Associate Professor Martina Baradel of the Graduate School of Law explores the decline and transformation of the yakuza in a new book from Oxford University Press
Associate Professor Martina Baradel of Nagoya University’s Graduate School of Law has published “21st Century Yakuza: Death of Japanese Organised Crime” (Oxford University Press, 2026), the first systematic academic account of the decline of Japan’s best-known criminal organizations and the fragmented landscape emerging in its place.
Drawing on years of fieldwork with active and former members, police officers, lawyers, and journalists across Japan, the book tracks a steep collapse in numbers, from roughly 80,000 members in 2009 to fewer than 20,000 today. Yet Baradel argues their disappearance is far from complete. “We can see that they’re beginning to show real signs of decline,” she said, “but they aren’t dead yet.”
A governance vacuum
The book’s central question, Baradel explained, is “what happens when a mafia begins to die.” Her framework treats these organizations not simply as sellers of illegal goods, but as providers of governance, regulating markets and communities in exchange for a cut. As legal exclusion, social stigma, and tighter market regulation have eroded that role, she argues, no single actor has fully stepped in to replace it.
What has emerged instead is a more scattered set of criminal actors that tend to prize speed and anonymity over the long-term, territory-based relationships that once defined organized crime in Japan. The old organizations, Baradel said, operated with a different sense of time altogether: “Our group has existed for generations and we want to continue.” The newer networks that have taken their place, by contrast, are described in the book as more transactional and short-lived, prioritizing quick gains over the kind of lasting local presence the yakuza once built. The book also traces how digital tools have accelerated that shift, allowing loosely connected networks to recruit, communicate, and move money without ever meeting in person or claiming a physical territory, something that would have been unthinkable for the hierarchical, reputation-based organizations she studies.
Alongside this shift in the criminal landscape, Baradel points to a related and less visible cost of decline: many people who have left these organizations in recent years have struggled to find stable employment, exposing gaps in Japan’s approach to reintegration.
An understudied field
Baradel hopes the book reaches beyond criminology to sociology, political science, anthropology, and legal studies, and includes a chapter devoted to the practicalities and ethics of conducting fieldwork on organized crime. She noted that relatively little academic work has been done on the subject in Japan, saying universities are often wary of the topic and of researchers who study it closely, viewing it as risky or difficult territory. She hopes the book will draw more scholars, including graduate students, into a field she describes as still wide open.
About Martina Baradel
Baradel is an associate professor at the Nagoya University Graduate School of Law and an associate member of the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. She previously held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship at Oxford, and her research has appeared in leading criminology and Japanese studies journals.
21st Century Yakuza: Death of Japanese Organised Crime
Martina Baradel
The publication is available through Oxford University Press.
