a lot of the yakuza groups, he says.

The yakuza are continuing to wage what amounts to an existential struggle, which is at its most intense in the traditional crime stronghold of Kyushu in southwestern Japan, but there is a growing consensus their glory days are well and truly over. I have seen a change in Japanese society over the past 10 years, says Mijatovic, who is still based in Japan and now runs a hotel and sports management business in Tokyo. Back in 2003 or 2004 when I was held hostage by them they were pretty much accepted as a fact of life here. He runs his hand through his dark mane as he recalls his ordeal at the hands of an offshoot of the most feared yakuza group, the Yamaguchi-gumi. Almost all my hair fell out during that period, he says with a wry smile. Mijatovic, 45, grew up in a blue-collar migrant family from Croatia, in the tough western Sydney suburb of Penrith. As a tall kid who was good at sport he managed to dodge most scraps, and those he got into were mostly settled in his favour. His parents worked hard to send him and his brother to the local Catholic school and Mijatovic booked his ticket to bigger and better things by getting into law at Macquarie University. He topped the class in his nal year and found work at a rm with a blue-chip list of Japanese clients including Toyota and Mitsui, which led to a secondment in Tokyo and a career handling legal work on big resource and infrastructure projects in Asia. Seven frenetic years and one failed marriage later, a more world-weary Mijatovic by now a longterm Tokyo resident was seeking a fresh start. Thats when he chanced into sports promotion and began looking after Thorpe in Japan, where the swimmer enjoyed huge popularity after he blitzed the Fukuoka World Championships in 2001. After that, Mijatovic looked after the Croatian soccer team during the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and South Korea. Eventually, his path crossed with that of a shaven-headed, cocksure mixed martial arts ghter who also hailed from Croatia. Taking on the management of Mirko CroCop Filipovic was a move that would transplant Mijatovic into a shady, vodka-soaked milieu lled with sullen, musclebound men from the former Eastern bloc who could kill with their bare hands. Its hard to believe that orderly and gentle postwar Japan had become such a hub for the brutal, almost no-holds-barred cage ghts staged by mixed martial arts organisations such as Pride and K-1. But as anyone who has lived here will say, there are many different Japans parallel worlds that supercially bear little relation to each other. At the time, three of the six mainstream free-to-air TV stations in Japan were showing mixed martial arts or kickboxing bouts on Friday nights in prime time, beaming the ghts into millions of Japanese homes and vying to become the dominant player in the industry. It was just as big as baseball, sumo and various other major league sports here at that time, Mijatovic

says. The lure of big money drew ghters from the former USSR and the Balkans to Tokyo. But most, including Mirko Filipovic, found the lions share was retained by the promoters or skimmed off by others. Mirko was having problems with the management of K-1. I took over his management and turned him into the hottest ghting property in all of Japan, Mijatovic recalls. He soon signed up other aggrieved foreign ghters and then put himself rmly on a collision course with the yakuza with his plans for a televised New Years Eve ght event in the city of Kobe, the base of the feared Yamaguchi-gumi, in 2003. Had I opened my eyes a bit more I might have seen that those guys were Had I involved [in the ght opened my game], Mijatovic concedes. The rst thing they did eyes I might was interfere with my ghthave seen ers. They started paying that those them to get injured. I started guys were to retaliate by signing up involved in their ghters, and thats the ght when it got out of hand. In game December I started getting threats. Japanese people would tell me I was pissing off the yakuza. Things started to escalate and I would have guys showing up and offering me protection. The closer it got to the ght, the more they started making explicit threats. Mijatovic moved out of his home and secretly checked into a hotel to buy himself time to hold the event, which attracted a crowd of 44,000. Two days after the event, the yakuza made their move. They basically grabbed me and held me hostage for three days, Mijatovic says. He says he was told by his assailants who cannot be named for legal reasons to hand over his ghters to a company aligned with the Pride organisation. When I pushed back and refused to sign those contracts, the guy on my right-hand side pulled his pistol out of his holster and put it on the table. When I continued to push back on signing the contracts, he raised the gun and said, If you dont sign, you know what happens next. At that time I believed probably rightly that if they were going to shoot me, they werent going to shoot me in the hotel. That would have been pretty messy and carting out a big body like mine would have been pretty obvious. Mijatovic insisted they redraft the contracts in English. That bought him some time, but after three days the yakuza lost patience and he was forced to sign his ghters over. He took his family back to Sydney the next day. As soon as these guys left we jumped on a plane I had a young baby, one month old, at the time, he says. While Mijatovic was scared, he wasnt keen to give
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in. He had spent almost all his working life in Japan and these guys had simply muscled in on what was his. To make things worse, his business partner had run away with $1 million of the proceeds from the Kobe event, leaving him nearly broke. Little by little his fear crystallised into anger. After a month in Australia he returned to Japan, determined to take revenge. I basically became a police plant into Pride and I started working with the police for the whole next year to bring the organisation down, he says. Mijatovic kept most of his ordeal secret from his Japanese wife, who was still breastfeeding their rst child, and made sure they remained in Australia. Meanwhile, he itted between several rented apartments in Tokyo near the US, Russian and Chinese embassies, taking advantage of the heavy security presence. He knew the yakuza had a contract out on his life. Mijatovic says that one of the discoveries made

PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY; AFP; JEREMY SUTTON-HIBBERT