Japan Subculture Research Center

If you’ve read Tokyo Vice, you’ll know that members of the Yamaguchi-gumi Goto-gumi were long suspected of killing a real estate consultant,  Kazuoki Nozaki,  in a dispute over a building…

Tokyoites are no virgin brides; we know a good pole dance when we see one. Or we thought we did, until the International Pole Championship rolled into town last year…

A woman who had gone for a trim at a hair salon in Tochigi prefecture Monday and agreed to a massage ended up with a handful more than she bargained…

The Korean custom of eating dogs is something that on occasion mistakenly gets loaded on to the Japanese. To the French and Dutch in the summer of 1981, mention of…

Just some quick news: Kiyoshi Takayama, second in command of the Yamaguchi-gumi, was arrested Thursday during a raid of his home in Kobe. Read here and here. More information to…

Telltale teeth marks from a feisty victim pinned a Sapporo man on charges of indecent assault, despite his denial of the crime during questioning. The 30-year-old man is suspected of…

Jake Adelstein’s epic tale of a foreign cub reporter’s climb Japan’s underbelly is now available in Hungarian! We can’t decipher anything about it without the aid of Google Translate, but…

Police arrested the manager of a Shinjuku “delivery health” prostitution business Thursday after they received a call from a customer complaining that the services offered were a rip-off. The 35-year-old…

Two men were arrested for impersonating yakuza and threatening staff at the grand sumo tournament held in May at Kokugikan in Ryogoku. The two men, ages 39 and 45 and…

As many who are up on their Japan news probably saw, there was an explosion Monday morning at an office owned by the Yamaguchi-gumi affiliated Yamaken-gumi. Thus far, the Mainichi…