In 1981, at the age of 32, Issei Sagawa leapt to infamy for a cannibal murder the Japanese call Pari jinniku jiken (The Paris Human Flesh Incident). When captured, he was found mentally unfit to stand trial, and sent home amidst suggestions that his wealthy family were able to secure special treatment for him. After a year in a mental hospital, Japan’s most gruesome celebrity was free.

Pari jinniku jiken

Sagawa had been studying English literature in Paris when he became obsessed with a Dutch classmate, Renée Hartevelt. Having persuaded her to come to his house to discuss their studies, he shot her in the neck, and spent the next 2 days eating various parts of her body. He chopped up the remains and put them in a couple of suitcases, which he dumped in a park. He was spotted in the park and arrested a few days later.

Celebrity career

Although most people were appalled by what he had done, there was undeniable public fascination with Sagawa, and he has managed to make some sort of living out of his infamy:

• He has authored at least 13 books, including explicit accounts of his own experiences. In one, he describes how the Dutch girl’s flesh “melted in [his] mouth like a perfect piece of tuna”. He has also written about other people’s atrocities, including a book about the infamous child-killer Sakakibara.
• He appeared in the 1992 film Sisenjiyou no Aria (The Bedroom), in which women are drugged and subjected to bizarre sexual fetishes. Sagawa’s role as a sadistic voyeur drew directly from his public persona.
• Another example of art imitating life is in Sagawa’s own painting, which focuses on the nude bodies of Caucasian women.
• In one extraordinary display of bad taste, he was once hired by a tabloid to write restaurant reviews.

Despite his varied celebrity career, Sagawa admitted in 2006 that he was having trouble scratching together enough cash to eat a Big Mac, let alone another Dutch student. Sagawa’s decision to revel in public infamy has made sure no one forgets his horrific crime, and he has found himself unemployable. It is difficult to see how much sympathy he should expect.

• Issei Sagawa (Wikipedia)
  “In interviews, Sagawa describes himself as a ‘weak, ugly and small man’ and claims that he wanted to ‘absorb her energy.’”
• The Cannibal Celebrity: Issei Sagawa (Crime Library)
  “He says that when he sat next to her in a class, he fell instantly in love and could not stop thinking about the white skin of her arms.”
• Issei Sagawa: The Confession
  Sagawa’s account of his cannibal act. Not for the faint-hearted.
• Sagawa Issei: Too Much Blood
  “I flipped through the childlike drawings. It was an account of his life, with the centerpiece being the two day-long orgy of mutilation, cannibalism and sexual deviance”
• Police photos from the crime scene
  WARNING! Some of the pictures are graphic and might be upsetting. If you’re unsure about visiting this site, please don’t.
• Former celebrity cannibal struggles for next meal (MDN WaiWai)
  “The fiend not only avoided prison time for his monstrous meal but managed to sashay his gruesome act into a celebrity career”
• Issei Sagawa (Everything2)
  “He is (or at least was) a huge celebrity and pop-culture icon in Japan, selling books, doing TV interviews and the like”

B: It’s me!

A: Takeshi? Is that you? What’s wrong with your voice?

B: I’ve got a cold. Listen, I need a really big favour…

“Ore Ore” sagi (“It’s me!” scams) are a well known confidence trick in Japan.

A fraudster calls a house. If the voice on the end of the phone sounds like it belongs to someone elderly or otherwise exploitable, he says “Ore! Ore!” (“It’s me!”). If he’s lucky, the victim will mistake him for a son/nephew/grandson, and say “Is that Hideo” (or similar), and his trap is set.

In most cases, the voice will be different from the one they’re expecting. If the victim seems uncertain, “Hideo” can invent a cold or flu to explain the change in his voice.

Next, the scamster adds the bait. “Hideo” has gotten himself into terrible trouble (like accidentally shunting someone’s Porsche, or being threatened by the yakuza), and owes a lot of money. The aim of this drama is to panick the bewildered victim into transferring money immediately to an account owned by him, after which, they never hear from him again, and the truth emerges.
At their peak, these kind of scams fooled thousands of gullible unfortunates every year, earning billions of yen. Media coverage has increased public caution, but also given increasing numbers of dishonest types the inspiration to try it out. There’s also more innovation – a complex ore ore scam might involve a number of fraudsters acting different roles and sharing the profits.

• Japan Behind the Scenes: “Ore, Ore” Fraud Increasing (Hiragana Times)
  “According to a recent TV station poll, three out of ten people surveyed said they had either been a victim or knew a victim.”
• Phone Fraud Fleeces the Unsuspecting (Sake Drenched Postcards)
  “It’s a story that’ll make you think twice before answering that next phone call.”
• Ore Ore Fraud. Why ore ore? (Watashi to Tokyo)
  “When we say “Ore” in Japanese, it is not a metal-bearing mineral. It is a informal word for a guy referring to himself.”
• Osaka has lower Ore Ore Fraud damage (Watashi to Tokyo)
  “They say one reason might be that the members of these crime groups cannot speak the Osaka dialect”

For women living in the apartment blocks of Japan’s most built-up urban areas, where clotheslines are in public view and relatively easy to access, panty theft is not an uncommon occurrence. To avoid this creepy and inconvenient problem, some use a special plastic cover to hide drying undies from public sight. However, if a determined panty thief sees the cover, he presumably has a pretty good idea of what’s underneath. White seems to be the most popular colour, for some reason known only to the thieves themselves.

“We’re worried you might pick up something”

The quest for smalls has encouraged levels of innovation that would make Sony’s R&D department blush. In May 2000, a shitagi dorobou in Osaka called a number of women, pretending to be a government Health Officer investigating an E. coli outbreak, and tried to persuade them remove their underwear and deliver it to a local park:

“We’re worried you might pick up something. For an inspection please take off the panties you’re wearing now and put them in a plastic bag and present them to us.”

Local authorities were flooded with complaints, and a high school girl was taken in by the ludicrous scheme before the police were able to issue a public warning.

Excuses, excuses

Sadly, the excuses used by shitagi dorobou when caught with panties have been much less creative than their methods of procuring them. Particularly desperate was the government official who, when caught with 400 pairs of womens’ underwear, claimed he had “found them in the street”.

In 2004, a 55-year-old shitagi dorobou was caught by the furious husband of the woman whose knickers he was in the process of swiping. Faced with substantial amount of evidence against him – 4,000 pairs of underwear stolen over a 30-year career – he decided to own up: “I just love panties and could not control my desires”.

In 2006, a Nagoya man was caught red-handed, having just stolen 67 pairs of kickers from one home. 1,700 more pairs were found in his garage. Admitting to over 250 separate acts of theft since 1990, he said that shyness with women had caused him to become interested in stealing underwear.

• ‘Shitagidorobo’ (Japan Sex Glossary)
• ‘Japanese Panty Thief Caught’ (Japan Probe)
• ‘Hunt for Japanese knicker thief’ (BBC News)
• ‘Japanese police arrested a 55-year-old male accused of theft.’
• ‘Panty raider’ (Salon)

The sokaiya are racketeer groups who blackmail large companies. By threatening to disrupt shareholders’ meetings, and cause the company a great loss of face, they are able to earn large pay-offs. Often, sokaiya are hired by the companies to ensure these meetings run smoothly, and protect them from other pressure groups.

One famous group is the “banzai” sokaiya, who raid business places, screaming “Banzai!” until they are paid to leave. More discreet groups threaten to reveal company secrets at an embarrassing time. They thrive in Japan, because Japanese companies are more likely to conceal negative information from their shareholders than companies in the US or Europe.

Unable to reprimand the sokaiya themselves, the government punishes the companies who make the payoffs. Tough fines have been imposed on many corporations, including Mitsubishi Motors and Nomura Securities, who were also temporarily banned from trading. Managing directors have faced imprisonment for giving “loans” to sokaiya.

• ‘Japan companies bid to bar gangsters’ (BBC News)
  
• ‘Japan reels from Sokaiya scam’ (ThisIsMoney)
  

Traditionally seen by many Japanese people as a modern incarnation of the samurai, the yakuza were tolerated for a long time.

They are distinctive for extensive tattooing, missing pinkie fingers and hairstyles 20 years out-of-date.

In 1991, new “Anti-Boryokudan” legislation outlawed organisations that employed a high proportion of former convicts, radically altering yakuza structure and making recruitment much more difficult.

• Yakuza (Wikipedia)
  
• ‘The Yakuza, the Japanese mafia’ (The Crime Library)
  
• Introduction to Yakuza Japanese
  

An embarrassment which most people ignore, they possess a surprising amount of political influence through yakuza connections and bribery.

Their campaigning centers monotonously around increasing Japan’s military, kicking foreigners out, and making the Emperor the boss again.

In 1990, Nagasaki’s mayor was shot by an uyoku group after he publicly suggested that Japan take responsibility for WWII. In 1993, another group killed the parents of a magazine editor whose publication criticised Empress Michiko.

• Fringe Groups: Uyoku
  

Supposedly introduced by adventurous Hell’s Angels in the 1950’s, boso zoku membership reached a peak of 40,000 in the 70’s.

With total disregard for Japan’s timid police, the gangs’ favourite trick is to cruise slowly through residential areas, revving their engines (having removed the mufflers) and making as much noise as possible.

The gangs are reputed to be prime recruiting ground for the yakuza (who the zoku must pay for the use of their territory), and violent crime perpetrated by these groups has increased rapidly.

• ‘Hot rod ‘tribes’ roar into the night’
  

Many of Japan’s illegal immigrants work in the ravenous, unregulated sex industry, which employs over 150,000 women, mainly from Thailand and the Philippines.

For many, this lifestyle is not a choice. Every year, hundreds of women are tricked into coming to Japan with promises of a good job and a comfortable life. When they arrive, they are handed over to the yakuza, who take their passports and force them to work in sex clubs. They live in cramped squalor, service up to 20 men a day, and have their earnings taken from them. Having entered Japan illegally, they cannot turn to the authorities for help.

In theory, these women are only working until they can pay off the cost of smuggling them into Japan. Starting at around US$25,000, this can easily be increased on a whim of her “owner”. Even if they eventually pay it, many girls find themselves turned over to the police and deported.

Japan was recently chastised by the UN for ignoring the problem. There are a number of reasons for this inactivity. Japanese society prefers to overlook embarrassing subjects, while yakuza ties in the government and police also make it more difficult to catch the human traffickers.

• ‘30,000 Thai women forced into Japanese sex trade’
• ‘Hijacking the Fight Against AIDS’
• ‘Owed justice: Thai Women Trafficked into Debt Bondage in Japan’
  Detailed information from Human Rights Watch

Sarin is a nerve gas. It acts rapidly on anyone who touches or inhales it, causing rapid exhaustion of muscles and glands. Clear, colourless and tasteless, the victim does not know they are exposed until its effects begin. Starting with flu-like symptoms, exposure can quickly lead to respiratory failure and death.

By 8am, Japan’s image as the world’s safest country was shattered. Sarin had been released on three crowded trains. 12 people were killed and over 5,500 suffered serious medical complications in the country’s worst ever terrorist attack.

Shoko Asahara

On the 27th of February, Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, was sentenced to death for these and 15 other killings. The verdict came 8 years after his trial began, and his appeal could postpone punishment for another 10 years.

Half-blind since his birth in 1955, Chizuo Matsumoto attended specialist schools for children with sight problems. Former classmates claim that he used his partial advantage to bully and humiliate his blind peers.

He left school in 1977, and eventually found work as an acupuncturist. In the early 1980’s, he was arrested for selling spurious ‘health tonics’. One was found to be orange peel mixed with alcohol.

Adopting the name Asahara, he went to India and Nepal to study Buddhism and Hinduism. When he got back he started claiming he could fly and set up a school for yoga and meditation, which became Aum Shinrikyo (Aum Supreme Truth) in 1986.

Aum’s early days

Initially, Aum seemed very similar to Japan’s countless other cults: combining groovy Buddhist and Hindu beliefs with an unhealthy Nostradamus fixation. They believed in an inevitable Armageddon in which only Aum members would escape damnation.

Asahara, a PR genius, took advantage of Japan’s increasing alienation and insecurity, and people signed up fast. At its peak, there were 10,000 members in Japan, 30,000 in Russia, and smaller groups in Europe and the US.

Of the Japanese members, over 1000 renounced the outside world, gave Asahara everything they had, and joined one of his communes. Many of these were Japan’s brightest stars, graduates of the top universities who felt rejected by Japan’s conformist culture.

Living with Aum

We don’t have much reliable information about what happened in Aum. The Japanese tabloids (who have a flirtatious relationship with the truth) claim:

• Members paid to drink Asahara’s bathwater and blood.
• Asahara used his telepathic abilities to brainwash Aum members. This was the defence used (unsuccessfully) by some of those who stood trial.
• Some followers spent several hours a day wearing the ‘Perfect Salvation Cap’, which is special leather headpiece attached to a 6-volt battery. As well as keeping their heads warm, this helped them stay in telepathic contact with Asahara.
• Aum apartments featured rooms lined with tin foil ‘to keep out electro- magnetic waves’. That must have been a pain if you wanted to use your Perfect Salvation Cap.
• Female cult members were almost entirely attractive young women. To help them focus on spiritual enlightenment, Asahara coerced some into having sex with him. He was probably helped by the fact they weren’t allowed to have sex with anyone else.
• Aum was manufacturing LSD and using it in cult rituals. Asahara toyed with the idea of flying an LSD-loaded crop-duster over rush-hour Tokyo.

The beginning of the end

In 1988, a lawyer called Tsutsumi Sakamoto established a coalition of people whose relatives were Aum members. This group was planning to sue the cult by proving that members did not stay of their own free will, but were threatened with gruesome punishments if they left.

On November 3rd, 1989, Sakamoto’s house was broken into, and he was injected with a deadly drug and beaten to death, along with his wife and infant son.

In 1990, 25 Aum members ran in the Japanese parliamentary elections, including Asahara himself. Despite an imaginative campaign featuring white-robed ‘cheerleaders’ with blue elephant-shaped headgear, none of them were elected.

Evidently pissed off, Asahara threw out the groovy stuff. Deciding that the people of Japan (who had rejected him so resoundingly) were already lost, he preached more and more about killing innocents as a short-cut to salvation.

This scared a lot of his formerly faithful acolytes, and Aum used increasingly heavy-handed methods to control them. Sadistic punishments were introduced for those who questioned a superior or tried to leave, including enforced LSD use, sexual humiliation, imprisonment and torture.

Over 40 former members are unaccounted for, and the police believe they were killed in these rituals. Meanwhile, Aum had been stockpiling liquid sarin.

In 1994, a large amount of the deadly chemical was released in Matsumoto, a small town north of Tokyo. Seven people died and 144 became seriously sick.

Many people became suspicious of Aum, and the authorities made plans to search their top secret headquarters. Sensing that his time was passing, and having tested sarin in Matsumoto, Asahara hit Tokyo at its heart.

Aleph: Aum’s reincarnation?

In January 2000, Aum was relaunched under the name Aleph. Although it publicly renounces the violence of it predecessor, Aleph is viewed with extreme suspicion by the press and public, who believe that members still follow Asahara’s teachings.

Aleph owns ten companies in Japan, mainly in the software industry. It claims to be using the profits to help those affected by the Tokyo sarin attack. Even if the police weren’t constantly monitoring them, it seems unlikely they will injure Japan so dramatically again.

“The conditions that created Aum – the straitjacketed education system and the lack of creative outlets in society – are the same as before,” says Yoshio Arita, an expert on cults. “There’s nothing to prevent other groups like Aum from appearing.”

• Aleph home page
  Very creepy. Stare into the mouth of the beast.
• BBC Profile: Shoko Asahara
• Archive of articles about Aum and Asahara
• Aum in the News

In Japan, more than 4000 men are arrested each year for groping on public transport.

Police crackdown

The mid-1990s brought a nationwide police crackdown on train gropers. Plain-clothes police officers were assigned to the worst affected trains during rushhour. Advertising campaigns gave advice to women who thought they were being molested: to thrust the offending hand in the air and yell “Chikan!” (“Groper!”).

Unfortunately, this hasn’t emboldened many Japanese women. Surrounded by strangers, most women would rather pretend nothing unusual is happening than create a scene. Gropers exploit this, and pick their victims carefully.

Some of the “victims” aren’t so innocent, and false accusations of groping are increasing. The shame associated with chikan makes it possible for especially enterprising young women to blackmail fellow train users.

Faced with a hysterically shrieking woman, most men are willing to be led to the nearest ATM and part with large sums of money (US$3000 isn’t uncommon).

Women Only Carriages

An obvious solution to the problem is to introduce a “Gropers Only” carriage, and then the randy little tykes might fondle each other to death.

Instead, “Women Only” carriages have been introduced at peak times on the most crowded lines. A guard is usually present to enforce this, politely telling any man who fails to read the pink sign to get in a different carriage with all the other perverts.

Generally, this has alleviated the problem, but there has been an unexpected side- effect. Any woman who finds herself outside the rosy sanctum of the “Women Only” car is viewed as fair game. After all, if she didn’t want her intimate parts mauled, she wouldn’t be there!

The behaviour of women in the safe zone has also drawn complaints. Momentarily freed from the rigid sexist expectations of Japanese society, a carriage of OLs can adjust their make-up and prattle away on their phones as much as they like, drawing complaints from other passengers.

The Groper’s Brotherhood

Meanwhile, what of the gropers? Who’s thinking about the degenerates? All they ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being. On the buttocks, or maybe on the breasts. Is that a crime?

Fortunately, help is at hand. You need look no further than Shigeru Oohori: “elite salariman”, loving husband/father, and head of “Chikan Tomo-No-Kai” (“The Groper’s Brotherhood”). He has assembled a 40-strong group of deviants from all walks of life, including teachers, government officials and a Buddhist priest (Buddhism seems to have an ambiguous attitude to molesting strangers in public places). Not just any horny freak can join though: a black belt 5th dan groper is expected to cop 100 sleazy feels a month.

According to Oohori, gropers come in two main categories. “Orthodox” gropers, about 80% of the fondling population, get their kicks from the girl’s look of disgust and embarrassment. The “Technician” is a rarer and far more admirable breed. With practiced technique, they subtly titillate their gropees into a state of subconscious arousal.

This chikan elite meet once a month in a Tokyo café to touch base and play with some new ideas. Over the internet, they warn each other of police crack-downs on certain train-lines. They even run practical mauling workshops, hiring girls to be bothered by them on crowded commuter trains, and offering criticism and tips.

There are special ” image clubs” (imekura) catering for chikan, with tailor-made rooms built to look like subway carriages, and prostitutes paid extra to act like unsuspecting commuters.

In the words of their sensei: “Groping was once a solitary activity, but now thanks to the Internet it’s become easy to link up with people who share the same kind of sexual interests.”

• ‘Japanese man publicly fights grope charge’ (The Christian Science Monitor)
• ‘Tokyo trains tackle groping problem’ (BBC News)
• How to Protect Yourself from Chikan
• ‘Minimising molestation’
• ‘Japan Tries Women-Only Train Cars to Stop Groping’ (ABC News)
• The His and Hers Subway
• ‘Women-Only Cars on Commuter Trains Cause Controversy in Japan’ (Kansas City Star)
• ‘Chikan-ery’ (ConbiniBento.com)
• ‘Grope-free commute’ (Salon.com)
• ‘Japan Out To Catch Train Gropers’ (AP)
• Molested girls pay back perverts (MDN WaiWai)
  “When Sunday Mainichi interviewed 30 high school girls in Shibuya, every single one admitted to being attacked by these predatory perverts”