Term · Japanese culture
Yakuza
Organised crime that keeps offices with signs on the door, business cards, and a magazine for members.
In Otakana the clue reads: Japanese organised crime syndicate
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Japanese culture
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
The name is a losing hand. In a card game similar to baccarat, eight, nine and three total twenty and score zero, and ya-ku-za are those three numbers, so the word claims the worthless. Groups trace their own origin to gamblers and street peddlers of the Edo period rather than to bandits, and they have always preferred to describe themselves as outsiders with a code.
The structure is formal and openly displayed. A boss takes subordinates in a ceremony of shared sake, ranks run in strict order, and offices used to carry the family crest on the door. Two rituals travelled into fiction: full-body tattoos that stop short of the wrists and collar so a shirt hides them, and cutting off a fingertip to apologise for a serious failure.
Membership has collapsed. Laws from 1992 onward let police designate the largest groups and squeeze their businesses, banks closed accounts, and the reported numbers have fallen by roughly three quarters from their peak. The genre has not shrunk with them, and Japanese film, manga and games keep returning to a version of the trade that mostly stopped existing.
Spelling YAKUZA
YAKUZA is six letters and the Z is the one that decides it. Very few words in this game carry a Z, so a single confirmed Z tends to close the row on the next guess. Two As, at positions two and six, with a U in the middle. It starts with Y, which behaves as a consonant here, so opening with a vowel-heavy guess is still the sensible move.