His real name is Akira Hareruya, and he doesn’t do this for fun. When his professional boxing career finished, Hareruya used his earnings to set up his own electrical contracting company. However, he was much worse at business than at boxing. Japan’s economic problems hit him hard, leaving him with personal debts of more than ¥200 million (roughly £1m or $2m). Rather than beat himself up about it, a friend gave him the novel idea of letting others do it.

Hareruya’s odd job briefly made him a bit of a Tokyo tourist attraction, and he even published an autobiography, ‘Nagurareya’, which sold 10,000 copies. Unfortunately, this didn’t raise enough money to clear his debts (which had inexplicably risen), and even caused problems at home. Hareruya had somehow managed to conceal his side-job from his family until they saw a feature about him on TV. This caused some surprise and distress, understandably.

• Week in the life: Hi, I’m Akira and I’ll be your human punchbag today (The Independent, 1999)
• Big in Japan: Nagurareya (Metropolis)
• Tokyo Talk: Knock out (Metropolis)

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”

The young man might be known to the girl and her family. Also, in a seasonal agricultural economy, farmers might have a number of laborers sleeping under their roofs sometimes, knowing that their daughters might be targets for yobai. In some cases, groups of friends would travel miles to neighboring villages, where the embarrassment of capture wouldn’t be as great, and each target a different girl.

In many cases, yobai would be conducted entirely with the knowledge of the girl’s parents. In fact, it was sometimes a prelude to marriage - parents would turn a blind eye the first few nights a young man secretly visited their daughter, but then he would be “caught”, and a more public courtship would begin.

Yobai tactics

• Take your clothes off before you even sneak into the house. In Fukuoka, it was once illegal to attack a naked intruder, as he was probably engaged in yobai rather than theft.
• Keep it quiet, even if socially questionable acts are required. One technique to avoid detection was to urinate along the bottom of doors to prevent them squeaking as they were slid open.
• Practice safe sex. A night crawling man would often cover his face with a cloth, protecting himself and his chosen lady from embarrassment if she rejected his advances.

Yobai clubs

Reportedly, yobai still happens in the more remote areas of Japan, and there seems to be nostalgia for the practice elsewhere. The seduction of sleeping women is a popular theme of Japanese pornography, and some image clubs offer special yobai services - providing prostitutes who pretend to be asleep while the client slips into their futon.

• ‘Bonk to the future: Business booming at old-style cathouses’ (MDN WaiWai)
  “Night crawling, the Japanese practice of stealing into a sleeping lady’s boudoir for purposes of making clandestine whoopie, has roots in remote antiquity.”
• YOBAI lit. NIGHT CREEPING (Sex Glossary)
  “Before the advent of Love Hotels, Karaoke Boxes, personal vehicles, and other such sites of sexual liaison, a young man would have little choice but to visit the bedroom of his lover in a practice known as Yobai.”

In many parts of the world, this attitude is abhorred. In others, it prevails beneath the surface. In Japan, there’s a whole industry dedicated to it. Alibi services (”alibi-ya” or “aribai-ya”) do exactly what you’d expect - help people keep their dirty little secrets.

Alibi services for sex workers

Working in Japan’s sex trade, although potentially lucrative, offers a variety of disadvantages. The folks back home might be ashamed, it may be more difficult to rent a flat or obtain credit, and potential husbands and their families might disapprove. For the sex worker who wants to keep her job a secret, alibi services offer bogus documentation to show she has a respectable job, and in some cases a special office phone number. Someone calling the number will find their way through to a “colleague” of the young lady, who explains that she has popped out of the office and takes a message. Family happy, flat rented, eligible young executive smitten.

Alibi services and lying to your partner

The constant scrutiny of a domineering spouse can really cramp your style, especially when all you want is a quiet evening in a love hotel with your secretary, or a good cruise around the local red-light district. Thanks to alibi services, you don’t need to make up transparent lies on-the-spot, you can construct fully-documented, watertight lies instead:

A: Hello darling

B: Why are you late? Where have you been?

A: I’m sorry I missed dinner, sweetheart. My train broke down.

B: Nonsense. You’ve been cavorting with that little floozy in some seedy hotel!

A: No, I’m telling the truth. Look, they gave me a special letter of apology.

B: I still don’t believe you!

A: Here’s the card of the stationmaster I spoke to. If you really don’t trust me, give him a call…

The souvenir shops in large train stations perform a related service. As well as the local trinkets and specialities one might expect, some shops also offer souvenirs from other parts of the country. Strange as this might seem, it’s amazingly handy for people who spend the weekend doing naughty things while their partners think they’re on business in another city.

• Sex, lies and alibis (WaiWai)
  
• ‘Can I have Michael call you back?’
  

Grown in glass boxes

In the 1980s, a farm in Shikoku started doing things differently. By growing watermelons in specially-made glass boxes, they forced the melons into a cubic shape. Leaping to worldwide attention, the square watermelon became a potent symbol of Japan’s appetite for novelty and innovation. The foreign media were captivated with Japan’s latest technological oddity, so much so that they greatly exaggerated the popularity of the square melons. In fact, the market for the succulent cubes is very small indeed, partly because they are prohibitively expensive, costing at least 10,000 yen (around £50 or $100).

Square watermelons as gifts

Square watermelons appeal mainly to wealthy Japanese people needing an impressive gift. Gift-giving is an important part of socialising in Japan, and beautifully-presented fruit is very popular. The usefulness of a gift is not nearly as important as its expense and the extravagance of its packaging. In fact, impermanence is usually more appropriate - beautiful gifts which doesn’t last, like food or flowers, appeal strongly to the Japanese sense of aesthetics.

Practical benefits

Besides their curiosity value, square watermelons have some genuine practical benefits. They are easier to stack and package than the round fruit, and less likely to be damaged in transit. Reaching the customer’s home, the carefully-chosen dimensions of the melons allows them to slot easily into a standard refrigerator compartment. The flat base also prevents the angular fruit from rolling around when being cut. These advantages hardly seem to justify such an extravagant product, but practical concerns of space and convenience are extremely important in urban Japan, where there is a pressing need to use the limited space efficiently.

Having said that, practicality is hardly the point, is it? Realising how profitable novelty can be, farmers have since developed pyramid-shaped varieties. These don’t get so big, and they aren’t allowed to mature property - they’re candy, but only for the eye. They’re are also much more difficult to stack, so we’re almost back where we started. Other versions, including melons shaped like gourds and bottles, are in the pipeline.

Foreign varieties

Despite the intrigue surrounding square watermelons in the rest of the world, the sheer expense of the fruit seemed to make it unlikely for it to spread outside Japan. However, in August 2006, UK supermarket chain Tescos announced their own, cheaper line of square watermelons. The melons are grown in Brazil, using cases made of wood instead of glass.

• Square fruit stuns Japanese shoppers (BBC News, June 2001)
  “Japan has again shown off one of its greatest innovations - square watermelons.”
• Japan corners the market on square fruit (CNN.com, June 2001)
  “The square boxes are the exact dimensions of Japanese refrigerators, allowing full-grown watermelons to fit conveniently and precisely onto refrigerator shelves.”
• Square melons on the way (Daily Mail, August 2006)
  “Tesco has developed a new square watermelon which can be sliced like a loaf of bread.”
• Odd Innovations: Geometric Fruit
  “Now in a complete twist, comes the completely opposite problem, the pyramid shaped watermelon. Good luck stacking these things!”
• Pyramid-shaped watermelons (Pink Tentacle)
  “Each melon is cultivated inside a hand-made acrylic box from a very young age.”

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”

During the Edo period, when salt was much more scarce, the people of Japan’s remote Izu Islands would save salt by preserving the fish they caught in a salty soup (kusaya-eki). The fish would then be laid out to dry in the sun.

When bigger catches came in, the same solution would be used salt to preserve multiple batches of fish. Although odorous, the smelly fish it produced came to be highly valued, and the same batch of kusaya-eki can be used for centuries, increasing in flavour and odour over time.

• Kusaya (Wikipedia)
  
• Kusaya
  In Japanese only, but plenty of pictures
  
• Niijima Kusaya
  Japanese only

It follows Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano), a masochistic yakuza hitman, who is searching for his missing boss. His motivation is not so money, or revenge - it’s that his boss happens to be the preferred sadist in his pain games. In his quest, he finds out about another hitman, the powerful schitzophrenic “Ichi”, who might be able to provide some answers along with the pain Kakihara needs.

The array of gore is disturbingly impressive, including hot grease, involuntary piercing, severed nipples, several rapes, complete vivisection, and particulrly memorable scene in which a gangster is tortured as he hangs from the ceiling on hooks.

As part of the promotion for the film, sick bags were given to the audience when it showed at the Toronto International Film Festival.

• Ichi the Killer (Wikipedia)
• Ichi the Killer (Movie Martyr)
  “Every time Miike pushes us farther than we thought we could go, it ratchets it up a level by either growing even more violent, or by disarming our shock with a bit of morbid humor.”
• Ichi the Killer (2002) Movie Review (Beyond Hollywood)
  “For many, this is the quintessential Miike film, a hyper stylised visceral barrage of over the top gore, torture and rape, which hangs loosely on a threadbare skeleton of inconsequential plotting and that boasts a madman’s sense of logic.”
• Ichi the Killer (Snowblood Apple)
  “Frankly, Quentin Tarantino would have given his right arm to have made this film”
• Ichi the Killer (KFC Cinema)
  “Already infamous for it’s extreme display of violence and gore, Ichi proceeds to shock and disturb audiences and bring them to a whole new level of queasiness.”

He didn’t know it, but highlights of all this were being broadcast to millions every Sunday on TV, and he was being constantly watched via a massively popular internet webcam. This was Denpa Shonen-teki Kensho Seikatsu (”Airwave Boy’s Prize Competition Life”), a segment of the frequently cruel comedy show Denpa Shonen (”Airwave Boy”).

The only clothes Nasubi ever won were scanty items of women’s lingerie that didn’t even fit, so he spent the entire time completely naked. If he actually won anything dignified to wear from the thousands of competitions he entered, it seems it was intercepted by the show’s producers. In a rare concession to taste and broadcasting standards, Nasubi’s bare groin was concealed with a garish cartoon eggplant for TV and web broadcasts.

Much of the show’s entertainment value came from his reactions to the prizes he won - from the sublime (winning a big bag of rice, or toilet paper after 10 months without) to the ridiculous (drooling over the TV he had just won before realising, with understandable dismay, that there was nowhere to plug it in).

Nasubi quickly became a cult figure, and attracted massive media attention. Worried that the media had worked out where he was, and that he might find out he was being watched by millions, producers moved him to a new cell in another location. His surprise at waking up with a flashlight in his eyes and being bundled across town was only exceeded by his rage when he realised they had forgotten to bring his bag of rice. His hysterical reaction to this made people think he had really started to crack.

Incredibly, after being released from his prison, Nasubi agreed to repeat the ordeal in Korea, where he wouldn’t even have the benefit of understanding the language:

“I suffered mentally every day. I felt trapped between sanity and madness, and I had no idea that everyone was watching my naked body all this time. It shouldn’t be allowed. But, to be fair, they’ve just given me hot miso soup and a bowl of rice and pickled plums, so I’ve agreed to go to South Korea and repeat the challenge.”

• We miss Denpa Shonen (Watashi to Tokyo)
  “He had to live by getting everything through offers and winning competitions, getting prizes from magazine and newspaper competitions until things he got value more than 1 million yen.”
• Nasubi (Quirky Japan)
  “NTV’s producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn’t have treated poor Nasubi the way they did.”
• Big in Japan: Nasubi (Metropolis)
  “Nasubi would cavort naked around the tiny apartment with a computer-generated eggplant covering his embarrassment”
• Nasubi’s Homepage (Japanese only)

Different meanings

Most traditional maneki neko are white with black and orange blotches, which is considered the luckiest combination. Other colors have special powers of their own, like black (wards off evil - popular with women wishing to avoid stalkers), red (keeps sickness and other evilness at bay), and pink (brings love).

A right paw up is supposed to attract wealth, while a raised left paw draws people (customers or visitors). Left paw maneki nekos are also common in bars and other places that sell alcohol - left-handedness is associated with strong drinkers in Japan.

Origins

Maneki nekos first began appearing in the beginning of the Meiji era (late 19th century). Noone knows how or why the tradition started, but there are numerous theories:

• When the Meiji government decided to clean up Japan’s sex districts by banning overtly sexual advertising and signage, brothels decided to use alluring kitties instead of welcoming ladies.
• The figures were produced in honour of a cat that saved a lord by beckoning him away from a tree just before it was struck by lightning.
• A wooden version was carved to console a courtesan whose cat had been beheaded by an over-zealous samurai.
• Poverty forced an old woman to give up her cat. Later, the cat visited her in a dream, and inspired her to make clay figurines, which she sold to make her fortune.
• A ramen stall gained an edge over its competitor by putting the little cat in its window.
• The cat might not be beconing, but cleaning itself. According to an old Chinese saying, “If a cat washes its face, a visitor will come.”

• Big in Japan: Maneki Neko (Metropolis)
  “There are almost as many legends surrounding its origin as there are figurines.”
• Maneki Neko (Wikipedia)
  “A frequent attribution to several Japanese emperors is that one day the luminary passed by a cat, which seemed to wave to him.”
• Maneki Neko Club
  “This is the home page for the people who love Maneki Neko.”
• Maneki Neko the Lucky Beckoning Cat
• My Maneki-Neko (Lucky Cat)
  Various maneki neko collections, with pictures