Japan's Yakuza Documented by Belgian Photographer
“I literally expected to enter into a Kill Bill kind of world.”
Made up of approximately 50,000 members, Japan’s Yakuza gang forms one of the largest criminal networks in the world. In 2009 Anton Kusters, a Belgian photographer, was granted access inside this heavily guarded criminal community and what’s more impressive was that he was allowed to document his experiences for two years. Kusters made a short documentary for The Economist titled Inside the Syndicate and it’s an informative exploration about the Japanese organisation that is thought to have descended from masterless samurai in the 17th century. What he came to find was that his expectations of the criminal network, borne from movies and television, was misguided and inaccurate.
