Yakuza members arrested for building a road on mountain they don’t own

Darn gangsters! Building infrastructure without permission.

On 15 July, about 120 officers with the Hiroshima Prefectural Police conducted a search of the headquarters for the Harada faction of the Kyosei-kai yakuza group in Hiroshima City.

The search was a part of an investigation into the boss and four members of the Harada faction, who were arrested 14 July on suspicion of building a road. That might not sound so bad, but it just wouldn’t be a yakuza project if there weren’t a bunch of illegal aspects, such as not having a permit to build a road, not owning the property that they were building the road on, and not having permission from the owner to build the road.

They also cut down numerous trees illegally over an area of 3,000 square meters (square feet) to make room for the road. Police first noticed the work in April 2025, when they saw trucks carrying some of the felled trees driven by the suspects. After interviewing the owner of the mountain, they found it was being done without permission. And since it was being built right behind the yakuza headquarters, they started to see what was going on.

However, it is unclear why this road was being carved out of the mountainside or even if any of the suspects admitted to the civil engineering crime. Readers of the news had a lot of theories in online comments.

Indeed, trees growing on mountainsides offer a great deal of protection against landslides caused by heavy rains by catching and absorbing water and supporting the soil with their roots. By completely removing them from that area, it is now considerably more vulnerable to heavy rains like the ones that hit Japan a few times last month.

And since their headquarters is sitting right underneath that area, it would bear the brunt of any disaster that might occur as a result of their criminal geo-engineering. Unfortunately, with the entire matter caught up in legal limbo, it is unclear whether this potential hazard will get the treatment it urgently requires.

Let this be a lesson that all the glitz and glamor of organized crime construction projects seen in those Scorsese movies simply don’t pay. You’d be much better off earning an urban planning or engineering degree or learning a trade and joining a fully licensed, bonded, and insured crew. Then, you can build all the roads you want, and not have 120 cops rummaging through all your stuff.