Ramen restaurant owner found shot in his Kobe kitchen was also a yakuza boss, police say

Murdered man ran both oxtail ramen restaurant and local crime syndicate.

If you look up the Kobe ramen joint Ryu no Hige on restaurant website Tabelog, you’ll see that it’s got a  ranting of 3.8 stars out of 5, which is pretty good since customers leaving reviews online in Japan tend to be conservative in their scoring. Read through some of the comments, and you’ll some talking about Ryu no Hige’s unique oxtail-stock broth.

What doesn’t get mentioned in the reviews, though, is that Ryu no Hige was owned and managed by a yakuza boss.

That came to light after a 65-year-old employee of the restaurant returned from an ingredient shopping trip on Saturday morning. Coming back to the restaurant around 11 a.m., prior to its opening for lunch, she found its 57-year-old owner, Manabu Yojima, collapsed on the kitchen floor with blood coming from a wound to his head. Yojima was subsequently pronounced dead by medical workers and a CT scan confirmed that he had been shot.

▼ Ryu no Hige

While disagreements do happen at ramen restaurants, the police don’t think Yojima’s murder stems from an argument with a customer. Instead, detectives from the nearby Nagata Precinct, which is handling the investigation, say it’s likely that the incident is connected to a turf struggle between rival organized crime syndicates. According to the investigators, in addition to running the ramen restaurant Yojima was also running the local Kodo-kai affiliate of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest yakuza organization.

No public mention has been made of a suspect or whether the restaurant will continue operations.

Source: Sankei News via Yahoo! Japan News via Hachima Kiko, Tokyo Shimbun
Top image: Pakutaso (edited by SoraNews24)
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