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Originally found as a student while at Kansai Gaidai, the webpage that this was taken from has since been lost to history. I can no longer even find the website anymore, even though the print out that I have for all the pages I had is written (if you want to try it, the web address is http://www.jingai.com/yakuza/introduction.html, but you will get sent to a Chinese page).
Without further ado, here is the articles directly transcribed from multiple print outs from 2012. Hopefully this will live on forever, inspiring plenty of future "wannabe Yakuza".
If you have ever played the Yakuza / Ryu Ga Gotoku series, watched any sort of Japanese gangster movies, or have had the misfortune of running into them while in Japan, you know the Japan's most infamous mafia group speak a seemingly incompressible form of Japanese. As outcasts and deviants from Japanese society, Yakuza members have their own language with a unique and specialized vocabulary suited to their organizational culture and occupation. "Yakuza Japanese" runs the gamut from honorifics to epithets, with major regional variations.
This webpage is designed as a primer to gangster Japanese, as used in movies and games, focusing on the Kansai (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe) and Tokyo varieties. Kansai dialect is very important to organized crime, as the nation's largest syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi, is headquartered in Kobe.
For students that are unfamiliar or not well acquainted with Kansai-ben, the following books for studying Kansai-ben are highly recommended. All are linked to Amazon if they are available for purchase.
Kansai-ben Survival Manual (Zach Adam's - Beloit College)
Colloquial Kansai Japanese: The Dialects and Culture of the Kansai Region: A Japanese Phrasebook and Language Guide (Tuttle Language Library)
This series will also assume the ability to read hiragana, katakana, and basic kanji.
By the time you absorb these lessons, you will understand the major features of Yakuza Japanese. This series will teach you Yakuza Japanese through dialogues of famous Yakuza movies, but will also include scenes from the classic Sega series, Ryu Ga Gotoku (known as Yakuza in the west).
楽しむぞ！
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