F or many of us, going to a restaurant is a real treat, so you want to make the most of every mouthful. From starters to small plates, how can you ensure that you have the best possible dining experience? Restaurant critics share the insider secrets to ordering well when eating out.
Don’t overplan
“I would normally have a glance at the menu,” says London-based Jimi Famurewa, who is a broadcaster, and a columnist and restaurant writer for Broadsheet London . But, says Famurewa, a bit of mystery can enhance the whole experience: “There is something to be said for having an element of surprise, like a bistro or gastro pub where they write the menu every day. If you have a vague idea that it is cuisine you like, or you’ve seen some dishes online that look appealing, then you’ll be all right.”
Look for the anomaly
“Being able to judge from a menu whether a restaurant is worth your time is tricky,” says Jonathan Nunn, a food writer from London and co-editor of Vittles . “Most restaurants, whether they’re a local takeaway or a high-end kitchen, tend towards a template. However, one good sign is spotting something that breaks this template – the use of an unusual ingredient or cut, a regional dish, or something homemade that really doesn’t need to be. It suggests that there is someone in the kitchen who is passionate about what they do. Even if the rest of the menu has no surprises, that one thing may be a sign that the chef cares.”
“In New York, the fashionable restaurants go through phases, and all the menus tend to look the same,” says Adam Platt, the former restaurant critic of New York magazine and author of The Book of Eating . “As a critic, I would look for the strangest or most emblematic stuff [on a menu] that tells a story. If lamb is on the menu, I find it boring, because lamb has a very distinctive taste and is usually served the same way.”
Order for the table
Don’t feel pressured to decide quickly, says Famurewa, which can be hard at the start of the meal when you are catching up with someone you haven’t seen for a while and you have a table for 90 minutes. “If you see snacks or bites, order a couple of those while you peruse,” he says. “It takes the pressure off, calms everyone down, and the people you are with will be impressed by you taking charge.”
“Diners have become more comfortable with cuisines where dishes are meant to be shared, so the skill of ordering for the table is increasingly valuable,” agrees Nunn. “If you don’t have it, find someone who does and let them take the lead. If you let people just order the things they like the sound of, the meal will descend into chaos. An ideal order for a table should balance meat and fish, and different cooking techniques, along with vegetables and more delicate dishes so the meal is digestible. There is also the art of being able to eyeball, from the number of people at the table, their historic capacity for eating, and their current appetite, exactly how many dishes to order – but this is not something you can teach.”
Always have a starter
“The top of the menu tends to be where a lot of the great value and creativity is,” says Famurewa. “At Town in Covent Garden , for example, you can get a chickpea pancake, some amazing pickles, and a yoghurty dip for £4.”
“Starters are the best things at restaurants,” agrees Chitra Ramaswamy, the restaurant critic for the Scottish edition of the Times, who lives in Edinburgh. Perhaps because “when you are at that stage of a meal, you’re so full of anticipation, hunger and excitement that the food tastes its best. Also, chefs often try out things in the starter section, so you tend to get more interesting food. I would never go to a restaurant and not have a starter.”
Never copy your dining partner
“ I wouldn’t dream of ordering the same thing as the person I’m eating with,” says Ramaswamy. “I am a big believer in swapping plates and trying each other’s food.”
“I am happy to share stuff,” says Platt. “In New York, Italian has replaced French as the dominant cuisine and you are always being force-fed pasta courses, so the only way to survive that is to share them.”
Don’t be afraid to ask
If you don’t know what something on the menu is, don’t get your phone out, says Ramaswamy: “Restaurants are a rare chance to resist our attention being captured by technology. There is a human standing right there whose job it is to find out those things for you. The chances are, they will be thrilled to tell you.”
“No question is too obvious,” says Famurewa. “Quite often, things on a menu will be deliberately opaque or mysterious, such as ‘holiday potatoes’ at Wildflowers in London, which are like parmentier – little olive-oil-fried roast cubes with rosemary.”
Be wary of recommendations
“You shouldn’t necessarily trust the view of a waiter on what to order in a restaurant,” says Nunn. “There are many reasons that your goals may not align.” Your server could be, “trying to push you towards a safer dish, bamboozling you into ordering an item that the kitchen needs to get rid of, or upselling you crudo you didn’t want. However, if you’re in a small plates restaurant, it is sometimes worth ordering one fewer dish than required and then asking the waiter if you’ve missed anything. The recommendation will often be a good one.”
Specials aren’t always so special
Ramaswamy admits she has made mistakes with this: “I’ve gone to a restaurant where I’ve ordered off the specials and then realised afterwards that the regular menu had been crafted by an executive chef, so it’s really well thought out and coherent. If you’re swept away by the specials, you don’t get that chef’s vision.” That said, she adds, “you can sometimes get the most fresh, seasonal and rare things on the specials board”, and these should be snapped up. “ Dogstar in Edinburgh had the most astonishing mylor prawns cooked over a charcoal grill as a special, and they only had a certain amount in. As I was eating them, it was crossed off the specials board”.
Ask fellow diners for tips
It is “100%” OK to ask a neighbouring diner what they are eating, says Ramaswamy. She recalls going to Macau Kitchen in Edinburgh, where the tables are very close to each other. “That intimacy meant I wanted to know exactly what [others] were eating. They gave us a recommendation, we took their advice and it was absolutely brilliant.”
Remember that variety is the spice of life
“We all have restaurants where you always order the same thing,” says Ramaswamy. “That is fine, but there is something to be said for ordering something different from your favourite restaurant.”
“Going out to eat is such an expense now,” says Famurewa, “I would just go for what you really fancy.” He cautions against the viral dishes that might lure you in: “I would not let that cloud your instincts about what you actually want.”
Give your diet the day off
“Let go when you eat out,” says Ramaswamy. “The point of going out to eat is pleasure. You can’t control the levels of salt, fat and sugar that are being used in the kitchen. Make changes at home instead.”
Platt has a different take on this: “I used to order everything on the menu, and so now I look for things that are light. I wouldn’t order salmon as a critic, but as a civilian trying to watch my weight, salmon is fine.”
Avoid over-ordering
“It is classic to fill up not just on bread but get really excited and order loads of starters, and then run out of enthusiasm and stomach space as the mains arrive,” says Famurewa. He recently had a huge starter and then asked to switch his main to something smaller. “You don’t want to annoy the kitchen, but if you change your mind, and you can catch it before it’s made, it’s better to do that than to waste food.” While it can be difficult to undo an order, you can always order more if you need to.
Be prepared to take home any food you don’t eat, says Ramaswamy: “I grew up in an Indian household where we didn’t throw away a single grain of rice. So no matter how fancy the restaurant is, if I don’t finish, I say: ‘Can I take that away?’ The only thing that will stop a person from doing that is embarrassment, in a fine dining restaurant in particular, but in those environments it is even more important because huge amounts of work by many hands has gone into each plate.”
Don’t overdo the booze
If you are knocking back the alcohol, “you’re not necessarily going to remember the dishes”, points out Famurewa. Paired wines are the perfect example of this, he says: “It can get to the point where the end of the meal is a blur.” Instead, have “a cocktail or aperitif to start, or a mocktail or low/no option, some wine with your main, then maybe a digestif or a coffee. If you are packing in too much in each of those zones, you will probably lose the run of the meal slightly.”
End on a sweet note
“Dessert is definitely something to share,” says Platt. “I like a lemony dessert: the acid cuts through the richness. But I’ll always share it.”
You have to be tactical to save space for a whole pudding, says Famurewa: “You might have gone lighter earlier, because you’re at a place where they do fantastic desserts. But quite often a scoop of something or an affogato is all you need – just a little bit of something to leave yourself with a nice sweet ending, rather than feeling bilious and trying to force down an enormous sticky toffee pudding.”
And if you don’t like your meal …
“You should probably say something,” says Ramaswamy. “It rarely happens to me: I’m easy to please and I only really go to restaurants I know will be good. I don’t mind things like slow service or bringing the wrong dish; I think that’s par for the course. What I cannot bear is rudeness and snootiness. But things have to have been pretty bad for me not to tip.”
“If you have built up a bit of a rapport with your server, hopefully you can be fairly honest,” says Famurewa. “Say, ‘this wasn’t for me’ or ‘I wasn’t sure about the flavour’. Approach it in a gentle way, rather than making grand demands, and you’ll probably get more sympathy and more of an effort to make it right. But just remember that restaurants, particularly independent ones, are under quite a lot of pressure at the moment.”
“Don’t eat it, don’t say anything and be polite,” advises Platt. Then, “don’t go back”.
I n almost 40 years, Mako Nishimura never lost a fight. She told me this as if it were as obvious as night following day. Nishimura is 5ft-nothing and slight of build. She is also probably the only woman ever to have been a full-fledged yakuza, a member of Japan’s feared and rule-bound criminal underworld. She must have defeated many male gangsters. How, I asked her, did she do it? “First the legs,” she said, hands clasped, maintaining the calm demeanour of a village priest. “You cut him down with a club or a plank of wood.” Then you get to work.
Nishimura’s relaxed attitude to violence – you suspect, speaking to her, that it’s a little more than that – is what first caught the attention of yakuza members in 1986, when she was a 19-year-old runaway and former juvenile-prison inmate living in Gifu, a city near Nagoya. One night that year, Nishimura received a phone call. A pregnant friend named Aya was in trouble. Nishimura grabbed a baseball bat, ran down the street and found Aya surrounded by five men. When one of them kicked Aya in the belly, Nishimura yelled for her friend to run, then went for the attackers with her bat.
By the time the police arrived, the attackers were covered in blood and Nishimura had fled. She went into hiding 170 miles away in Tokyo. A fortnight later, when she returned to Gifu, a local man approached her in a nightclub. He was a member of the Inagawa-kai, one of Japan’s largest organised crime syndicates, and he wanted her to join. Nishimura was already in a biker gang called the Worst, who raced and robbed while dressed in the white jumpsuits of wartime kamikaze pilots. She was getting more deeply involved in serious crime, too, running sex workers and extorting local businesses, as well as selling – and taking – large quantities of methamphetamines. The Inagawa-kai man didn’t have the right energy, Nishimura thought. She turned him down.
Yakuza life nonetheless appealed. It offered respect, protection and, above all, the opportunity to make big money. A few days later, another yakuza sent for Nishimura. His name was Ryochi Sugino, and he ran a Gifu affiliate of one of Japan’s largest yakuza groups. Sugino was a convicted murderer but he was also charismatic and, somehow, paternal. Nishimura trusted him. “He had this aura,” she said.
Aged 20, she and an underboss shared sake at the gang’s downtown Gifu headquarters, a ritual known as sakazuki that formalised Nishimura’s entry into the yakuza, and established her loyalty to Sugino until death. Now, as the saying went, if Sugino told Nishimura a crow was white, she would have to agree. She was proud of her new identity, she told me. “Everything that was yakuza-like, I would do.”
Some of the men taunted her for being a woman. But they also appreciated the business she brought in, running girls and meth around Gifu. Unlike members of Italian mafias, who kick cuts of criminal profits up through a rigid hierarchy, yakuza operate more like franchises, with members paying a monthly tribute to trade off the syndicate’s threat of violence.
At the time Nishimura joined, the yakuza were thriving. Unlike many organised crime groups around the world, the yakuza did not consider themselves outsiders. They had long been institutionalised, having grown powerful with, rather than against, the state. They claimed a connection to feudal-era samurai and helped plunder Asia on behalf of imperial Japanese forces. By the middle of the 20th century, their image as patriotic felons had been further massaged by yakuza-owned movie and manga houses.
By the 1980s, when Nishimura became a member, the yakuza did not merely traffic guns, drugs and women; the gangs ran casinos, golf courses and high-rises, and extorted money from publicly listed corporations by threatening to disrupt their operations. The largest yakuza syndicates were worth hundreds of millions of dollars and were active on the stock market, with operations from Hawaii to Ho Chi Minh City.
But as Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 90s, and a succession of scandals laid bare organised crime’s cosy relationship with politics, the Japanese public increasingly demanded that police crack down on the gangs. These days, after years of increasingly tough lawmaking, plus competition from international and tech-savvy crime syndicates, the yakuza are widely seen as a spent force.
Nishimura is no longer a member. She lives in a small, ground floor apartment near Gifu’s railway station, surrounded by plants and photos of the two sons whose adult lives she has – because of her criminal past and her drug addiction – mostly watched unfold from afar. When we met, across three days last autumn, Nishimura, 59, wore her hair in a dyed-blond ponytail, pulled through a rhinestone-studded baseball cap and paired with a white denim jacket and drainpipe jeans. The most visible signs she was once a yakuza are the lurid tattoos that spill on to her neck and hands, and the little finger missing from her left hand.
Nishimura has no desire to become a feminist icon. “I was a man,” she told me. “I had to behave like a man.” Nonetheless, she speaks of feeling ashamed of her decades of crime – much of it targeted at women – and she is attempting to add redemption to her repertoire. She has written a memoir about the highs and lows of life in the mob, and works for a charity to help ex-yakuza ditch the gangs for good. As the fortune of Japan’s historic underworld fades, Nishimura hopes her life’s latest chapter may just pull her own family back together, too.
A s a child, Nishimura devoured the stories yakuza told about themselves – particularly the swashbuckling rebels portrayed onscreen by stars such as Ken Takakura and Bunta Sugawara, who lived by a code: protect the weak and fight the strong. For Nishimura, that meant rebellion against her father, a disciplinarian civil servant whose parenting style, as she recalled it , involved flogging and flinging his children, half-naked, out in the cold. Anything from bad grades to slouching could be met with a beating. “Hard work,” he told Nishimura and her two younger brothers, “never betrays you.”
By the age of 14, Nishimura had joined a group of so-called “delinquents”, smoking cigarettes and cutting class. It was a “fresh experience”, she writes in her memoir, a “time of liberation and freedom”. But when Nishimura bleached her hair blond, it enraged her father. He shaved her head, and she arrived at school the next day with her head wrapped in a towel.
From then on, Nishimura became a habitual runaway, sleeping in cars or under the eaves of temples. She renamed herself Mako, meaning “the devil’s child”, and got the first of hundreds of tattoos that now cover almost her entire body. Some Nishimura did herself with a stick and poke – including the ones on her thighs, which hurt the most. “I can endure pain,” she assured me.
Aged 17, after a few months in juvenile detention for drug possession, Nishimura joined the Worst, one of hundreds of bōsōzoku (literally: “speed tribe”) biker gangs across Japan. Yakuza were often recruited from biker gangs, and it wasn’t long before Nishimura came on to the radar of a 40-year-old yakuza, who in turn introduced her to Sugino.
When Nishimura’s mother, Hiroko, discovered that her daughter had graduated from juvenile detention to become Japan’s sole female yakuza, she turned up at the gang’s HQ in Gifu. It wasn’t difficult to find: yakuza have registered offices, logos and even employees of the month. “Please take care of my daughter,” Hiroko begged Sugino. But Nishimura now had a second family – one that, she felt, accepted her for who she truly was.
For the first two years as a Sugino-gumi yakuza, Nishimura lived out a kind of probationary period, knocking off a list of daily chores that could include cooking (colleagues particularly enjoyed her potato salad), cleaning, laundry, working the reception desk or walking the boss’s two akita dogs, one of which had, according to legend, notched up four kills of his own and was thus named, unimpeachably, Dog Killer Maru.
The Sugino clan also taught Nishimura how to extort businesses, and to identify corruptible cops and politicians. (During the 1980s, a newspaper reported that one Gifu yakuza organisation retained a sitting member of the Diet, Japan’s legislature, as an “adviser”.) Nishimura used drug money to set up a sex worker service, then invested its profits in slot machines. She gave some of the cash she made to the elder of her two brothers, a struggling truck driver who himself had flirted with the mob. She lifted weights, learned karate and spent vast sums on tattoos, including designs worn by fabled kingpin Kenichi Shinoda.
One of the yakuza’s most profitable areas was the sex industry. Nishimura would deliver women to Watakano, a half-square-mile island 75 miles south of Gifu given the nickname Prostitute Island. Pimps might pay advances for good-looking girls, so Nishimura searched among Gifu’s indebted or drug-addled women for potential money spinners.
On one occasion, according to her memoir, just as Nishimura was about to close a deal for one of them, a young meth addict named Reiko, the girl ran away. Nishimura tracked her to Osaka, Japan’s second city, and paid a yakuza member to kidnap her again. Nishimura drove the terrified girl back to Gifu in her Mercedes, adding travel expenses, food and drug costs to her debt. You’ll have to clean up after yourself, Nishimura told her.
Nishimura then drove Reiko to a ferry terminal, where they boarded a dilapidated fishing boat before Nishimura passed the girl to a Watakano yakuza. Years later Nishimura ran into the girl. She had repaid her debt but she was vacant, and didn’t recognise Nishimura at all. Nishimura recognised her role in Reiko’s misery. But, she said: “If you are a yakuza, if you don’t do these sorts of bad things, you can’t really rise or become better.”
R ivals often called Nishimura the “little man”. She remains either the only or one of two women to have performed the sakazuki. (There is a woman in Osaka who may have done so before Nishimura, but she refuses to speak about her past.) Nishimura is the “exception that confirms the rule” of the yakuza’s strict patriarchal culture, according to Martina Baradel, an Oxford University academic and author of the books Yakuza Blues and 21st Century Yakuza. (In the early 1980s, the widow of the leader of Japan’s largest yakuza syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi, took over while her husband’s chosen successor languished in prison. But she never performed sakazuki.)
Occasionally Nishimura would make concessions to the underworld’s patriarchy – such as answering the phone at Sugino-gumi reception in a deeper voice. But she is insistent that nobody made a sexual advance on her, or treated her as anything other than a fellow member. Nishimura’s biggest threats arrived in other forms.
As her profits and status soared, Nishimura’s private life spiralled out of control. Drink had never agreed with her; neither had she enjoyed huffing paint thinner with her biker friends. But meth was another story. It kept her alert, and high, like her hair was standing on end, she said. The Sugino-gumi outlawed drug use, but Nishimura’s small apartment welcomed a rotating cast of gangsters and users, who sat around injecting meth.
It wasn’t long before Sugino discovered the gang’s addiction problem, and ordered Nishimura to apologise on their behalf in the yakuza way: by slicing off the tip of her little finger. Nishimura pinned the digit between a short sword and the ground, and stepped on the blade. But the sword slipped, and cut her finger diagonally. So she did it again, severing it a joint deeper, before heading to a nearby hospital whose staff filed the protruding bone, evened the bloody stump with nail clippers, and stitched it together. Then she returned to HQ, and handed the grisly remains to her boss. Seeing the nonchalance with which she’d performed the act, squeamish members would later come to Nishimura to perform it on them, too – which she did, gladly, and often for a fee.
Nishimura, now 21, had long since dropped out of contact with her father. Her mother, Hiroko, remained in touch, meeting her wayward daughter in secret, giving her money, and hoping that, one day, the family would reunite. But when police raided Nishimura’s apartment, they found methamphetamine, and a judge sentenced her to two-and-a-half years in prison for possession. While inside, she studied business law, and learned financial con-artistry from a fellow inmate.
When Nishimura was released in 1990, aged 24, she was met at the front gate by a yakuza guard of honour, driven to gang HQ, dressed in a suit and handed a million yen – about £4,700 today. The ceremony, known as demukai , “was an important rite of passage for the yakuza member,” according to an anthropological study from this period. “It was a symbol that the state’s rehabilitation efforts had failed.”
In prison, Nishimura had managed to get clean, but upon her release started taking meth again. She was renowned for her toughness, but inwardly the drug had made her a wreck. She grew paranoid, and suffered hallucinations. “I was worn out,” she writes. “Shadows looked like people; running water sounded like a human voice.”
B y the end of the 80s, the yakuza had lost their status. For decades, Japan’s gangs had maintained a reputation as outlaws stealing from the rich, composed of burakumin, a low-ranking social caste historically confined to “dirty” roles such as butchery and undertaking. But a series of high-profile scandals revealed that the bosses were living extravagant lifestyles and corrupting politicians. Fed up with their influence and with gangland violence, the public turned against them.
Even the yakuza film genre, so beloved of Japanese audiences through the 1950s and 60s, had changed. The hagiographies had given way to newer films, such as Boiling Point in 1990, which parodied their thuggery. In 1992, a film called Mob Woman depicted a female lawyer who successfully faced down the yakuza. After it screened, a trio of gangsters set upon the director, Juzo Itami, and slashed his face with knives.
Itami recovered; the Diet nonetheless enacted an anti-yakuza law prohibiting them from involvement in the stock market, collecting protection money and working as loan sharks. The law – which was similar to the 1970 US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act – allowed authorities to designate yakuza as “violent groups”, enabling the seizure of assets and property.
It wasn’t just a matter of lost honour or prestige. The yakuza had ridden high on an economic miracle that carried Japan from postwar ruin to the world’s third-largest economy. But the bubble burst in 1990, wiping 60% off the value of Japan’s Nikkei stock index and devaluing the yen. Yakuza lost huge investments in global megaprojects, while foreign gangs outmuscled them in drug and sex markets they had previously dominated.
At its height in the 1960s, the yakuza had claimed to have more than 184,000 members in 5,000 syndicates – far more than the Italian and Italian-American mafias combined. According to police records, by the mid-1990s, yakuza numbers had dwindled to about 90,000. Gangsters from China, Vietnam and even Russia began moving in on the yakuza’s home turf. “The day when Japan is run by the world’s gangsters,” wrote the Sunday Mainichi magazine in 1992, “may not be far off.”
I n 1995, aged 29, Nishimura met a member of a rival clan at a yakuza dinner party in Gifu. He was 15 years her senior, and in a relationship. They began an affair and, six months later, Nishimura got pregnant. Motherhood changed her almost overnight. “I never thought I would die for anyone,” she said. “But when I had children, I started to think I could die for them.”
Nishimura’s lover had been on bail when they met, and he was rearrested while she was expecting. She couldn’t control the courts but she vowed to quit meth for good. Nishimura broke off contact with her Sugino-gumi colleagues, and stopped hanging out at their regular haunts. Her father had died several years before her child was born but Hiroko came to Nishimura’s house every day, delighting in her first grandchild. Hiroko and Nishimura even shopped together, like a normal mother and daughter. In some small way, Nishimura felt, the baby would repay the pain she had put her own parents through.
When the boy’s father emerged from prison, a year into his son’s life, and refused to leave the yakuza, Nishimura left him and moved from Gifu to Kasugai, a city closer to Nagoya and the village in which she had grown up. But motherhood didn’t offer the thrills of organised crime, and for years, she writes, “life seemed to stand still”.
When, in her son’s final year of nursery school, his father asked to give the relationship another try, Nishimura agreed. They moved into an apartment in Gifu together, and for a while things were good. But Nishimura couldn’t hold down administrative jobs, or work at a local nursing home. When employers saw her tattoos or missing finger, they would find a way to reject her.
She returned to crime – first running a massage parlour, then sourcing meth in Tokyo and selling it by the kilo. “I was impressed by how easily meth could be made into money,” she writes. “One drug deal could bring in several times the profit of one month’s worth of legitimate work.” Aged 39, Nishimura gave birth to her second son. Unlike her father, she didn’t beat her children, but she was surprised how strict she could be. “You understand the reason behind that severity,” she told me. “My father was right.”
All this time Nishimura had avoided her old yakuza colleagues in the Sugino-gumi. Instead, she assumed the role of gangster’s wife, cooking and cleaning for her partner’s men at their Gifu headquarters, even though she was the family’s main breadwinner. She and her partner fought, she says, sometimes violently: according to Nishimura, one time she hit him and he responded by throwing a kitchen knife at her.
Nishimura stayed off meth, but instead consumed prescription tranquillisers, eventually taking an entire sheet of 10 pills each day. She started dealing meth from her home, and police arrested her. They released her after 10 days, having searched the flat and found nothing but shipping labels. But one day in 2014, aged 48, Nishimura was hospitalised after taking enough pills to paralyse her. It was “like I was tied to the bed”, she writes.
When she was discharged, she reached out to her old yakuza friends. But time hadn’t been kind to them, either: Nishimura’s closest ex-colleague was an alcoholic, and the gang was broke. Yakuza once vowed never to harm or extort regular citizens, but they were now engaged in the kinds of digital romance scams Nishimura believed were below them, including those that targeted elderly people. The “responsibility to fight the bullies to help the weak”, she told me, seeming to forget her own cruelties, “is the core of yakuza thought. If it’s not like that, I don’t like it.” Soon afterwards, she left the gang for good.
T he fate of Nishimura’s former gang in Gifu reflected the decline of the yakuza across Japan. The 1992 anti-yakuza laws had curbed some of the gangs’ business, but companies or individuals still paid them to extort or intimidate. So, in 2011, Tokyo outlawed all financial transactions with them. Not only were yakuza now blocked from their main source of income, but members could not buy vehicles, open bank accounts or even register a sim card. Gone was the promise of a glitzy gangster lifestyle, and numbers plummeted.
One anecdote from recent years captures the diminished status of the yakuza. In February 2020, when a Covid-19 outbreak stranded the Diamond Princess cruise ship at Yokohama for a month, members of a local yakuza group offered to clean the stricken vessel. “Humans like us should do the dirty job,” said one high-ranking member. His offer invoked the mythical history of the yakuza’s origins in the low-caste burakumin . But it was also an attempt to score good PR: by this time, there were fewer than 30,000 yakuza, and one of their bosses was now offering to sweep shit off a ship’s decks. (Japan’s government refused the offer.)
Today, Japan’s criminal world is dominated by small, informal groups known as tokuryū , a term used by police to describe gangs without the rigid hierarchies or infrastructure of yakuza syndicates. Many orchestrate their crimes online, offering so-called yami baito , or shady part-time jobs, via social media, recruiting scammers for romance and crypto fraud.
Foreign gangs that were once hired muscle for the yakuza are now key players in Japan’s sex and drug trades. These gangs are “very flexible”, says Tadashi Kageyama, a senior managing director at risk advisory firm Kroll. “They partner up with the Chinese gangs, they partner up with the Vietnamese gangs, they partner up with the Russian mafia,” he told me. Modern organised crime is highly digital, says Kobe-based academic Wolf Herbert. “And the old yakuza? They don’t even have a smartphone.”
Japanese cops today arrest under half the number of foreign nationals they did 20 years ago. Nonetheless, foreign gangs have become a useful foil for Japan’s resurgent far-right. The prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, said in November that “members of the public feel anxiety and a sense of unfairness due to illegal acts … committed by a small number of foreign nationals”. Criminal monopolies – particularly those that, like the yakuza in its heyday, have captured a large portion of the police and judiciary – are less prone to violence than an underworld contested by several smaller gangs. Even Nishimura suggested to me that, “maybe it’s safer with the yakuza around than others”.
B y 2016, Nishimura had split from her partner. But partly because of her drug addiction, he won custody of their sons. Even her mother stopped visiting. Nishimura drifted through a succession of dead-end jobs, wondering if she would ever see her children, or her mother and brothers, again. She was alone, without even the down-and-outs in her former gang for company. And then she met Satoru Takegaki.
Takegaki had been a yakuza enforcer for 32 years, a tough guy who was close to the Yamaguchi-gumi boss. But over time he had grown disillusioned: money was scarce, and newcomers ignored the sense of honour and tradition that he believed should underpin yakuza life. When a boss’s son was gunned down in a dispute, Takegaki left the Yamaguchi-gumi altogether. There are, in theory, ways to retire from yakuza life. But Takegaki’s former colleagues didn’t accept his departure. They shot up his house, after which he installed CCTV cameras and slept with a sword by his side.
Soon after, in the city of Himeji, he founded Gojinkai, an NGO helping other yakuza leave the criminal life. By 2020, when Nishimura first met Takegaki, he was often quoted in the media predicting the yakuza’s demise. She began visiting the Gojinkai office once a month, joining Takegaki and other former yakuza in a street-cleaning exercise. It was “wonderful to see such a bigshot in the past taking the initiative to pick up trash”, she writes. Nishimura’s inability to leave her criminal past behind had left her poor, alone and jobless. But she was inspired by Takegaki. “If he can do it,” she thought, “so can I.” (I was unable to reach Takegaki for comment, though he told a Telegraph reporter in 2021 that the yakuza would be extinct “in 50 years, perhaps less … They will be the stuff of movies and legends, just like the ninja. Gone.”)
Gojinkai aimed to address a major issue for anyone trying to ditch the yakuza and join the legal economy. Authorities consider them members for five years after leaving – meaning they are left unbanked, unable to find employment, and more susceptible to rejoining the underworld. Ex-yakuza “are afloat in the grey zone,” says Herbert. “So there is no way for them to get out of the criminal scene.”
Working with Gojinkai gave Nishimura a sense of purpose. After the pandemic, Takegaki allowed her to open a branch just minutes from her old gang HQ in Gifu. She helps former members with housing and drug rehab, and finds work for some of them at a local demolition firm. “I want to let people know that whatever you’ve done in your past, you can still face the future,” she said. “And you can sort yourself out.”
Helping others’ rehabilitation felt like a small way to atone for her past. But Gojinkai was an unpaid gig: Nishimura was still just scraping by financially, and missing her two boys, who were now young men. She knew her eldest had become a champion kickboxer in Tokyo, and surrounded herself with pictures of his exploits. But she was poor and lonely. Above all, she wanted her family back.
T he Kogane shrine in Gifu is a complex dedicated to Shinto, Japan’s indigenous, animist faith. Some version of the shrine has stood on the same spot for almost 2,000 years, though it has been destroyed and rebuilt through a series of national calamities, from an 1891 earthquake to allied firebombing campaigns. Shinto has also become a key part of Nishimura’s post-yakuza reinvention. And on a chilly Sunday morning last October, she invited me to join her at Kogane, as she paid her respects alongside a white-robed priest.
Nishimura’s younger brother and mother joined us on the visit. Hiroko is even tinier than her daughter, with rosy cheeks and cropped, greying hair. She had kept secret her sporadic visits with Nishimura over the years. But in December 2024, alongside Martina Baradel, the author, mother and daughter sat together in the family home for the first time in decades – making sure to do so while Nishimura’s younger brother was at work. In the spring of 2025, mother, daughter and brother met at a Gifu cafe. They spoke for three hours. “We had to cry,” said Nishimura.
She apologised for the years of hurt she’d caused her brother. He, too, is missing a little finger: he claims he was only a yakuza for a short time, and went back to driving trucks after a year. He spoke about their childhood, about how Hiroko would fight their father, telling him not to be so harsh on the kids. When Nishimura stopped coming home around the age of 14, “it was hell”, he said. By the time of the reunion, he and his sister hadn’t seen each other for more than two decades.
Years of secrets and intermittent contact with her children had taken their toll on Hiroko. “I was missing them,” she said, bursting into tears. She was “anxious, worried about what they would do”. Nishimura, sitting opposite, wiped away a tear of her own.
Nishimura meets occasionally with her older son, who is now in his late 20s. His younger brother isn’t yet ready. For now, Nishimura knows that reuniting with Hiroko and her brother will have to do. “I’ve realised how important family is,” she told me.
She shrugged, perhaps uneasy with the sudden outpouring of emotion, then offered a rare hint that her sex had in fact protected her in her life of crime. “If I was a man,” she said, “I’d have been killed already.”
Hiroko beamed. “I didn’t even see it in my dreams” that she would ever share a moment with her kids like this. “I’m so happy,” Hiroko added. Tears kept streaming down her cheeks. “Every day I was thinking about her,” she said, pointing at Nishimura, the prodigal daughter, her painted hands wrapped around a coffee cup, “because she’s so cute!”
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This article was amended on 21 May 2026. Mako Nishimura is missing part of her little finger on her left hand, not her right hand as an earlier version said.
