Possible Yakuza Hit In Japanese Denny’s

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Just when you’ve had enough of rice for breakfast and thought it was safe to go and eat some pseudo-Western food, some yakuza wag has to go and blow away another mobster in a Denny’s in Togane City in Chiba Prefecture.

Having eaten in several Japanese diners, I’m not entirely convinced this incident was not some shitty food-related happening rather than a mob hit, but I’ll defer to the journalists here. The deceased, 62-year-old Yoshiaki Furukawa, “apparently a yakuza,” was shot in the chest by another suspected mobster, also in his sixties, who fled the scene in his car. Local police set up checkpoints, but the gunman currently remains at large.

Furukawa apparently entered the Denny’s around 8:45 in the morning, along with four associates, and sat down for some presumable breakfast. The gunman popped in around ten a.m, had a brief chat with Furukawa at another table near the entry, and then plugged him to the horror of the other diners just trying to get on with their mornings.

Tokyo Reporter reports that Furukawa was a former “senior-level member of the Sumiyoshi-kai organized crime group and an acquaintance of the gunman, who police said is likely a member of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest criminal family.”

News On Japan has footage of the Denny’s for anyone curious and also reports that police actually believe the shooting stemmed from “money troubles.”

Given the age and separate gang affiliations involved, I’d prefer this situation to be a little less mundane and a little more old school mobster beef spanning decades, but we can’t always get what we want, I guess. But who knows? Perhaps this will lead to a spate of elderly retired gangsters pinning their yakuza buttons to their lapels once more to settle some old scores in a geriatric inter-gang blood feud.