Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book examines the transformation and decline of the yakuza in contemporary Japan, analysing how state regulation, market restructuring, and shifting social attitudes have reshaped the country’s criminal landscape. It argues that the yakuza historically operated as governance-providing organisations embedded in semi-regulated markets, exercising authority through visibility, reputation, and partial institutional tolerance. The study traces how administrative sanctions, exclusionary measures, and formalisation of key economic sectors progressively eroded the conditions that enabled yakuza monopolies, leading to organisational contraction rather than abrupt dissolution. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with current and former members, and analysis of legal and economic change, the book shows that the yakuza’s decline produced a governance vacuum rather than direct replacement by new mafia-type groups. Emerging criminal actors, including hangure and transnational fraud networks, rely on anonymity, decentralised coordination, and transactional violence and do not recreate the stabilising functions once associated with yakuza rule. The book contributes to comparative research on organised crime by demonstrating how criminal governance can recede without being supplanted and by analysing the effects of administrative repression on illicit economies. It also highlights the persistence of symbolic authority and residual influence, despite diminishing formal power, and considers the implications for criminal markets, state–crime relations, and future forms of illicit organisation in Japan.</jats:p>