For Jake Adelstein's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Japan is for the most part a safe country. Gun-control laws are so strict in this East Asian nation of more than 120 million that fatalities remained in single digits last year. And yet we still feel a palpable sense of relief when we make ...
Is this a case of deja vu on the dancefloor? In 2012, police in Osaka started raiding clubs for violating the adult entertainment business law, popularly known as fūeihō. The law forbids dancing after midnight. When pressed on the matter, police officials said they were simply ...
Director Hirokazu Kore-eda recently won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for "Shoplifters," a critically acclaimed family drama that was partially inspired by real-life events. It attempts to depict a slice of life in which people are struggling to make ends meet, a set of circumstances ...
Everyone loves a tale of redemption. Unfortunately, this isn't going to be one of them. In a previous column, I introduced a man who had gone from being a greedy, violent, self-centered boss of an organized crime syndicate to become a compassionate male nurse. It's ...
Netflix last month released a yakuza film starring Jared Leto titled "The Outsider" to critical disdain. And as much as I expected to hate the movie, I didn't. It's portrayal of the world of organized crime in Japan after World War II is not ...
A new type of transfer fraud in which perpetrators take advantage of their victims' fear of prosecution has sparked concern among law enforcement officials in recent weeks. The Public Prosecutor's Office and the Metropolitan Police Department have issued a statement warning people about a "wire ...
Crime involving cryptocurrencies appears to be on the rise at a time when the total number of reported crimes in Japan is falling. The theft of 523 million NEM coins from Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck Inc. on Jan. 26 has brought this issue to a ...
Fuji Television screened a popular TV series in 2009 called "Ninkyo Herupa" ("Yakuza Helper") that focused on the life of a former gangster who landed a job at a nursing facility for the elderly. Over the course of the series, he learned to follow the ...
A number of theories have been put forward on the reasons behind the 2015 split of the country's largest crime syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi. Some say the factions that left the organization and formed a group called the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi were egged on by the police, ...
Japan's organized crime syndicates appear to be embroiled in something of a power struggle. Yoshinori Oda, who heads a splinter group that left the Yamaguchi-gumi called the Ninkyo Yamaguchi-gumi, was attacked as he left his house in Kobe on Sept. 12. Oda's bodyguard, Yuhiro Kusumoto, ...
