Tadamasa Goto

According to his autobiography, Goto was born in Ebara, Tokyo, as the youngest of four brothers. After the beginning of the Pacific War, of World War II, he moved to his father's hometown Fujinomiya, Shizuoka at age two when his mother died. He was raised by his grandmother and grew up in poverty.[9] After a period as a street thug in Fujinomiya, his yakuza career officially began in 1972, at age 28, when he joined a tertiary Yamaguchi-affiliate based in Fujinomiya.[10] Goto was rapidly promoted, and in 1985 he formed his own yakuza group, the Goto-gumi, in Fujinomiya as a secondary affiliate of the Yamaguchi-gumi.[1] He entered the Kobe headquarters of the Yamaguchi-gumi in its 4th era (1984–1985),[1] and had been in the headquarters until 2008 when he was expelled.[11]

In 2001, after dealing with the FBI, he entered the United States to receive a liver transplant, and gave a $100,000 donation to the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.[12] Goto got his new liver, from a queue-jumping transplant,[13] in the year when 186 people in the Los Angeles region died waiting for a liver.[8] Although the FBI would want some crucial information about the Yamaguchi-gumi's activities in the United States, Goto provided little useful information, according to a retired chief of the FBI's Asian criminal enterprise unit in Washington,[8] however it included a clue about some activities of Susumu Kajiyama the "Emperor of Loan Sharks".[14] Jake Adelstein, the journalist who uncovered the transplant story, received death threats.[15] When he was investigating the scandal for the Yomiuri newspaper, he had a formal meeting with mobsters associated with Goto, where he was told, "erase the story or be erased, your family too".[5]

Goto began disappearing from the yakuza scene in 2008 after allegedly being forced into retirement by the Kobe headquarters' ruling faction led by Kiyoshi Takayama of the Kodo-kai.[16] His expulsion from the Yamaguchi-gumi was officially confirmed by the headquarters in October 2008.[17] After retirement, he became a Buddhist priest,[18] with his Buddhist name "Chuei" (忠叡).[19]

Goto released his autobiography, Habakarinagara (lit. "while hesitating", roughly analogous to the western phrase "with all due respect" [20]), in May 2010. Habakarinagara had sold over 225,000 copies and went to number one in sales on various book-sales charts in Japan, including the Amazon.co.jp chart, by early 2011. All book royalties were donated to charity, Cambodia's "Angkor Association for the Disabled" and Myanmar's two Buddhist temples including "Mogok Vipassana Temple".[11] Angkor Association for the Disabled's official website has listed Goto as a major donor, with his Buddhist name "[Ven.] Chyuei [Gotou]".[21]

In December 2015, Goto was named by the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control as an individual with ongoing associations with the Japanese yakuza. Sanctions were imposed to effectively freeze all known assets held by Goto in the United States and to prohibit all U.S. persons from engaging in transactions with him.[2]

• Adelstein, Jake (11 May 2008). "This Mob Is Big in Japan". The Washington Post.