The company was not Olympus and the man arrested was not Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, the former CEO of Olympus.

However, Olympus is currently under investigation by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, the Tokyo Prosecutor’s Office, and the FSA/SESC for suspected violations of the same law. Olympus via its allegedly independent investigative committee announced recently that there was no evidence of organized crime involvement in the massive financial fraud the firm perpetuated for more than a decade. In that fraud, Olympus used a network of dubious companies. Individuals who have been found guilty of investment fraud and insider trading, managed at least two of the companies Olympus used to hide past losses: NEWS CHEF and J-Bridge.

In this particular case, the man arrested along with four others was Tsuyoshi Nakamura, former president of general contractor Inoue Kogyo Corporation. He was charged with arranging a fake capital hike in violation of the financial instruments and exchange law.

The police also arrested four others on charges of violating the law. Nakamura and the others are suspected of arranging a false 1.8-billion-yen capital hike of the company by issuing of new shares in September of 2008.
  Investigative authorities suspect that 1.5 billion yen of the total “capital hike” was money  circulated from an investors union known as Apple Limited Fund (Tokyo Chuo-Ward).   Yamaguchi-gumi members had a role in running the fund, but it is not clear whether it was front company or simply a “cooperative entity.” Police believe the fake capital increase was used to  raise the stock prices long enough for Yamaguchi-gumi members to sell their acquired shares at a large profit.

The Tokyo Police believe that formerly TSE listed company Inoue Kogyo was used by the yakuza as a platform to manipulate stock prices and cash in on leaked stocks. *artwork by Mari Kurisato. http://marikurisato.com

Nakamura and his associates are also being investigated for possible violation of the organized crime penal laws, specifically money laundering. Inoue Kogyo, which was listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, filed for court approval for the start of bankruptcy proceedings in October of 2008, due to financing difficulties. It was delisted the same month.

This is not the first time a company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange has been involved with organized crime. In March of 2008, Suruga Corporation, had its offices raided in connection with their use of a Yamaguchi-gumi Goto-gumi front company to evict tenants from buildings that Suruga Corporation wished to acquire. The Yamaguchi-gumi members involved were arrested for violations of the lawyers law (弁護士法違反) . In Japan, only legal counsel has the right to negotiate eviction with building tenants. No one from Suruga Corporation was arrested for hiring organized crime members to do their dirty work; it was not a crime to utilize yakuza for business purposes in 2008. At the time of raid and the arrests, Suruga Corporation had on their board of directors a former National Police Agency Organized Crime Control Division bureaucrat and an ex-prosecutor. After the firm’s organized crime ties were revealed, banks refused to loan the firm money and they began corporate rehabilitation procedures in June of 2008. In the same month, the TSE announced they would be delisting Suruga Corporation–because of the firm’s financial difficulties–with no reference to the firm’s ties to organized crime. Suruga Corporation was delisted on July 25^th, 2008.

It should be pointed that Inoue Kogyo and Suruga Corporation were listed on the second section of the TSE, while Olympus is listed on the first section, so obviously different standards of corporate compliance and investigation are to be expected.  First section companies, we assume, would never, ever, get involved with organized crime. Not like those second sector guys.

Yes, the world is always made complicated by honest men with a sense of justice and duty–to themselves and to their shareholders or to some greater good. The whole scandal emerged first in the Japanese media. Yes, despite what you have been told good investigative journalism does exist in Japan. The magazine FACTA, has been following the story for months and ZAITEN, also ran a long feature on how Olympus’s money bleeding investment arm, ITX,  had been amputated quietly–but not so perfectly that  the huge pools of financial blood were not noticed. The mainstream Japanese media has chosen to ignore the story, probably because HUMALABO, the cosmetics and supplements maker, which Olympus now owns—is also a huge advertiser, especially in newspapers.

In year 2008, something happened at Olympus that turned the company from an entity focussed on seven major business areas, into a company completely out of focus, blurred by a total of seventeen business areas, to include real estate, investments, consulting, waste disposal, labor dispatch, and running travel agencies. Igari Toshiro, former prosecutor turned anti-yakuza crusader, who was Japan’s greatest expert on white-collar organized crime aka the keizai yakuza (経済ヤクザ）and many veteran organized crime detectives have stated that one of the first signs that a company has been infiltrated by anti-social forces is a sudden and totally new change in company direction–especially into areas like waste disposal, labor dispatch (temporary staffing), and real estate—all areas where anti-social forces have carved out a large niche for themselves.

Olympus seems to have lost their focus in June of 2008. Anti-social forces may have set their sights on the company at this time.

Olympus invested at current exchanges, what would be over 700 million dollars into three companies, in 2008 circa the time of their transformation into Super Olympus–and later wrote down the value of those investments by three quarters in the same year.  The three companies shared addresses and office space with several other companies with different names but sometimes the same employees, creating a web of real and paper companies that make tracking the money very difficult. One of the auditors involved is considered a corporate blood brother (企業舎弟・kigyoshatei) to the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest crime group, by law enforcement and regulatory agency sources. In short, what happened at Olympus has all the earmarks of anti-social forces gaining entry into a company and draining it of cash. The Yubitoma case in 2007, the taking of Lehman Brothers Japan for 350 million by a yakuza connected firm Asclepius in 2008, and other cases bear a striking resemblance to what seems to have happened at Olympus.

When the board of a company continues to make decisions that negatively impacts the financial situation of the company, it is the duty of the CEO under the The Companies Act (会社法）to address these acts of corporate malfeasance and if need be, make the shareholders aware of the problem and possibly file criminal charges. It would appear, based on all that has surfaced, that Mr. Kikukawa, who ran Olympus during the periods where the suspicious transactions took place, and possibly other directors as well, may be guilty of the crime of an aggravated breach of trust . (会社法第960条・取締役などの特別背任罪）The law essentially says the following, “when a director (executive officer etc), for the purpose of promoting such person’s own interests or the interests of a third party or inflicting damage on a Stock company, commits an act in breach of such persons duties and causes financial damages to such Stock Company, such person shall be punished by imprisonment with hard labor for not more than ten years or a fine of not more than ten million yen or both.  If this is what Mr. Kikukawa and other board members have done, then under the The Companies Act (会社法), Mr. Woodford would be an accomplice to a crime by remaining silent.

I’m certainly not the judge and jury in this matter. However, as a reporter who has been covering organized crime since 1994, I feel confident in saying that if there hasn’t been a takeover or collusion of the company by anti-social forces, there is certainly a level of corporate malfeasance here that has already drawn the attention of the Japanese law enforcement agencies and regulatory agencies. It is drawing world attention as well. Investigations will come. No one can be sure what will be found until the digging is done.

The Neojaponisme Blog has a very interesting catalog of the players involved in the transactions. It begins like this:

The JTA maintains a “Model Accommodation Contract”, which serves as a widely-accepted set of guidelines recommended for hotels, ryokans, and other lodging facilities.

The agency explains on its website: “As anti-social forces threaten the physical and financial safety of tourists and the hotels themselves, we have enacted new provisions to our existing laws.”

Along with informative stipulations such as “guests may be turned away if there is no vacancy” and “guests may be turned away if equipment breakdowns occur due to a natural disaster”, a new clause states that if a guest is discovered to be an organized crime member, their hotel reservation may be cancelled or they can be turned away. Additionally, they can also be kicked out. Guests may also be asked to leave they act in a violent manner or if they make “considerable trouble” at the hotel.

According to an article in the Asahi Shinbun, the National Police Agency had called for such measures to be taken since 2006. Police hope that such a measure, finally in place, will spread through the rest of the country. Arima Hot Springs Tourism Association, for example, had already implemented such measures. This association of hotels is located in Kobe, which is also the home of the Yamagumi-guchi.

Sado-san of the Japan Tourism Agency, who is coy about his first name, stated that there was no reason in particular that the Agency has decided to implement these provision now; he refers to the ongoing dialogue concerning such provisions that the agency has had with the police over the past few years. Kind of a, “just getting around to it” sort of thing, it seems.

The below excerpts of the contract are taken from the English version online.

Article 5 – Refusal of the Conclusion of the Accommodation Contract
05.01. The following are cases where our Hotel (Ryokan) will not accept the conclusion of the Accommodation Contract:

(4) When the Guest seeking accommodation is considered to be corresponding to the following (a) to (c).
(a) The law in respect to prevention, etc. against illegal actions by gang members (1991 Law item 77)
stipulated article 2 item 2 (hereinafter referred to as “gang group”.), gang member stipulated by the
same law article 2 item 6 (hereinafter referred to as “gang member.”), gang group semi-regular
members or gang member related persons and other antisocial forces.
(b) When gang group or gang members are associates of corporations or other bodies to control
business activities.
(c) When a corporate body has related persons to gang members.

Article 7 – The Right of Our Hotel (Ryokan) to Cancel the Contract
07.01. The following are cases where our Hotel (Ryokan) may cancel the Accommodation Contract:

(2) When the Guest is clearly considered to be corresponding to the following (a) to (c).
(a) Gang group, gang group semi-regular members or gang member related persons and other
antisocial forces.
(b) When a corporate body or other organization where gang groups or gang members control business
activities.
(c) In a corporate body which has persons relevant to gang member in its board member.

Japan Tourism Agency has given the finger to the nine-digit crowd aka the yakuza.

Jake’s notes: Most major hotels in Japan since 2009 have embedded an anti-organized crime exclusionary  clause into the overnight stay contracts guests sign when checking in. A yakuza member who signs in as a hotel guest and conceals his/her yakuza affiliation can then be arrested for fraud, if the hotel agreement has that clause. The anti-organized crime clause was the brain-child of deceased lawyer, and former prosecutor Igari Toshiro. This contractual clause was used this year to arrest the second highest ranking member of the Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai for “playing golf under false pretenses.”  Yakuza are great fans of expensive luxury hotels but as illustrated in Itama Juzo’s classic film 民暴の女(Minbo no Onna/The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion)–they often cost the hotel more in business and in financial losses than what they pay for their top-of-the-line rooms.

After getting caught manipulating public opinion to be pro-nuclear and to shut up dissent, NISA distributes "bowing in shame" (土下座）figurines to employees, with mini-manual to improve public opinion of NISA with quality apologies. (Not really.) It's not easy being an atomic cheerleader.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has made the requisite denouncements, promising an independent investigation into the matter, to be published by the end of August.

The Sankei Shinbun reports that according to Chubu Electric, NISA requested they put these “questioners” in inconspicuous locations in the assembly hall. They were also asked to “try not to call on those in opposition to the plutonium thermal proposition,” but to have citizens ask questions that have been pre-made by Chubu Electric. They ended up drafting the questions, but after consulting their legal compliance department, they reaching the conclusion that such an act would be extremely dubious and never actually distributed them. In fact, Sankei reports that some Chubu employees encouraged citizens to “speak honestly, even if your opinions are critical”.

Other utilities went along, however. According to the Asahi Shinbun, Shikoku Electric “sought out 29 people, including local residents, to speak up in the government-sponsored session, providing them with ‘example opinions’ beforehand….One person said at the session: ‘I was somewhat relieved to learn that using fuel made from plutonium blended with uranium would not be very different from using uranium in terms of the gases generated’. The words were similar to the sample opinion.”

There is something darkly funny about the provided  ”example opinions”. While this is another serious example of collusion between industry and regulators, the incident also just seems pathetic–conjuring ridiculous images of confused citizens reading awkwardly from index cards, stumbling over the terminology, NISA officials shuffling over to help with the pronunciation of the more challenging nuclear words: “No no, thats actually thor-ium…yes, yes, now please start from the beginning.” This is really the best strategy they had to generate favorable public opinion?

Maybe I’m simply unfazed by these nuclear industry “scandals” the press keeps uncovering, but rather than villianous, the attempts at manipulation just seem too incompetent to take seriously. They could certainly learn a thing or two from the oil barons of the US or the bankers on wall-street. Or maybe it just shows how little effort is required to get away with unethical behavior in an environment as saturated with corruption as Japan’s nuclear industry is.

Jake’s note: NISA is part of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). The same agency which is now investigating NISA for “improper behavior”. Allegedly, the job of NISA is to regulate the nuclear industry, not be the atomic energy cheerleaders. There were seven NISA inspectors on the site at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear reactor on the day of the earthquake, March 11. All of them fled immediately, leaving very few people competent to measure the radioactive levels at the site or assess the danger leverl. NISA in response to my questions insisted that this was not dereliction of duty.

NISA has never filed criminal charges against TEPCO although the firm has repeatedly forged documents and altered data in over 161 incidents, which constitutes forgery and possibly fraud under Japanese criminal law. If it wasn’t clear that NISA is more about supporting the nuclear industry than regulating it, it is now. They might as well trade in their geiger counters for some pom-poms. It would make the agency more transparent.

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 area, Kabukicho. Despite being from different papers, Richard Lloyd Parry and I worked the story together, exchanging information, contacts and tips. There was a chance that Lucie might still be alive, being held captive somewhere. The hope that reporting on it might make a difference superseded any journalistic rivalry. Now Parry has written a compelling book about the depravity of man, the difficult pursuit of justice, and how we deal with the wrongful deaths of those whom we loved.

Lucie, a young English woman, came to Japan to have fun and make money as a hostess in order to pay off her debts. She never went home. Her alleged killer, Joji Obara, is a clever man and a graduate of the law department of an elite Japanese university. I write ‘alleged’ because, despite all the circumstantial evidence that he was responsible for her death, the Japanese courts have only convicted him of dismembering her corpse. The charges were of rape resulting in death, but they have not yet been proven to the satisfaction of the judiciary. Obara knows that without a full confession, the Japanese police are handicapped, and prosecutors loathe such a case. He also knew enough of the law to prey on foreign hostesses. Hostessing is not allowed on foreign visas. If foreign hostesses go to the police as victims of sexual assault, they themselves are arrested and often deported, and no charges are generally brought against their assailants. (For years, human traffickers in Japan exploited this same fact.)

Every year, roughly 80,000 people go missing in Japan. The police don’t investigate each disappearance, or even a significant fraction of them. Perhaps if Tim Blackman, Lucie’s father, hadn’t raised hell, the case would never have been seriously investigated. But once the Tokyo Police realised that this was not just another missing persons case, they pursued it with vigour and determination. While the police are generally treated fairly in the book, Parry implies that they were uninterested in the case, and this is not so.

Parry’s book describes in detail Tim Blackman’s frustration with the police efforts to track down the phone number of Akira Takagi, one of his daughter’s friends, a few days after she vanished. Explanations of why they couldn’t do it probably seemed disingenuous to the Blackman family. I’m sure they were. The truth is that because of the no-caller-ID setting Takagi had placed on his phone, it wasn’t possible to trace the call. According to Shoji Takao’s Keiji No Banka (‘The Detective’s Dirge’), an in-depth account of the police investigation written with the aid of the detectives who worked the case and published in Japan last year, a huge amount of time and energy was spent examining the fraction of recoverable phone records and developing. a lead on the case.

The Japanese police as a general rule do not reveal information about an ongoing investigation to anyone, because it would hurt their case in court. The usual practice is to conceal critical data that only the criminal could possibly know, in order to obtain an ironclad confession that can’t be explained away by saying, ‘I was just repeating what I read in the papers.’ If the police come off looking lazy, bureaucratic and disinterested, it’s simply because they care more about getting the perpetrator then they do about social niceties. One detective who worked the case put it this way: ‘The best thing we can do for the family is to see that justice is served. Everything else is secondary.’

One of the ironies of the case was that some of the key sources who helped the police track down Obara were yakuza affiliates of a Tokyo-based crime group. They are not generally good Samaritans but there are three things that the group bans and that are cause for immediate expulsion: theft, robbery and rape. Obara was scum even in their eyes. When Lucie’s body was found, one member of the group contacted me with a message: ‘If Obara doesn’t get the death penalty, we could administer it. Prisons are full of accidents. Let Mr Blackman know. If that’s what he wants, we’ll see that justice is done.’

Obara has also been found guilty of raping several other women and of killing Carita Ridgway, a well-liked girl from Perth, Australia. (Ridgway and I had a mutual friend, a classmate of mine who worked at the same hostess bar as Ridgway and whose testimony was used to convict Obara. It’s a small, ugly world sometimes.) People Who Eat Darkness is also about these other women, and the suffering of their family members and friends. Furthermore, it is an indictment of Japanese society, in which sexual crimes against women, especially those working in the adult entertainment world, frequently go uninvestigated. Rape is a crime punishable by as little as three years in jail; at the time Lucie vanished, the penalty was only two years. Even today, a first-time offender, if he admits guilt and pays damages to the victim, may still get a suspended sentence.

Parry has spent years researching and writing this book. It allows readers to experience Japan’s S&M subculture, the police bureaucracy, and the tightly controlled press club system, parts of Japan that most Japanese never know. One also feels one is reliving the tragedy as a friend of the family, with all the agony it involves. It’s a journey worth taking, if you have the stomach for it.

I never passed on that message from the yakuza. After finishing Richard Lloyd Parry’s book, part of me wishes that I had. However, there are some choices that I think people should be spared from making. We are all responsible for our own choices. The choices that Obara made ruined the lives of many. The choices of Lucie’s family and some courageous victims are what put him behind bars. Like every exceptional book, there is a moral to this tale. But it’s up to readers to determine for themselves just what that moral really is.

Note: In June this year (2011) Richard Parry had a book talk at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan that was enlightening and informative. My live (at the time) tweet feed on the conference can be read by clicking here. Thanks to @nofrills on Twitter for compiling it. Many other related books in Japanese can be found at the bottom of the page.

*This review was originally published in the British periodical, The Literary Review and is reprinted with their position. It’s a great magazine for those who love reading.

On March 30th, not only did TEPCO admit that the chairman had been taking Japanese mass media power brokers on the trip to China but also that TEPCO paid the majority of the travel fees for the participants. On April 7th, a reporter asked TEPCO to reveal the names of the mass media firms that had executives and/or former executives joining the chairman on his trip, but TEPCO dodged the question.

It’s well known that TEPCO pays huge advertising fees to most media outlets; it is one of the largest advertisers in Japan. It’s not as well known that the president of TEPCO, Masataka Shimizu, is also the chairman of  the Japan Society for Corporate Communication Studies (JSCCS), which includes among its members former and current top executives from Asahi Beer, Toyota, and Dentsu, Japan’s largest advertising agency. The board of directors also includes a representative of Nihon Television’s Reporting Bureau, Economic News section:

In a sense, the president of TEPCO is the chairman of what is whispered to be the equivalent of a lobby group that wields the power of advertising revenue over anyone who crosses their paths. It is ostensibly a group of scholars, executives, advertising agency bosses, mass media representatives, and businessmen who gather together to study more effective means of communications. Veteran Japanese reporters assert that the society also functions as powerful consortium of large corporations who know how to use the threat of taking away advertising dollars as a whip to keep the Japanese media muzzled.

You don’t have to be too bright to figure out that if TEPCO, Toyota, Asahi Beer and Dentsu somehow banded together and pulled advertising from your newspaper, television channel, or radio program, that it would be financially devastating. In the April edition of weekly magazine Asahi Geino, Noted journalist, Takashi Uesugi claims that on March 15th, after repeatedly lampooning and criticizing TEPCO on TBS Radio that the producer asked him to leave the show, claiming that the program was being “revamped.” TBS Radio refuses to comment on the issue at present.

Masataka Shimizu, the president of TEPCO, is still listed as the chairman of the JSCCS but on April 1st his “greetings” were taken down from the sight and replaced with the words of the vice-chairman. The current page expresses condolences to the victims of the recent disasters. There is no mention of the problems at the Fukushima reactor,  only that Chairman Shimizu is now too busy dealing with the disaster to fully devote himself to his duties for the organization.

According to a mainstream Japanese media reporter, the TEPCO tours of China have been going on for over ten year. “The trips have a token amount of study, such as visiting a factory, or whatever has been scheduled to justify the event for that year. In reality, most of the day is devoted to sight-seeing. At night the TEPCO executives wine and dine the reporters, editors, or  mass media representatives. And of course, the obligatory karaoke.”

It’s not surprising that much of the Japanese mainstream media has been less than critical of  TEPCO up until now. It’s very hard to raise your voice loud enough to be heard from inside the pocket of your sponsor.

The president of TEPCO also is chairman of the Japan Society For Corporate Communication Studies. Their motto: "Striving to create a new vision of society." It may be a myopic one.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

(via The Atomic Age, thank you to Shihoku Fujiwara of Polaris Project for the link)

One would like to think that things have changed over the years, but even now in Fukushima, reports are being published that tell how people are being lured with offers of up to ¥400,000 per day to work at the nuclear reactors–many of whom are victims of the tsunami. Because of high radiation levels the amount of time each person can spend inside is limited. TEPCO confirms they’re working with outside agencies to secure enough workers to keep operations running, but refused to comment on how much each person is being paid.

In a way, it’s kind of vindicating to see the investigation turn out as I expected it would and a little disappointing. In this interview with AP in July of 2010, I expounded as succinctly as possible on the problems with yakuza and the sumo world.

“Sumo is involved in organized crime because they’ve had a symbiotic relationship for years,” said Jake Adelstein, a former crime beat reporter for a Japanese newspaper and author of the best-selling book “Tokyo Vice.” “The wrestlers and the yakuza have a macho admiration for each other. The yakuza by being seen with the sumo wrestlers, acquire ‘status’ and the sumo wrestlers get money, booze, food, and women.”

Adelstein said smaller training stables don’t have big corporate sponsors and need the money the yakuza offer. “The average salary of a sumo wrestler is a pittance and they need the cash,” he said, adding that once a wrestler is beholden to the mob he is vulnerable to demands to throw bouts — which the gangsters bet on — to clear his debt.”

In the best of worlds, the sumo baseball betting scandal would be pursued until it was proven that yakuza had also been involved in match-rigging as well. Perhaps the latest judicious leak from the police is an attempt to garner public outcry so that they can pursue the investigation even farther. However, if I was going to bet on the outcome, which I would never do, since gambling is a crime in Japan–I’d bet that the investigation ends with a few arrests and a post-humous prosecution of the yakuza boss who was believed to have organized a great deal of the betting.

I wouldn’t mind losing the hypothetical bet, though.

UPDATE:  The current head of the Japan Sumo Association(JSA)  has apologized for the scandal and announced that they will conduct a serious investigation into recent allegations. With a former lawyer for an organized crime front company still working with the JSA, we can probably be pretty sure that the investigation will uncover nothing more than a convenient scapegoat.

According to news reports, an unidentifed man working close to the site, heard sounds like a tire being punctured at 2:40 am on the same day. Since October of last year, there have been four other construction sites in Tokyo where bullets were fired.  The construction company working on the Seibo University site has gone on record that it will be severing ties with all organized crime groups and implementing that policy in its larger public works as well.  Police sources believe that this case was a clear warning by an organized crime group, hungry for construction projects, that they will not be easily dismissed.  The relationships between this shooting and previous incidents is unclear. If you were in a punny mood, you could say that gunshots represent yakuza “destructive criticism” of the new policies rather than the usual “constructive criticism” that one would hope for from these chivalorous groups.

"Don't fear the yakuza, pay them off, or use them." from the Tokyo Metro Police HP. Tokyo is actively trying to push the yakuza out of construction and the business world. New ordinances will add impetus.

Prior to this incident, on October 6th, the 19th annual Tokyo Citizens For the Banishment of Organized Crime Meeting/Boryokudan Tsuiho Tomin Taikai (暴力団追放都民会）was held at the Hibiya Kokaido and participants, which included several construction company executives, pledged “Not to fear organized crime, nor to give them money, nor to use their services.”The Tokyo City Government is expected to pass an organized crime exclusionary ordinance （暴力団排除条例)  this year which will make paying off the yakuza (指定暴力団）a crime, and will also allow the police to release the names of companies that do business with the yakuza. Seven prefectures already have similar laws on the books. The new laws will make the price of paying off the yakuza, in loss of face and in penalties,  much more expensive than the actual cash payments to the yakuza.  It highly incentives firms not to cooperate or collude with organized crime, much as the revisions to the commerce law in December 1997, made it unacceptable for large listed companies to pay off sokaiya (総会屋）ie racketeers. After a few company executives were arrested for “giving profits to racketeers” the pay offs drastically declined as did the number of sokaiya.

For footage of the construction site and more details see the NHK News Report.

Note: On a more serious note, for the safety of the construction firms and their employees, that are being targetted for reprisals by organized crime, we have omitted the company names from the article.

Date: Saturday, September 25 from 7-9pm

Location: JICA Chikyu Hiroba Seminar Room 301 (Map)
(One-minute walk from Exit 3, Hiroo Station, Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line)

Admission: 1,000 yen, 500 yen for students with ID

To register for the seminar, please fill out this form (Japanese only),

For more information, contact:
Polaris Project Japan Office
TEL：050-3496-7615
E-mail: info@polarisproject.jp