Gangster daughter reveals underworld

With her dyed-brown long hair and tight designer jeans, Shoko Tendo looks like any other stylish young Japanese woman - until she removes her shirt to reveal the vivid tattoos covering her back and most of her body.

The elaborate dragons, phoenixes and a medieval courtesan with one breast bared and a knife between her teeth are a symbol of Tendo's childhood as the daughter of a "yakuza" gangster and her youth as a drug-using gang member.

The author of Yakuza Moon, a best-selling memoir just out in English, the 39-year-old Tendo says that police efforts to eradicate the gangsters have merely made them harder to track.