- "And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they'll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders."
- —Molly
Yakuza aka the "Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum", are the world's wealthiest criminal order. 50 years before Johnny was born they had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse. It is comparable to a multinational zaibatsu like ITT and Ono-Sendai. It is so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles.
They have Gaijin soldiermen. It is rumored that they have to chop a finger off every time they screw up.
The Yakuza proceeded to advanced forms of industrial espionage, stealing research data from Ono-Sendai, threatening to publish it, and holding it secret for ransom.
Yakuza stole a program from Ono-Sendai, which was in turn stolen by a (now dead) fool which he sold to Ralfi Face who unknowingly bought it and uploaded it to Johnny's brain for safekeeping. The Yakuza learned it and sent Shinji to kill all of them.
Once Ralfi was killed, Johnny and Molly Millions went to a broadcast pirate and and uploaded the stolen program to the Yakuza Comsat. The program contained the message: Call off the dogs or we wideband your program. The pair hid to The Pit, among the Lo Teks.
Shinji was killed, and it is not known if the Yakuza ever got their message, and didn't show any movement for nearly a year. Johnny speculated that perhaps they had accepted his terms, and/or they sold the original back to Ono-Sendai. But Johnny imagined that the Yakuza would spread their shadow over the city's data banks, probing for reflections of his movements, among his numbered accounts, securities transactions, bills for utilities.
Indeed, the Yakuza eventually located Johnny years later, and sent an assassin to finish the job.
On Freeside, Cath believed that Case (using the false identity of Lupus) was a member of the Yakuza. She asked why Case had all his fingers, referring to the rumored finger-cutting practice; Case assured her that he never made mistakes.