Jake Adelstein's Blog, page 90

TMPD arrests former Goto-gumi member for murder of real estate consultant in 2006

If you've read Tokyo Vice, you'll know that members of the Yamaguchi-gumi Goto-gumi were long suspected of killing a real estate consultant,  Kazuoki Nozaki,  in a dispute over a building in Shibuya ward.  On December 3rd, The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department Organized Crime Control Division Four arrested former Goto-gumi member Nobuyuki Yamamoto (27 years) on charges of murder. According to police sources and reports, Nozaki represented a real estate company that was in a legal dispute over the ownership of the Shinjuku Building with a Goto-gumi front company. Nozaki was in charge of the legal battle over ownership of the building. The police allege that ex-gang member Yamamoto stabbed Nozaki to death on the streets of Minato-ku Kita Aoyama in March of 2006.

The investigation has taken over four years and the TMPD believes that the killing was sanctioned at the top level of the Goto-gumi (now a defacto part of the Kodokai) and are continuing the investigation. Goto Tadamasa, the former leader of the group, now Buddhist priest, was found guilty of fraudulent activity pertaining to the building's real estate deeds this year and given a suspended sentence.

For some footage of the arrest and more information see the Mainichi Shinbun article (in Japanese). Goto Tadamasa was one of the most infamous crime bosses in Japan. His organization attacked film director Itami Juzo, in 1992 after the release of the film Minbo (the Gentle Japanese Art of Extortion) and Goto himself managed to get a liver transplant at UCLA for himself and three other yakuza associates under dubious circumstances in the period between 2001-2004.

Brush up on your pole positions at the International Pole Championship

Tokyoites are no virgin brides; we know a good pole dance when we see one.

Or we thought we did, until the International Pole Championship rolled into town last year and took our brains for a ride. Packed to the rafters of Shinjuku's cavernous Christon Cafe, aficionados and laymen alike were wowed by cowgirls, brides, monks, wild Amazon natives and other masters of the pole. From sultry numbers that would make a Roppongi stripper jealous to exotic acrobatic feats you'd expect of Cirque du Soleil candidates, it was definitely not the child's play found in any red light district. This was some serious schooling in gymnastics. But sexier!

And as incredibly disappointed as I am that I won't make it this year, I'm here to spread the word about the International Poledance Championship 2010, run by the lovely Ania Przeplasko of the International Pole Dance Fitness Association. The biggest pole dance event ever, this year's competition will see representatives from 21 countries work the pole to its limit, including last year's champions Mai Sato and Dave Kahl (pictured above). As a testament to how popular pole dancing has become (as if it wasn't popular before!), the venue has been upgraded to the plush JCB Hall, ensuring everyone gets a great view of the acrobatic action on stage.

Jake helped judge the 2009 competition, but I see he's relinquished the coveted position in order to spare competitors his harsh judgment of inner thigh grip.

And because pictures speak louder than words, here's some scenes from last year's competition, including Mai's breathtaking performance.

International Pole Championship

JCB Hall, Meets Port, Tokyo Dome

9 December 2010

¥4,000

Featuring two world-firsts: First ʻDisabled Divisionʼ and the first time National Champions from around the world will compete for the title ʻUltimate Pole Championʼ

Don't forget to check out their workshops!

IMAGINE JOURNALIST: JAPAN! Nintendo DS games captures life as a foreign correspondent!

The IMAGINE JOURNALIST game for Nintendo DS is an amazing simulation game capturing the life of a journalist, from budding reporter to international correspondent. It's stunning realism and great game play have already made it a favorite of many of us in the industry.  Allegedly Columbia University is going to add it to their journalism program in the very near future. I'm very pleased to have had the opportunity to work on the special Japan edition: IMAGINE JOURNALIST: JAPAN! (Real World Edition) and as a treat for our readers, here's an exclusive preview. I hope that it will serve as inspiration to everyone planning a rewarding career as a highly demanded foreign correspondent.

Never before has a game captured the life of a foreign correspondent in Japan so well!

Tale of the celebrity cannibal

The Korean custom of eating dogs is something that on occasion mistakenly gets loaded on to the Japanese. To the French and Dutch in the summer of 1981, mention of the Japanese likely brought to mind one individual who ate a completely different type of meat–human.

Issei Sagawa had just completed a semester of study at the Sorbonne Academy in Paris, France, when he invited his Dutch classmate Renée Hartevelt to dinner. Sagawa shot and killer her, then spent the next three days eating her body. He was caught trying to dump her remains in a lake, and investigators discovered further remains still in Sagawa's fridge. According to his testimony, Sagawa had found Hartevelt to be incredibly beautiful and he wanted to "absorb her energy" in order to compensate for his own "weak, ugly, and small" stature.

Sagawa was found to be legally insane, but was released into the hands of the Japanese authorities. After being examined by psychologists, who found him to be sane but "evil", he was released.

The folks over at VBS TV have just released a short documentary on Sagawa (part 1 and 2). For those unfamiliar with Vice Mag and VBS TV, I warn you that it's not for the faint of heart and NSFW.

Perhaps as an unfortunate testament to the Japanese penchant for the unusual, Sagawa now lives as a minor celebrity. He's also a painter according to this macabre YouTube clip, and he tries to persuade potential clients that he has better and more delicate taste than Hannibal Lecter. Somehow his blood-red shirt doesn't put us at ease.

Yamaguchi-gumi number two arrested

Just some quick news: Kiyoshi Takayama, second in command of the Yamaguchi-gumi, was arrested Thursday during a raid of his home in Kobe.

Read here and here. More information to follow!

The high price of writing about the yakuza–and those who pay. 猪狩先生を弔う日々

By Jake Adelstein

"In life, we only encounter the injustices we were meant to correct."

Igari Toshiro, ex-prosecutor, leading lawyer in the anti-organized crime movement in Japan. 1949-2010.

Igari Toshiro, was my lawyer, my mentor, and my friend. In the sixteen years I've been covering organized crime in Japan, I've never met anyone more courageous or inspiring–or anyone who actually looked as much like a pit-bull in human form. Igari-san was a legend in the law enforcement world, the author of several books on dealing with organized crime and preventing their incursion into the business world. He was the father of the "organized crime exclusion clause", a simple but brilliant idea that is now embedded into most contracts in Japan and requires the signer to pledge that he is not a member of an organized crime group. It's already been used to arrest one high-ranking yakuza boss, and is the basis for the legislation being adapted prefecture-by-prefecture that will make it a crime to pay off gangs or provide them with capital. He was rather disliked in the underworld.

The last time I spoke face-to-face with Igari was on August 8 this year.  It was a Sunday; he had come back from Brazil and went directly from Narita Airport to his office to meet me. I asked him if he would cooperate in a documentary I am working on as consultant and a reporter for National Geographic Television on the yakuza.

I also had a problem.

It's rather simple: In 2008, I angered an yakuza boss named Goto Tadamasa, who was head of a 1,000-member strong faction of the country's largest gang, the Yamaguchi-gumi. In an article published in the Washington Post, I wrote how he had sold out his own group to the FBI in order to get a visa for the United States so he could receive a liver transplant at UCLA. The article along with a subsequent book I helped write for Takarajima Publishing resulted in him being kicked out of the Yamaguchi-gumi on October 14, 2008. Takarijma, without bothering to warn me, published his biography this May. It's a great book–except for a bit of subtle language that amounts to a yakuza-style fatwa on my life.

I asked Igari to help me deal with the fallout from the book. After much discussion, he and his two colleagues came up with a plan. His parting words were: "It'll be a long battle. It'll take money and courage, and you'll have to come up with those on your own. But we'll fight."

On August 28th, his body was found in his vacation home in Manila, wrists slashed. Time of death unknown. It's been ruled a suicide. Personally, I believe he was killed. I probably will never be able to prove it.

Igari had been working on his final book, Gekitotsu (Collision). It's an amazing work that pulls no punches, using the real names of the yakuza and the politicians and individuals connected to them. He wrote, "Wherever it was possible, I made it a point to use the real names here. I'm aware that poses a huge risk for myself. I took that risk because I wanted to honestly write about my battles with the injustices hidden in our society and the results of those struggles. It's proper to write the name of those you've fought."

Ex-prosecutor and lawyer, Igari Toshiro, was a famous crusader in the war against organized crime. These are some of the book he authored.

Igari has been probably more influential than any individual in the anti-organized crime movement in Japan. As discussed above, he was the lawyer who first came up with the idea of the "organized crime member exclusionary clause" (暴力団排除条項). It was inspired by problems the Westin Hotel had when Goto-gumi and his posse stayed there and refused to leave, pointing out, "there's nothing that says yakuza can't stay at a hotel."  Igari realized that legally that could be accomplished since the Japanese government does designate organized crime groups and members officially. All it would take was adding a clause to any contract in which the individual signing has to clarify whether or not they are a yakuza, and if they are, the establishment reserves the right to unilaterally nullify the contract. It's now part of almost any standard contract in Japan, even Sports Clubs. It has been used effectively by the police. A yakuza boss opening a bank account this year was later arrested for fraud because he lied about his yakuza affiliation on the contractual agreement with the bank.  The organized crime exclusionary ordinances （暴力団排除条例）which are sweeping the country, prefecture by prefecture, were also his brain child.  This year I met up with a high-ranking member of the National Police Agency, who had a copy of Igari's book on his desk, and said, "In the war on organized crime, Igari-sensei was the equivalent of a five star general. He will be sorely missed."  The current head of the National Centre For The Elimination of Boryokudan was also very vocally supportive of Igari, adding, "the organized crime exclusionary ordinances would have never made into legislation if it hadn't been for the man."  (There are now more than ten local governments in Japan with these ordinances on the book, which differ from prefecture to prefecture, but generally ban pay-offs to the yakuza or providing them with capital. Violators can be fined or jailed. Corporations that do business with yakuza will be publicly named. The ordinances have the potential of being a huge body blow to all organized crime groups, depriving them of protection money and capital. By punishing the individual or firm that capitulates to organized crime, it may have the same efficacy the change in the Commerce Laws had in eliminating racketeers-総会屋.)

Before leaving for Manila on vacation, he told his editor, "I'm nosing around in dangerous places. I don't know what's going to happen to me. Let me sign the publishing contract now."

In September, my best source in the Yamaguchi-gumi told me point blank: "Igari-san was murdered by the yakuza. It wasn't Goto's direct order. He was exposing yakuza ties to Sumo and professional baseball. It angered people. You should be careful too. The yakuza don't warn people anymore, they just act."

It's a dangerous thing to expose the worst of the yakuza for what they are. Itami Juzo, directed the first realistic film about the yakuza, Minbo, in 1992. Goto-gumi members attacked him for doing it, slashing his face open. He would later tell the New York Times in an interview, "They cut very slowly, they took their time. They could have killed me if they wanted to." Eventually they did. On December 20, 1997, after a weekly magazine wrote about his extra-marital affair, he allegedly killed himself. A former member of the Goto-gumi told me in 2008, "We set it up to stage his murder as a suicide. We dragged him up to the rooftop and put a gun in his face. We gave him a choice: jump and you might live or stay and we'll blow your face off. He jumped. He didn't live."

In 2005, yakuza fan magazine writer Suzuki T wrote an article that poked fun at a yakuza group. They broke into his office and beat him to a pulp. In 2006, Yamaguchi-gumi thugs stabbed the son of non-fiction writer Mizoguchi Atsushi, because their boss was unhappy with one of his articles. Two members were arrested. Their boss was not. On April 17, 2007, the mayor of Nagasaki was gunned down after refusing local yakuza involvement in public works projects.

I try to be very careful when writing about the yakuza, and mindful of my sources, some of whom are members. I hate to admit it, but there are still those in the organizations that do follow a code of honor.

I understand the unwritten rules in Japan. Yakuza fan magazines are sold here in the open: three weeklies, three monthlies. They do interviews with current yakuza bosses, but the questions are limited and there is an implicit understanding that even after the interview is done, the boss reserves the right to edit or scrap it. As one veteran detective explained to me, "if you violate that rule, there will be harassment and often retaliation."

I probably didn't communicate that fact well enough to the National Geographic production crew that came to Japan. Through the sources I introduced they interviewed three current yakuza members, but didn't alert me that they ran into trouble. The best I could do was warn the local National Geographic offices about it and talk to the head office in Washington DC. They were very responsive and hopefully nothing will come of it. But if it does, it will be my sources and the local Japanese staff who take the hit. I'm not an easy target because I'm under police protection. The staff are not.

The yakuza don't have much pull in the US. They harass whoever will give them leverage. It's why I don't move my family back to Japan and why leaving Japan is not an option for me. I have to take care of my sources. It's my responsibility.

I went to Igari's offices in September to pay my respects; there was no funeral. There was a little shrine for him in his office, but everything was pretty much as he'd left it. On his desk, was an article about the Sumo Association and match rigging, heavily noted. His secretary told me, "Igari-san was really happy to take your case. He laughingly bragged to everyone, 'I'm representing a reporter for National Geographic–that makes me an international lawyer!' " I could visualize him saying that with his deep, rolling laugh.

Grief is a funny thing. Seeing his empty desk, for the first time I got a little misty-eyed. Not too much, because there were people around, you know. It wasn't very manly, but I didn't cry.

You may wonder why I keep doing a job that is increasingly dangerous. I wonder myself. Partly, it's because Japan is my home. I've lived here for more than twenty years. I'd like it to be a better place. In the old days, we'd call that civic duty.

I once asked Igari-san over wine, "Have you ever been threatened?  Do you ever fear for your life?" He didn't answer my question directly.

"I became a prosecutor because I wanted to see justice done in this world. When I quit and became a lawyer, I didn't go to work for the yakuza like many ex-prosecutors do. I continued to fight them. Not all yakuza are bad guys, but 95 percent of them are leeches on society: they exploit the weak, they prey on the innocent, they cause great suffering. If you capitulate, if you run away, you'll be chased for the rest of your life. And if you're being chased, eventually what is chasing you will catch up. Step back and you're dead already. You can only stand your ground and pursue. Because that's not only the right thing to do, that's the only thing to do."

And so I stay. Igari-san wasn't an investigative journalist and he wasn't a saint. But he fought for justice and for truth, and as an investigative journalist, I've always believed that's what our job entailed. Forgive me if that sounds naive. I believe that, if no one stands up to the anti-social forces in the world, then we all lose.

When I called Igari's editor, he knew who I was. He told me, "Igari said you're the most trustworthy, crazy, and courageous journalist he knew." It's the first time I've ever been praised by the dead, and more than I deserve. But it made me feel an obligation to live up to those words. Sometimes, the only way to honor the dead is to fight for what they died for. It's the only way I know how to mourn.

An abbreviated version of this article was originally published on the Committee to Protect Journalists blog.

The high price of writing about the yakuza–and those who pay

By Jake Adelstein

"In life, we only encounter the injustices we were meant to correct." Igari Toshiro, ex-prosecutor, leading lawyer in the anti-organized crime movement in Japan. 1949-2010.

Igari Toshiro, was my lawyer, my mentor, and my friend. In the sixteen years I've been covering organized crime in Japan, I've never met anyone more courageous or inspiring–or anyone who actually looked as much like a pit-bull in human form. Igari-san was a legend in the law enforcement world, the author of several books on dealing with organized crime and preventing their incursion into the business world. He was the father of the "organized crime exclusion clause", a simple but brilliant idea that is now embedded into most contracts in Japan and requires the signer to pledge that he is not a member of an organized crime group. It's already been used to arrest one high-ranking yakuza boss, and is the basis for the legislation being adapted prefecture-by-prefecture that will make it a crime to pay off gangs or provide them with capital. He was rather disliked in the underworld.

The last time I spoke face-to-face with Igari was on August 8 this year.  It was a Sunday; he had come back from Brazil and went directly from Narita Airport to his office to meet me. I asked him if he would cooperate in a documentary I am working on as consultant and a reporter for National Geographic Television on the yakuza.

I also had a problem.

It's rather simple: In 2008, I angered an yakuza boss named Goto Tadamasa, who was head of a 1,000-member strong faction of the country's largest gang, the Yamaguchi-gumi. In an article published in the Washington Post, I wrote how he had sold out his own group to the FBI in order to get a visa for the United States so he could receive a liver transplant at UCLA. The article along with a subsequent book I helped write for Takarajima Publishing resulted in him being kicked out of the Yamaguchi-gumi on October 14, 2008. Takarijma, without bothering to warn me, published his biography this May. It's a great book–except for a bit of subtle language that amounts to a yakuza-style fatwa on my life.

I asked Igari to help me deal with the fallout from the book. After much discussion, he and his two colleagues came up with a plan. His parting words were: "It'll be a long battle. It'll take money and courage, and you'll have to come up with those on your own. But we'll fight."

On August 28th, his body was found in his vacation home in Manila, wrists slashed. Time of death unknown. It's been ruled a suicide. Personally, I believe he was killed. I probably will never be able to prove it.

Igari had been working on his final book, Gekitotsu (Collision). It's an amazing work that pulls no punches, using the real names of the yakuza and the politicians and individuals connected to them. He wrote, "Wherever it was possible, I made it a point to use the real names here. I'm aware that poses a huge risk for myself. I took that risk because I wanted to honestly write about my battles with the injustices hidden in our society and the results of those struggles. It's proper to write the name of those you've fought."

Before leaving for Manila on vacation, he told his editor, "I'm nosing around in dangerous places. I don't know what's going to happen to me. Let me sign the publishing contract now."

In September, my best source in the Yamaguchi-gumi told me point blank: "Igari-san was murdered by the yakuza. It wasn't Goto's direct order. He was exposing yakuza ties to Sumo and professional baseball. It angered people. You should be careful too. The yakuza don't warn people anymore, they just act."

It's a dangerous thing to expose the worst of the yakuza for what they are. Itami Juzo, directed the first realistic film about the yakuza, Minbo, in 1992. Goto-gumi members attacked him for doing it, slashing his face open. He would later tell the New York Times in an interview, "They cut very slowly, they took their time. They could have killed me if they wanted to." Eventually they did. On December 20, 1997, after a weekly magazine wrote about his extra-marital affair, he allegedly killed himself. A former member of the Goto-gumi told me in 2008, "We set it up to stage his murder as a suicide. We dragged him up to the rooftop and put a gun in his face. We gave him a choice: jump and you might live or stay and we'll blow your face off. He jumped. He didn't live."

In 2005, yakuza fan magazine writer Suzuki T wrote an article that poked fun at a yakuza group. They broke into his office and beat him to a pulp. In 2006, Yamaguchi-gumi thugs stabbed the son of non-fiction writer Mizoguchi Atsushi, because their boss was unhappy with one of his articles. Two members were arrested. Their boss was not. On April 17, 2007, the mayor of Nagasaki was gunned down after refusing local yakuza involvement in public works projects.

I try to be very careful when writing about the yakuza, and mindful of my sources, some of whom are members. I hate to admit it, but there are still those in the organizations that do follow a code of honor.

I understand the unwritten rules in Japan. Yakuza fan magazines are sold here in the open: three weeklies, three monthlies. They do interviews with current yakuza bosses, but the questions are limited and there is an implicit understanding that even after the interview is done, the boss reserves the right to edit or scrap it. As one veteran detective explained to me, "if you violate that rule, there will be harassment and often retaliation."

I probably didn't communicate that fact well enough to the National Geographic production crew that came to Japan. Through the sources I introduced they interviewed three current yakuza members, but didn't alert me that they ran into trouble. The best I could do was warn the local National Geographic offices about it and talk to the head office in Washington DC. They were very responsive and hopefully nothing will come of it. But if it does, it will be my sources and the local Japanese staff who take the hit. I'm not an easy target because I'm under police protection. The staff are not.

The yakuza don't have much pull in the US. They harass whoever will give them leverage. It's why I don't move my family back to Japan and why leaving Japan is not an option for me. I have to take care of my sources. It's my responsibility.

I went to Igari's office this month to pay my respects; there was no funeral. There was a little shrine for him in his office, but everything was pretty much as he'd left it. On his desk, was an article about the Sumo Association and match rigging, heavily noted. His secretary told me, "Igari-san was really happy to take your case. He laughingly bragged to everyone, 'I'm representing a reporter for National Geographic–that makes me an international lawyer!' " I could visualize him saying that with his deep, rolling laugh.

Grief is a funny thing. Seeing his empty desk, for the first time I got a little misty-eyed. Not too much, because there were people around, you know. It wasn't very manly, but I didn't cry.

You may wonder why I keep doing a job that is increasingly dangerous. I wonder myself. Partly, it's because Japan is my home. I've lived here for more than twenty years. I'd like it to be a better place. In the old days, we'd call that civic duty.

I once asked Igari-san over wine, "Have you ever been threatened?  Do you ever fear for your life?" He didn't answer my question directly.

"I became a prosecutor because I wanted to see justice done in this world. When I quit and became a lawyer, I didn't go to work for the yakuza like many ex-prosecutors do. I continued to fight them. Not all yakuza are bad guys, but 95 percent of them are leeches on society: they exploit the weak, they prey on the innocent, they cause great suffering. If you capitulate, if you run away, you'll be chased for the rest of your life. And if you're being chased, eventually what is chasing you will catch up. Step back and you're dead already. You can only stand your ground and pursue. Because that's not only the right thing to do, that's the only thing to do."

And so I stay. Igari-san wasn't an investigative journalist and he wasn't a saint. But he fought for justice and for truth, and as an investigative journalist, I've always believed that's what our job entailed. Forgive me if that sounds naive. I believe that, if no one stands up to the anti-social forces in the world, then we all lose.

When I called Igari's editor, he knew who I was. He told me, "Igari said you're the most trustworthy, crazy, and courageous journalist he knew." It's the first time I've ever been praised by the dead, and more than I deserve. But it made me feel an obligation to live up to those words. Sometimes, the only way to honor the dead is to fight for what they died for. It's the only way I know how to mourn.

An abbreviated version of this article was originally published on the Committee to Protect Journalists blog.

How The CIA Helped Put the Yakuza And The LDP In Power

I just finished re-reading Tim Weiner's magnum opus, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA ,which is perhaps the best book ever written on the Central Intelligence Agency, and its general history of dismal failures.

Operations in Japan turned out to be one of the Agency's rare success stories.

Chapter 12: "We Ran It In A Different Way" is a must for anyone interested in the shadow history of Japan. It details how in post-war Japan, the CIA, using large amounts of cash, reinstated former war criminal Kodama Yoshio and hand-picked one of Japan's Prime Ministers–in order to supress communist/socialist movements. Kodama had extensive yakuza ties and huge amounts of capital made in the black markets in China. ($175 million estimated). The Tokyo CIA station reported on September 10th, 1953, "(Kodama) is a professional liar, gangster, charlatan, and outright thief….and has no interest in anything but the profits." It still didn't keep the CIA from doing business with him up to that time and behinds the scenes later. The chapter also notes how the CIA was able to ensure that Nobusuke Kishi became Japan's prime minister and the chief of its ruling party, in order to ensure that Japan didn't go red. The president himself seemed to have authorized huge cash payments to Kishi and his other lackeys within the LDP.

Chapter 12 "We Ran It In A Different Way" has a fascinating account of US backing of gangsters and their politicians in post-war Japan

Kishi's links to the Yamaguchi-gumi and other organized crime groups are well-known. His former private secretary was instrumental in organizing the deal between former Yamaguchi-gumi Goto-gumi boss, Goto Tadamasa, and the FBI; it was a deal in which Goto shared intelligence on organized crime groups within Japan and information on North Korea in exchange for a visa to the the United States. He received a liver transplant at UCLA, a transaction which the FBI did not set up or was involved in. Some of this is discussed in Tokyo Vice.

According to the excellent book, The Japanese Mafia by Peter Hill, and other sources,  Kishi also once put up the bail money for a Yamaguchi-gumi boss accused of a felony.  Goto Tadamasa, the ex-yakuza boss (currently a Buddhist priest doing charitable work) in his memoirs Habkarinagra (Pardon me but…) also discusses his close ties to ex-Prime Minister Kishi. Robert Whiting in the seminal Tokyo Underworld also covers US political connections to organized crime  in Japan in great depth and quite entertainingly. Whiting-san worked for the National Security Agency at one point in his life and what he says has great credibility as far as I'm concerned. (I'm not outing Robert by writing that he once worked for the NSA; it was mentioned in a Japan Times article several years ago and proved to be correct.) David Kaplan's groundbreaking Yakuza:Japan's Criminal Underworld was probably the first book to really examine the shadowy ties between the yakuza, the LDP and the US after the occupation. What makes Tim Weiner's small chapter so impressive are the extensive notes, documents obtained from the CIA, and that he apparently conducted interviews on the CIA side as well. Impressive work.

Kodama, the right-wing industrialist mentioned above,  is notorious for his gangster connections but perhaps what best illustrates the point is that in the early sixties, Kodoma, Taoka Kazuo (田岡 一雄氏), the third generation leader of the Yamaguchi-gumi, and Machii Hisayuki  (町井 久之) head of the once powerful Japanese-Korean mafia, Toseikai（東声会) all served as board members of the Japan Professional Wrestling Association at the same time. They were all good buddies. As noted in Legacy Of Ashes, and in other sources, the Liberal Democratic Party was founded with a mixture of criminal proceeds, yakuza money, and US funds. The days when the US were able to exert control over Japanese politics are long gone but the yakuza have managed to maintain their own ties and connections to politicians across the board. For the Japanese government, they are still a useful entity, at times, and before the APEC summit, calls were sent out to all the major yakuza leaders urging them not to get into any gang wars and to keep an eye on anti-American lefties. After APEC ends, the aftermath of someone lobbing a hand-grenade into the headquarters of the Yamaguchi-gumi Yamaken-gumi headquarters will probably result in a bloody gang war. But for the time being, the yakuza are keeping the peace.

Full Disclosure Memo: In the worst of the Japanese press and blogosphere, I've been accused of being an agent of the CIA several times. Or the Mossad. Take your pick. This is untrue. I'm not a Mormon, have been very promiscious, and I am not totally inept, all things which disqualify me off the bat. However, in 2006-2007,  as part of a US State Department sponsored study on human trafficking in Japan,  I worked with a company which has many retired CIA/NSA employees and has been accused of being a front company for the CIA. I don't know if they are or aren't a front company and I don't really care. The study and the Human Trafficking report that came out of it had a positive impact on Japan's attitude towards dealing with human trafficking isssues and that's really all that matters.

If you're interested in the outsourcing of intelligence, pick up a copy of Spies For Hire: The Secret World Of Intelligence Outsourcing *by Tim Shorrock. The CIA contractor card on the cover has a partial picture of a Jewish looking fellow but I don't think that's me. Not unless someone issued me a nifty little card and didn't tell me about it. It's an incredibly well-written book which unfortunately is out of print, but you can still find copies if you look.

* I was contacted by a yakuza fan magazine journalist roughly two months ago who asserted that it was me on the cover of Spies For Hire and tried to shake me down for cash, obliquely.  So by writing this post, I'm also saying "f*ck you very much."  Personally, what's the most insulting thing about being accused of being a former CIA agent, and no offense to anyone working for the agency intended, but they have such a dismal success rate that it's kind of like being accused of working for post-Bush FEMA. It wounds my pride. Most people who are in "the intelligence community" would argue that actually the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has the best actionable intelligence of any agency .

Anyway, if you're a serious Japanologist, Legacy of Ashes is worth having on yourself for that chapter alone.

Tokyo Vice: Now in.. Hungarian!

Jake Adelstein's epic tale of a foreign cub reporter's climb Japan's underbelly is now available in Hungarian! We can't decipher anything about it without the aid of Google Translate, but fingers crossed that the reaction is good.

Adding to the US edition, UK edition, Australia/New Zealand edition and the German edition, that makes the fifth region that can now read about Jake's infamous exploits in their native tongue, and I'm sure he's thinking about the book tour opportunities right this minute.

Explosion rocks Yamaken-gumi office, gang claims no video footage

As many who are up on their Japan news probably saw, there was an explosion Monday morning at an office owned by the Yamaguchi-gumi affiliated Yamaken-gumi. Thus far, the Mainichi is the only place to have an English-language story up about the incident:

Police rushed to the office of the Yamaken-gumi gang, which is affiliated with the Yamaguchi-gumi criminal syndicate, in Kobe's Chuo Ward after a resident nearby reported the sound of a blast and that their house windows had been shattered at around 2:40 a.m. on Nov. 1.

Officers from Ikuta Police Station found several dents on a stainless-steel column near the office's front door and a gunpowder-like smell wafting in the area. A metal cylinder, measuring about 1 centimeter in diameter and three centimeters in length and apparently part of the explosive material, was found inside the resident's home across from the gang office. Police suspect that someone had placed an explosive near the gang's office and have begun investigating the case on suspicion of destruction of property.

According to the article, a gang member had checked CCTV footage, but did not see anyone on camera.

Here is a TBS report about the incident (Japanese) showing the glass debris that covered the area:

Residents may be scared, but the yakuza are probably furious and out hunting for the mysterious figure that supposedly didn't appear on their security cameras.