Encounter sites a hotbed of trouble, Japanese women victims of fake foreigners

TOKYO (TR) – Japan’s tabloid media contains no shortage of articles reporting on the arrests of men utilizing teenage prostitutes met on encounter Web sites. However, reports Nikkan Gendai (Dec. 9), those same sites are also rife with fraudulent activities. Read more

Illegal Tokyo casinos popular with baseball stars

In November, Japanese prosecutors arrested Mototaka Ikawa, 47, the former chairman of Daio Paper, after he admitted to a breach of trust in connection to 10.6 billion yen borrowed largely for gambling purposes.

“In the beginning, he used to go to gambling joints in Japan,” a reporter for a national paper tells weekly tabloid Shukan Taishu (Dec. 12). “But he eventually went overseas, where he was able to bet higher. He then became addicted.”

The tabloid says that Ikawa started in the murky underworld of illegal Japanese casinos — establishments that big-name celebrities and sports stars also frequent.

(It should be noted that, aside from motorbike, horse, boat, and bicycle racing, gambling is prohibited in Japan. Pachinko is not classified as gambling.) Read more

Japan times: Cut-up cops send sword-wielding slimeball to jail

At the age of 20, pachinko shop employee Munemitsu Takahashi (a pseudonym) decided to quit his job. By age 28, he had not worked for eight years.

One of the ways Takahashi supported himself, reports Shukan Jitsuwa (Dec. 8), was to befriend females via the Internet and, while feigning to be the president of a real estate firm, find creative ways to swindle them.

One of Takahashi’s victims was a 28-year-old woman we’ll call Reiko. The magazine describes the tale you are about to read as resembling “the scenario of a low-budget horror film.” Read on.

The sly Takahashi, who lived in a part of Japan relatively far from where Reiko resided, managed to keep his hooks in her for seven years. At one point in their relationship, when Takahashi was age 24, he was sentenced to a prison term. Before going behind bars he sent her an email.

“I have decided to undergo an operation,” he wrote. “It might be some time before I can write to you again — maybe even a year or longer. Please wait for me.” Read more

Hyogo shop registered as game center busted for offering high-stakes gambling, 11 arrested

TOKYO (TR) – Hyogo prefectural police arrested two employees early Thursday morning at a game center in Amagasaki City for offering gambling in violation of the adult-entertainment law, reports the Sankei Shimbun (Nov. 17). Read more

The celestial journey of Shoko Tendo

TOKYO (TR) – Upon introduction, author Shoko Tendo does not offer the image of a woman who has spent much of her life mixed up with drugs and yakuza gangsters.

With straight brown hair and sharp facial features shaped by reconstructive plastic surgery, this 42-year-old daughter of a mobster reveals no visual hints as to her past, aside from the occasional glimpse of one of her elaborate tattoos peering from under the cuff of her long shirtsleeve.

She is not shy about revealing that striking artwork covering her pencil-thin frame. A courtesan with a dagger gripped in her teeth fills her back as serpents crawl along her arms and legs. Kanji characters and carp fill in the spaces between and around.

“In public, people don’t see tattoos,” explains the soft-spoken Tendo, seated in a coffee shop in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro Ward on a rainy day in February. “They disapprove. But when I grew up I saw my father and people around him with tattoos. It was close at hand, and I thought, that’s me.” Read more

Japan’s crackdown on loansharks may prompt housewives to peddle flesh

From June 18, a revised law controlling moneylenders, which has been applied incrementally up to now, goes into full force. A salient feature of the law, reports Nikkan Gendai (May 19), will be a limit on the loan amount to less than one-third of the borrower’s annual income. At the same time, nearly all consumer loan companies are ceasing to extend loans to housewives.

This is no small matter. According to the national census of 2005, Japan had 16.4 million full-time housewives, of whom an estimated 4.75 million, or 29 percent, had taken out consumer loans.

“A majority of that number have already lost their sources of credit,” says loan consultant Mikio Kobayashi. “It’s believed that 38 percent of the housewives who take out loans conceal it from their husbands. As a result, women desperate for money have resorted to underground moneylenders, who charge usurious rates, and many wind up working flat out just to keep up the interest payments.” Read more

Mahjong world championship comes to Tokyo

TOKYO – Jong Rock rides a motorcycle and plays guitar. He’s a tough guy with long sideburns and a skull-painted leather jacket. The ladies can’t resist him and he plays…mahjong.

Rock is the main character in a manga featured in Kindai Mahjong, a bi-monthly magazine whose content includes various serials and advertising all focusing on the game of ceramic tiles on felt.

As a business, mahjong doesn’t have the scope of pachinko, one of Japan’s largest industries. Neither does it have quite the sophisticated allure of horse racing. Instead, its reputation over the past decades has been as the game of choice for high-stakes wagering in smoke-filled backrooms and parlors by hard-core gamblers – including members of the yakuza, company presidents, and politicians. Read more

Tokyo casinos take a gamble

TOKYO – On a typical weekday night, the streets on the west side of Tokyo’s Shimbashi Station are alive with activity: salesmen hocking necklaces and bracelets compete for sidewalk space with lottery ticket booths; taxis line up for fares; and salarymen slowly filter into the hostess and snack clubs off the main streets.

Mixed in are middle-aged men slowing pacing the sidewalks while wearing advertising sandwich boards decorated with playing cards or roulette wheels. Some offer gambling action for as little as 10 yen. Small maps give directions to each “game kingdom.”

Today, legal gambling in Japan is limited to horse, motorboat, bicycle, and motorbike racing. A number of other activities, such as the lottery, pachinko, and mahjong, are classified as “amusements” and are legal. A casino’s existence then can only be the result of one thing, says Reikichi Sumiya, an organized crime expert and journalist. “Wherever there’s gambling in Japan, there’s the yakuza,” he says. Read more

Pachinko U: Majoring in tumbling steel balls

TOKYO – A stroll around Shinjuku Station will reveal plenty of pachinko parlors emitting a rapid-fire clinging of steel balls and pounding dance tunes.

Such clamor is music to the ears of Ei Yoshida, president of G&E Business School, which teaches all there is to know about what is basically an upright pinball game.

“Our students either want to change their career,” says Yoshida from his third-floor office on Shinjuku-dori, “or they are already working in pachinko and need to learn more.”

Established in 2006, G&E Business School annually instructs 200 students, aged between 19 and 25, to work in this massive industry, one that recently has been facing a downturn yet remains highly dynamic. Read more

Pachinko parlor owner sticks to his nails

TOKYO – Yoshimasa Ono puts the compilation cassette into the stereo underneath his counter. It is a mix of oldies (“I’ve Got Rhythm”) and new artists (Mariah Carey). Just behind him in a glass cabinet are packages of soap and corned beef. It is mid-morning and his regulars are just now beginning to take their seats in one of the four rows of machines at Kamome, his small pachinko parlor near Tokyo’s Yurakucho Station.

Ono’s machines, all roughly 20 years old, are quite a bit different from the typical machines found today in Japan’s parlors. They are relative antiques.

“Inside the machines, the parts are old. I feel like they are my children,” says Ono, manager of the shop for the last 10 years. Read more

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