A prediction: if Japan ever becomes a police state, it will come about not by national law but municipal ordinances. And the war on organized crime could be the engine that drives the process.
With the coming into force of its Organized Crime Exclusion Ordinance on Oct. 1, Tokyo joined every other prefecture in Japan in having a set of local regulations intended to make life miserable for yakuza and other organized crime groups. With so much international commerce being done through Tokyo, perhaps the foreign business community may start to take note of what these ordinances mean, since they affect businesses of all types. They also grant the police potentially significant powers to interfere in commercial affairs.
As with those of other prefectures, the Tokyo ordinance has the commendable goal of making it harder for mobsters to function in society. Recent revelations about allegedly improper expenditures by Olympus, which some have speculated could be evidence of ties to "antisocial forces" (code for mobsters), have focused a great deal of attention on this policy goal.