People Who Eat Darkness (闇を食う人々）An amazing book and a tissue sample of Japan's social pathological elements

People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman* By Richard Lloyd Parry (Jonathan Cape 404pp £17.99) When the disappearance of Lucie Blackman made the news, I was covering it as a reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper. By necessity rather than by choice, I was already familiar with the darker side of the country: I had spent 1999 to 2000 as a police reporter assigned to the 4th District, home of Japan’s largest adult entertainment... Read More

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO): Is it time to turn off the lights?

“Jump in a nuclear reactor and die!’ Those were the words directed at the chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) by one angry man at the tense stockholders meeting held today on June 28. It captured the sentiment of many people in Japan who are demanding the company take responsibility for the meltdown on March 11, at the nuclear power plant TEPCO managed and owns. The meeting inside did not run smoothly but meltdown was avoided. Outside the meeting, the Tokyo... Read More

Missing Organs, Missing Donors, & Yakuza Involvement in Organ Transplants: This time in Japan! (Not UCLA)

On June 24th, 2011,  A doctor, a Sumiyoshi-kai gangster, a former mobster and two others were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to illegally trade a kidney and faking an adoption between 2009 and 2010 . It’s a hell of a complicated case involving a doctor in need of a kidney transplant, a gangster that was paid to help him procure a donor and now revelations that the same doctor received a kidney transplant–and the donor is now missing. For more on the story, see... Read More

Film: Cold Fish (冷たい熱帯魚)

reviewed by Amy Seaman If  you’ve read Tokyo Vice, you’re already familiar with the story of Sekine Gen and Hiroko Kazama, the husband and wife pet-shop owners that killed at least four people in the nineties, poisoning them and dismembering their bodies in a very gruesome but effective fashion and the strange twists and turns the police investigation took along the way to their arrests. (Both have been sentenced to death).  The cult  film director, Sion Sono,... Read More

MAFF staff, teacher, doctor show that pervs come from all professions

One usually inane but occasionally fun thing about the Japanese media is that they almost always list the professions of those who appear in news articles. This really made the headlines pop today as a number of randy men who happened to work in either the public sector or in some kind of care profession got caught red-handed in unfortunate incidents. A head clerk at the Ministry of Agriculture, Forest and Fisheries was arrested June 19 for groping a woman on a train while riding... Read More

9 Day Warning: On March 2nd, NISA disciplined TEPCO on lax equipment checks before meltdown

On March 2nd, approximately nine days before the TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Reactor One melted down, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) formally disciplined TEPCO for failure to conduct inspections on critical pieces of equipment at the Fukushima Number One and Number Two Reactor. NISA found that TEPCO had violated safety regulations and gave them the second lightest administrative punishment possible: 注意の行政処分-chui... Read More

Moe Yamaguchi's high-rolling husband arrested for running illegal hostess club

My husband run a hostess club illegally? Never! Actress and talento Moe Yamaguchi was “really stunned” when she learned her husband, web entrepreneur Shigeo Ozeki, has been illegally running a posh hostess club without a license. Ozeki and two other men were arrested May 26 for their suspected connection with “Birth Nishi-Azabu“, an exclusive but unlicensed hostess club hidden in a residential neighbourhood in Tokyo’s Minato ward. Opened in 2004,... Read More

Positive correlation discovered between asthma attacks and exposure to Japanese government's bullsh*t

According to an NHK online article published on May 25th, the Japanese Ministry of the Environment announced last week its findings that children who were exposed to higher amounts of automobile exhaust fumes had a higher probability of being diagnosed with asthma. Previously, the ministry refused to accept the correlation, claiming scientific evidence on the subject was lacking (despite studies that for years have suggested so: here in Environmental Health Perspectives, a cross-continental... Read More

Hidden love hotels come out of the closet thanks to law revisions; It's a love fest in post-quake Japan

It seems business is booming for the love hotel industry. The number of registered businesses has jumped by a whopping 2,700 hotels since the beginning of the year, a hefty number considering that, at the end of 2010, there were only 3,692 love dens on the books. While it looks like the entire country has decided to tackle head-on Japan’s infamous declining birth rate problem, the apparent boom in love hotels is less due to demand than it is to changes in the adult entertainment... Read More