Kodo-kai
criminal organization based in Nagoya, Japan
The Kodo-kai (弘道会 Kōdō-kai, Koh-doh-kai) is a yakuza criminal organization based in Nagoya, Japan. It is a secondary organization of the Sixth Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest known yakuza syndicate in Japan. With an estimated membership of 4,000, it is the second-largest Yamaguchi affiliate after the Yamaken-gumi, and operates in at least 18 prefectures.
The Kodo-kai is under close surveillance by the National Police Agency, as the NPA considers the organization to not be a traditional yakuza organization, but to be more like a mafia-type organization or terrorist organization. The Kodo-kai is notorious for its defiant attitude toward the official, and has dispensed with the yakuza's traditional policy of co-operating with the police.
The Kodo-kai has been one of the wealthiest clans in the Yamaguchi-gumi, with an immense working capital estimated at around $5 billion.
History
The Kodo-kai was founded in 1984 by Shinobu Tsukasa with 24 other members including Kiyoshi Takayama. At this time, Tsukasa became a formal member of the Fourth Yamaguchi-gumi. When the Fifth Yamaguchi-gumi started in May 1989, Tsukasa assumed the position of wakagashira-hosa (one of the third-ranking bosses).
Kiyoshi Takayama was promoted to the number-two boss (wakagashira) in 1989, and to the 2nd president (kaicho) in March 2005.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6425390. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984, 1989 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kodo-kai” 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.