An alleged leader of Japan's Yakuza gang was arraigned in a Manhattan federal court Thursday on charges of trying to sell weapons-grade nuclear materials to Iran, though the suspect's ties to the ...

Yakuza gangs, long tolerated as a “necessary evil” in Japan, have been in slow decline since organized crime countermeasures were enacted in the early 1990s.

Tokyo (CNN) — Think of Japan’s famed yakuza gangs and you might think of heavily tattooed men getting into bloody fights – the stuff of action films and video games. But last week four men ...

Kenichi Shinoda, the boss of Japan’s largest ‘yakuza’ gang, the Yamaguchi-gumi, walks at Tokyo’s Shinagawa station to return to his his home in Kobe, western Japan on April 9, 2011 after ...

Japan appeared to be winning its long battle against organized crime. The number of remaining yakuza gang members has declined for the 12th year in a row, with fewer than 40,000 members in 2016.

Both the American Mafia and the Yakuza hit their peak memberships during the 1960s. The U.S. mafia gave buttons to 5,000 members, a number which has remained fairly steady.

A wayward Japanese youth's apprenticeship with the Nipponese mafia provides an intriguing premise but little substance in French docu "Young Yakuza." Like Japan's other cultural touchstone, the ...

Tokyo (CNN) — Think of Japan’s famed yakuza gangs and you might think of heavily tattooed men getting into bloody fights – the stuff of action films and video games. But last week four men ...

Tokyo (CNN) — Think of Japan’s famed yakuza gangs and you might think of heavily tattooed men getting into bloody fights – the stuff of action films and video games. But last week four men ...

But last week four men were arrested in Tokyo for a more mundane crime – operating a yakuza office too close to a library. The suspects, ages 55 to 77, “conspired” to operate an office from ...