What do the "bad guys" in Britain and Japan do without guns?

[HiPointDem]

59. not really the case.

Currently, the yakuza comprises roughly 79,000 people, divided among 22 groups.

Although referred to by authorities as "anti-social forces," it's actually a semilegal entity with offices, business cards, and fan magazines.

The yakuza groups make their money through a combination of legal businesses -- like dispatching day laborers -- and illegal activities such as extortion, racketeering, and financial fraud. The largest yakuza group, the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi, has 39,000 members. The Inagawa-kai, the group most closely tied to former Justice Minister Tanaka, has 10,000 members and is based in Tokyo. Its offices are across from the Ritz-Carlton.

In 2007, two years before it came to power, the DPJ received the coveted endorsement of the Yamaguchi-gumi and the Inagawa-kai. It was a relationship that worked out well, until recently. However bizarre it may sound, there's nothing particularly remarkable about an organized crime group supporting a political party in Japan.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/12/13/the_yakuza_lobby?page=0,1

Yakuza have long had a symbiotic relationship with Japanese politics and there is a tacit deal: yakuza can have weapons, can even use them for insider yakuza business, can traffic them outside japan -- but not to ordinary japanese or petty street criminals.

if the government wanted to catch yakuza with weapons they could just go to their headquarters, which are well-known. Everybody knows where the yakuza are & who they are.

It's a different culture.