Notes On The Yakuza Lobby: How The Underworld Asserts Itself In The Political Sphere
Because of Japan's personal privacy protection laws, created by the LDP to discourage magazine reporters for writing about their scandals and organized crime ties, I'm limited in what I can…
Coffee & Cigarettes Together At Last : Speak Lark, Drink up
Any hard-boiled journalist or cop will tell you that coffee and cigarettes go well together. So I guess it was a stroke of marketing genius for Philip Morris to team…
Japan’s Media, Mega-Ad Agencies, & Nuclear Industry: A Lethal Combination?
It is generally considered that the media is the Fourth Estate. Their primary function is to monitor and observe the activities of the other great powers in society, however some…
The Town of Living Buddha Statues (仏像のまち) High School, Buddhist Iconography, Magic &Teen Love
It's the story of Sorato, a high school student who's deceased father was a sculptor of Buddhist images (仏師/busshi）and seems to have passed his unusual talent on to poor Sorato-kun.…
Life With Zero Electricity: Naoto Matsumura in Fukushima, “it’s Possible”
Tokyo – September 11/ 2012 was the one year and six months anniversary of the big Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster, followed by the Fukushima nuclear accident. The nuclear disaster…
The Trial Of Minoru Tanaka: The high cost of investigative journalism in Japan & “the nuclear mafia”
An article which appeared last year in the December 16 issue of “Kinyobi” weekly written by Minoru Tanaka, resulted in a punitive lawsuit against him. The article called the head of a…
Japan’s Human Trafficking Problems Not Resolved: US State Department
The government has not identified a forced labor victim in Japan in 18 years, despite substantial evidence of abuses against workers in the Industrial Trainee and Technical Internship Program. Japan…
Yakuza Go On The Record About 3/11 Relief Efforts In July Fanzine (実話時代）
"The Inagawa-kai is a yakuza group and our family motto is one word 我慢 (gaman/endurance). This is a time when that motto is very important--in the face of a rain…