a quasi-yakuza group.
Going back to the Chinese Dragons who caused the brawl in Ikebukuro, the media have described them as a quasi-yakuza group. However, in an article in Bunshun Online, a person familiar with Chinese Dragon commented: 'Many people seem to think of the former motorcycle gang 'Dragons' when they hear Chinese Dragon, but strictly speaking the two organisations are different" (Bunshun Online, 20/10/2022).
The reason for this, he said, is as follows.
'In the 1990s, after the first president of the Chinese Dragons left the biker gang Dragons, he and some of his friends took in illegal residents and illegal immigrants who came to Japan and started a mafia group, and that was the beginning of the Chinese Dragon. There are cases of members of the biker gang Dragons joining the criminal group Chinese Dragons, but most of them left the group at the age of 18 or 19 and later become ordinary members of society, so the biker gang Dragons is not the same as the criminal group Chinese Dragons" (Ibid.).
Based on these testimonies and others, the media's reporting of the Ikebukuro brawl as being caused by the biker gang Dragons (equated to the Chinese Dragons) does not seem accurate. While it is possible that the Ikebukuro brawl may have included a few former members of the Dragons, it does not follow that the group involved in the brawl was the Chinese Dragons.
There is also the possibility that the brawl was caused by an infiltrated 'Chinese mafia' group. A former yakuza member who had been active in Kabukicho, said that around the year 2000, illegal immigrants from organisations such as the Snake Heads (an organisation that facilitates the smuggling of illegal immigrants) were dealing drugs around the area of Okubo. The yakuza group to which he belonged issued a warning not to get involved with the Chinese mafia, including the Snake Heads: 'For them, life has little value. It was common to hear stories of container stowaways where, when the lid was opened, tens of people had died of asphyxiation.'
When a hangure gangster specialised in kidnapping was asked if he would take work from Chinese criminals, he replied: "No. If they insisted, I'd get paid in advance. It's not worth it if you do the job and then get killed." As these testimonies show, dealing with the Chinese mafia involves a risk to life.
The Chinese Mafia is a well-established organisation: they have a worldwide network. They do not care if the Japanese police label them as a quasi-yakuza group. They have shed more blood, killed more people, and went through more ordeals around the world than any Japanese gangster could ever hope to.
When I heard the news of the Ikebukuro brawl, I was reminded of the horrific incident in the US from the depths of my memory.
"The incident took place on 4 September 1977, around 2.30 am. Two Tongs (parties = mutual aid unions or criminal gangs in Chinatown), the Wah Ching and Hip Sing, were hanging out at the Golden Dragon restaurant, a well-known Chinatown restaurant in San Francisco.
Two cars approached the restaurant and three stocking-clad men jumped out with shotguns and raided the Golden Dragon. The Wah Chings spotted them quickly and escaped. The gunmen opened fire on four Japanese customers, then went crazy, waving their shotguns around and shooting randomly, killing and wounding many people before running away. By the time they escaped, it looked like a bomb exploded on the scene.
Investigations revealed that a young Chinese gangster group called the Joe Boys, who were at odds with Wah Ching, had attacked Wah Ching leader Michael "Hot Dog" Lui. （The perpetrators were not caught until two years later and were only teenagers aged 17 and 18 at the time of the incident).
In 1983, eleven people were shot in a clash between two groups, the White Tigers and the Free Masons, in New York's Chinatown.
The US was so preoccupied with the Italian mafia that they realised too late the threat posed by the Chinese mafia, whose crimes started to be noticed around 1975, and after the Golden Dragon Mass Circle in 1977 various books on the Triads and Chinese Mafia began to appear.
Chinese mafia groups have long histories, and their traditions run in the underground for centuries. They are likened to dragons because the dragon's head glimpses out from underground, the tail springing up in the distance. The dragon that reared its head in New York stretches its tail far beyond Hong Kong and deep into mainland China" (Hiroshi Unno, Dragon Genealogy - China's Secret Society, Fukutake Shoten 1989).
The criminal community is deep and dark, including China's Triads (14K, Chao Bing, etc.) and Taiwan's Qing Bing. The Japanese yakuza were feared by the Japanese because they might kill anyone they came into conflict with. However, the Chinese mafia easily kill their opponents for money. The price of life is too low for them.
The Ikebukuro brawl may be a warning from the Chinese mafia. Japanese society should be prepared to avoid the mistakes done in the US, so that nobody in the future will say "Japan was too preoccupied with their gangs and other criminal organisations to realise the threat of the Chinese mafia".
https://gendai.media/articles/-/101445?imp=0
