Yakuza

Gokudo is the formal reading of the name, while everyday speech uses yakuza. The label covers Japan's organized crime syndicates and the individual members inside them, gangsters by trade rather than costumed criminals.

In the present setting the term attaches to a shrinking handful of groups, among them the Shie Hassaikai, the Abegawa Tenchu Kai, and the Todou Gang. Public perception has fallen just as far, from feared rulers of the criminal world down to small-time thugs widely assumed to be circling extinction.

Chivalry is the distinction they insist upon. The old syndicates operated under a strict ethical code, and that code is precisely what the Shie Hassaikai's Boss pointed to when separating his people from Villains, raising Kai Chisaki to believe in it. He revered the temperament of the bygone era and searched for a path where gangsters could still make a life in a Hero-saturated world, and that search drew enough followers to keep his group breathing for a while.

Kai read the same situation and reached the opposite conclusion. Abandoning the code to drag the yakuza back toward prominence, he remade the Shie Hassaikai as a villain outfit. The genuine members who stayed did so because they respected the Boss and because Overhaul's tenacity frightened them, not out of conviction.

Ahead of the Quirk Phenomenon these syndicates ran the criminal side of Japan without a serious rival. Their reach and their power went unmatched, and the men inside them thrived as gangsters who considered themselves honorable, notorious for a rigid code of chivalry that modern Villains never bothered with.

Heroes and Villains changed the arithmetic. As All Might's era took hold, the bulk of yakuza factions were reclassified as Villain organizations and systematically taken apart, and most of their people were locked away. Their time ruling the dark ended there. Anyone still free was treated as a Villain waiting to happen and lived under permanent surveillance.

The Todou Gang's collapse left the Shie Hassaikai as one of the last groups standing, and its Boss carried the shame of that decline personally while refusing to surrender the ethics that came with the name.