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The Yakuza is an organized crime syndicate in Japan that's been around for over 400 years. The organization began during the Tokugawa shogunate as an association of street pedlers, or, as one researcher put it, "snake oil salesmen." It has many of the trappings of a secret society. Its etymology is uncertain.
In a couple of earlier essays, I wrote about the variety of revolutionary and underworld organizations based on the name Jacob, as well as the connection of the name Jacob to Freemasonry. I suggest that the word Yakuza is likewise derived from the name Jacob.
The organization's similarity to other underworld groups and secret societies is rather self-evident so I will confine my argument to linguistic points. In fact, Jacob is a near-perfect phonetic match of Yakuza in the Japanese language and hence a highly plausible donor candidate for the same, considering that
(1) Katakana is used to write the word Yakuza (ヤクザ). Katakana is the phonetic syllabary the Japanese use for words of foreign origin, like Joe Biden (ジョー バイデン) or McDonalds (マクドナルド). A suggested etymology of the word based on the consecutive numbers "eight-nine-three" cannot plausibly account for this circumstance.
(2) The letter 'j' is a relatively modern variation of the letter 'i', which, as the initial letter in a word where it is followed by another vowel, would be voiced like the modern /y/ sound (as in, e.g., "Yazoo"). This is the form ("Iacob") we see in the King James Version of the Bible, which is similar to Iacobus, the Latin form of the name (Ph. Yakobus).
(3) Because the atomic unit in Japanese phonology is the syllable, words cannot end with a /b/ without a trailing vowel sound.
(4) Voiced plosive stops like /b/ are often weakened to fricatives in Japanese; /z/ is the only voiced fricative in that language.
Hence the most straight-forward phonetic transcription of Jacob into Japanese, under its traditional pronunciation, would be Yakuba, which happens to be quite similar to the Arabic form of the name (Ph. Yakub). And a shift from Yakuba to Yakuza is explicable in terms of established linguistic principle and precedent.
