Japanese gangs, or yakuza, have a well-deserved reputation for unpredictability and violence that keeps most journalists away, but a vicious turf battle between two rival gangs in the southern island of Kyushu, has made them reluctant media fodder. Last month, in a remarkable act of collective courage that has electrified the fight against organised crime in Japan but divided Kurume city, residents took the gangsters to court.
'The yakuza are using weapons like the kind you see in the Iraq war: grenades, bombs and guns that can shoot people from 500 metres away,' says Osamu Kabashima, the lawyer representing the 1,500 plaintiffs.
'My clients have had enough. They want to live in safety and peace, and they're putting their lives on the line to achieve it, for the sake of their children and grandchildren.'
The latest chapter in Kurume's yakuza woes began in May 2006 when long-time boss of the 1,000-member Dojin-kai gang, Seijiro Matsuo, suddenly announced his resignation, sparking a war of succession with splinter group Kyushu Seido-kai.
The two-year war has led to six deaths and two dozen shootings and bombings. In the most notorious incident, a gangster high on amphetamines walked into a hospital and pumped two bullets into a man mistaken for a rival. In another brawl outside the head office of the Dojin-kai gang in a busy shopping area in Kurume, a machine-gun ambush sprayed bullets in all directions.
Those attacks finally snapped the patience of residents, who banded together to drive them out, using a civil law that allows them to challenge businesses that 'infringe on their right to live peacefully'.
