Is no line of work stable these days? Even the Japanese mob is thinning its ranks:

They made their money with sex, drugs and gambling but then invested much of it in high finance. Now Japan’s yakuza have their back to the wall as the economic crisis takes aim.

One of the victims of the downturn is Taro Hiramatsu, a heavily tattooed retired gangster in his 50s who said he never felt all that comfortable with the underworld’s new high-flying ways to begin with.

“The yakuza have been hit by the financial crisis because they’ve invested in the stock market among other things,” said Hiramatsu, the number two of his crime gang until he was unceremoniously kicked out last year.

His own career as a gangster hit the skids, he said, when the cash dried up and he could no longer pay his 30,000-dollar monthly dues to the syndicate.

About one third of mid-level chiefs in his crime group, he said, have lost their jobs over the past year, many fleeced of their possessions with only their group insignia tattooed indelibly on their chests.

Middle management, always the first to go. Why the decline? Blame capitalism, of course. When you get away from running numbers and get into running money, you get too far away from your roots:

Sitting cross-legged in a Tokyo house, [Hiramatsu] says he doesn’t have much time for the new generation of mobsters who have traded the mean streets for the corporate boardrooms, and their nine-milimetre automatics for the Nikkei-225.

“I think that a majority of yakuza are reflecting on whether throwing away traditional for capitalist-style values was the best thing to do,” said Hiramatsu, musing on the modern ways of his centuries-old brotherhood.

“Bushido, the yakuza’s samurai spirit, is disappearing. The disappearance of those values is not only bad for yakuza but for Japan as a whole.”

Many fun quotes in this article, including one where Yakuza historian Jake Adelstein refers to the modern-day Yakuza as “Goldman Sachs with guns. ” Sorry that didn’t work out. But… why would they want to return to Hiramatsu’s beloved but ultra-violent bushido when they can probably, if they pitch it right, convince NBC to air a “Donald Trump: Yakuza Apprentice” reality show, where heavily tattooed 50-year-olds vie for a spot assisting The Donald in opening an international chain of combination condo/tattoo parlors?

(h/t to TonyS for the Photoshop; I think he even hung out late at the office to make this one.)