Tokyo, Japan – When news broke that Japan’s most powerful yakuza crime syndicate – the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi – was about to split into two groups, police departments around the country braced themselves for the gang war that was expected to follow. There was precedent for such fears. A similar factional split among the Yamaguchi-gumi in the mid-1980s “led to Japan’s bloodiest gang war ever, wi