November 1, 1914 - Kakuji Inagawa
He rose from teenage enforcer to the founding patriarch of one of Japan's most enduring organized crime organizations, building the Inagawa-kai into a syndicate that outlasted him by decades. What distinguished his long career was not simply the scale of what he built, but the reputation he cultivated within the underworld itself — as a mediator and stabilizing force among competing criminal factions, a role that granted him unusual influence across the broader yakuza landscape.
From Wikipedia
Kakuji Inagawa (稲川 角二 Inagawa Kakuji), also known as Seijō Inagawa (稲川 聖城 Inagawa Seijō; November 1914 – December 22, 2007) was a Japanese yakuza boss best known for founding the Inagawa-kai, Japan's third-largest yakuza syndicate.
Inagawa, son of a Meiji University graduate who fell on hard times, never attended school. He was recruited into the yakuza as an enforcer when he was a teenage judo student.
After serving in World War II, Inagawa formed the Inagawa-gumi, the predecessor to the current Inagawa-kai, in Atami, Shizuoka, in 1949.
Inagawa was regarded as an "elder statesman" of the yakuza, and a peacemaker skilled in settling disputes between rival gangs. In the early 1960s, he headed the short-lived Kanto-kai, a federation of Kantō region gangs organized by Yoshio Kodama. That organization's rightist philosophy was summed up by Inagawa: "We bakuto cannot walk in broad daylight", he said.
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