During the war, Inagawa organized a small street gang in Yokohama to harass and intimidate the Koreans and Chinese who controlled the city's black market. Over the years the organization gained tremendous stature within the Japanese underworld. The Kakusei- kai gang, as it came to be known, was nearly equal to that of Tsuruoka Masajiro, then the reigning "godfather" of Yokohama and Inagawa's criminal mentor during the early years. By the 1960s Inagawa's influence had spread from Yokohama to Tokyo and the northern island of Hokkaido. His major source of revenue came from the lucrative casino gambling rackets, which he single- handedly controlled. The Tokyo Metropolitan police reported that the gangster had taken in $175,000 in fees from just one card game in 1965. Continued police harassment, however, compelled Inagawa to seek legitimacy through political channels. In 1963 he changed the name of the gang to Kinsei-kai and petitioned the authorities to grant it political status. In its fight against the Communists, the Japanese government frequently overlooked the misdeeds of the yakuza, whose sympathies were tied to the political right.
Inagawa pushed for an alliance with the other yakuza gangs against the common enemy. He reminded his rivals that "We gamblers cannot walk in broad daylight. But if we unite and become a wall to stop communism we can be of service to the nation. If anything happens, we would like to stake our lives for the good of the country." The dream of unification did not come to pass until Oct. 24, 1972, for during the intervening years Inagawa had been incarcerated in Japan's Fukushima Prison. When freed in January 1969 he discovered that his once -powerful gang had been decimated by internal mutinies, defections, and police arrests. Meanwhile, the Yamaguchi-gumi gang had supplanted the Kinsei-kai as the most formidable yakuza on the island nation. Under the aegis of Kodama, an alliance was forged with the Yamaguchi gang. The powerful criminal combine now controlled all but four prefectures in Japan. Virtually every yakuza gang in the nation was under the thumb of the Yamaguchi- Inagawa brotherhood.
By the late 1970s, Inagawa's syndicate had branched out into drug dealing, loan sharking, and other forms of vice. The police estimated that the illegal enterprises were fronted by 879 legitimate businesses in 1979 including construction firms, restaurants, and entertainment companies whose combined yearly income was almost $200 million. The syndicate is run much like a large corporate conglomerate with twelve "bosses" representing 119 gangs on a board of directors. Inagawa oversees his criminal empire from a lavish hotel suite in downtown Tokyo. He enjoys close contact with the Tokyo police, and is on intimate terms with the movers and shakers of business, commerce, and entertainment. Every third and fourth Monday the aging gangster sponsors a golf tournament in the Kanagawa Prefecture where professional athletes and show people share in his hospitality. In 1984 a feature film about Inagawa was released in Japan that was an equivalent of the Godfather. It was called Shura no Mure (A Band of Daredevils). The elder statesman of the Japanese underworld is reflective about the future of the yakuza. "In the future," he said, "there'll be one mob. Like my organization, the bigger firms will take over. You can see the move towards a more corporate structure." See: Kodama Yoshio; Machii Hisayuki; Nakasone Yasuhiro; Jirocho Shimizu no; Ogawa Kaoru; Osano Kenji; Sasakawa Ryoichi; Taoka Kazuo; Yakuza.