Hisayuki Machii
Zainichi Korean yakuza boss
Hisayuki Machii (町井 久之, Machii Hisayuki; July 20, 1923 – September 14, 2002), born Jeong Geon-yeong (Korean: 정건영; Hanja: 鄭建永) was a Korean Japanese yakuza boss. He was nicknamed the "Ginza Tiger" (銀座の虎, Ginza no Tora), and was the founder of one of Japan's most notorious yakuza gangs, the Tosei-Kai.
Biography
Early life
According to his widow Yasuyo, Machii was born Jeong Geon-yeong, a first-generation Korean of Minami-Sakuma Cho, Shiba Ward, Tokyo, Empire of Japan. His mother left him in the care of his grandmother in Seoul (at the time under Imperial Japanese occupation and known as Keijō). He returned to Tokyo when he was thirteen. After World War II, Machii became involved in postwar Japan's thriving black market. He entered Senshu University in 1943, however, he dropped out of it. By 1948, he had formed his own gang, the Tosei-kai or "Voice of the East Gang" which grew to over 1,500 members by the early 1960s. The Tosei-kai became so powerful in Tokyo that they were known as the Ginza police, and even the Yamaguchi-gumi's Taoka had to cut a deal with Machii to allow that group to operate in Tokyo.
Under the American occupation
Like fellow yakuza powerbroker Yoshio Kodama, Machii had good relations with the US occupation authorities due to his staunch anti-Communist stance: Tosei-kai soldiers were often used as strikebreakers during the occupation years.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hisayuki Machii” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.