The eclipse of the yakuza, Japan’s feared organised crime gangs, seemed for a while to be one of the great triumphs of modern crime fighting. For decades violent gangs controlled drugs, sex businesses and loan sharking in cities; in little more than a decade, through a combination of vigorous policing and new laws that cut off their connections to legitimate businesses and banking, they have been forced into retreat.
In 2011 there were 33,000 fully fledged yakuza; in 2020, according to police figures, there were 13,000. However, as numbers have dwindled and their bosses have been sent to prison a new threat has filled the void: the hangure.
The word, pronounced han-gu-reh, means “quasi-delinquents” and describes shadowy and poorly understood criminal gangs that are
