How a former gang member in Japan found a new path through Christianity

When 53-year-old Tatsuya Shindo is in public, he almost always wears long sleeves. These sleeves hide the tattoos on his arms, which reveal his previous life with an organized criminal gang in Japan, the Yakuza. 

Shindo said he joined the yakuza as a young man because, “I was looking for a family.” 

He explained that the head of the yakuza organization is like a father, and fellow gang members — who are mostly men but include a few women — are like brothers and sisters.

Shindo said that the stuff that he was involved in throughout his 20s was pretty unsavory, to say the least. He sold methamphetamines, ran credit card scams and helped with “debt collection.”

The worst part of his job though, he said, was “managing” women being trafficked by the yakuza. Eventually, that lifestyle led Shindo to drug addiction. He got kicked out of the gang and ended up doing three stints in prison where he found a new life path. 

Now, more than 20 years later, Shindo is the pastor at Friends of Sinners Jesus Christ Church, in Saitama, about a half hour outside Tokyo. There, Shindo spends a lot of time with congregants, some of whom are also ex-convicts or former yakuza members, in a society where redemption and getting a second-chance is not easy. 

On a recent Sunday morning, Shindo preached about his favorite subject: forgiveness. 

“When people reach the final stage of their lives,” the pastor told the congregation, “one of the biggest regrets they often have is failing to forgive. So much energy is wasted by not forgiving others, because forgiveness is about reaching peace and the freedom to move on with your life.”

After the service, Shindo said that he thinks this message is something people in Japan need to hear, no matter what faith background they come from. 

“Japanese society is really narrow-minded,” he said in an interview with The World. “Someone with tattoos can’t even go to a public bath or swimming pool.” 

For anyone who’s been connected with the yakuza, Shindo said, earning people’s trust is not easy. 

That wasn’t always true in Japan, said Jake Adelstein, author of the book, “Tokyo Noir: In and Out of Japan’s Underworld.” 

“The yakuza, as we really know them now, have been around since the 1870s. They’re quite corporations with a sort of feudal code of honor that they sometimes live up to and sometimes they don’t,” he said.  

In fact, they call themselves ninkyo dantai, meaning “chivalrous organization.” 

At one time, yakuza fan magazines were popular. Adelstein said that started to change in the 1990s when people stopped viewing the yakuza as anything like honorable mobsters. 

“In recent years, the view of them has become very negative. They don’t have fan magazines to push their worldview forward,” Adelstein said. “So, the general Japanese view of the yakuza is negative. Now, it’s a career destroyer. If you’re associated with the yakuza, then your career is over.”   

Someone who has been affiliated with a gang also can’t join a gym, rent a car or open a bank account, Adelstein said, because the police know exactly who belongs to yakuza crime families. 

And those obstacles can continue to haunt former members, like Shindo and some of the people at his church. 

Shindo said that during his third and final stint in prison, he started reading the Bible. 

He said that he found it mostly boring, but then, he came across something in the Book of Ezekiel. 

Shindo recited the passage from memory, with God saying, “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.”

This idea that God exists and is willing to forgive — even a former yakuza member — changed his whole outlook, Shindo said. 

It led him to convert to Christianity, and later, to go to seminary and become a preacher. 

Shindo said that Japan’s majority religious traditions of Shinto and Buddhism also discuss the theme of forgiveness, but they’re more about self-control. 

And this is something he focuses on from the pulpit, or when he goes to visit people still serving time in prison.

Only about 1% of the population in Japan is Christian, and Shindo said that his goal is to spread the faith.