Hi Malcolm,
Thank you for the story. Japanese police are ineffective as far as the yakuza are concerned.
I was once headhunted to work for a Japanese real estate company in an Asian country selling golf club licenses to Japanese in Singapore but the golf club had a poor setup. The Patron of the golf club had been twice accused of murder, but was let off by the sympathetic Asian gov't he lived in. (In addition I was trying to sell these memberships when this Asian country, post-Soros, had imposed punitive taxes on capital gains to keep money from leaving. Ask any Singaporean today and they don't rate this Asian country highly for investment, it was the same then). I had actually hired a private investigator in Kobe who came back with the report "Your prospective boss is on record for three cases of threats to individual property owners-but other than that the investigation was inconclusive". I took the job on that basis-my mistake.
Anyway, the golf course wasn't going well as noone wanted to golf at the same time as this Patron was, diminishing the prospective value of a membership. I was asked by my boss (he had short curly hair and a short pinky too - remember the movie Black Rain?) to bribe the manager of a large Japanese bank in Singapore to push memberships on his staff. What was the name of the bank in your post? No, not that one. Anyway, I refused. Three days later a one-way plane ticket to Tokyo was sitting on my desk when I arrived in the morning excusing me from my duties. I had to hire a Japanese-American lawyer in Tokyo to extract myself from my position, working in sales for the real estate arm of the second largest crime syndicate in Japan, who, by agreement, will henceforth go unnamed.
I have personal experience with what you describe however, as with Iraqi prisoner abuse, a few rotten apples spoil the bunch. I am just wondering if it is logical to assign Japan a low chance of recovery, or is Japan as well-positioned as Korea, Australia or Hong Kong to benefit from growth in China and India while the US and perhaps Western Europe continue their secular bear market? |
