On Yakuza

According to an article in The New Yorker, Tadamasa Goto is an example of the new breed of yakuza  "He's much more ruthless than yakuza were in the past," said a Tokyo policeman.  "He'll go after citizens. . . We suspect Goto of being involved in the killing of seventeen people."  

The killing of seventeen people is particularly shocking in Japan, which has one of the lowest murder rates per capita in the world - about one murder per 200,000 people, less than 10 times the rate of the United States.

The distressing part, to me at least, is that in 2008, Goto undertook the training necessary to be certified as a Zen Buddhist priest.  He has left the yakuza, written an autobiography, and has announced that all of the royalties will go to a charity for the disabled in Cambodia and to a Buddhist temple in Burma.

All fine and good, and it's far from me to begrudge a person a chance at redemption, at turning his life around.  But Goto seems not to have done that; in fact, his autobiography reportedly includes death threats against a Western investigative journalist he has found to be troubling.

Further, it is apparently not uncommon for ex-yakuza who fear retribution from former colleagues to become Zen priests.  It's bad karma to kill a priest, they reason, even if that priest is a former crime boss who still commands many loyal followers.  

The investigative journalist has completed his training to become a Zen priest, too, figuring that what works for ex-yakuza could work for him as well.  The journalist, an American, considers himself a Buddhist and said he likes the concept of karma, although he told the priest who was training him that he didn't believe in reincarnation.  He was told that you don't have to believe, "In Buddhism, it's not about faith.  It's about doing."

True enough, but I don't think they, the ex-yakuza or the investigative journalist, understand karma.  If you think that karma is doing good deeds so that you receive good fortune, you're completely off base.  And neither of the new priests mentioned a word about the practice of zazen.

I maintain that it's a failure of Zen in Japan to allow such men to become priests in order to protect their own skin.  Granted, Buddhism is not alone in this shortcoming.  It's not at all uncommon to read about prisoners who have become born-again evangelical Christians in order to win sympathy and support both from prison guards and from parole boards, or to convert to Islam in order to gain protection within the prison population.  But both of these Abrahamic religions revolve around finding salvation for oneself, so these aberrations are less unusual; Mahayana Buddhism is about the saving of all other sentient beings, so it's more distressing to hear about it being used for protective coloration.

I have heard it said jokingly, and by Japanese natives at that, that the time may come for the West to re-introduce Zen to Japan.  I don't mean to be disrespectful to the great Japanese patriarchs or to the beautiful traditions that have allowed Zen to flower, but 'm not so sure that it's a joke anymore, or that the time is too far off.