Japan’s “YAKUZA RECOVERY”
Happy days are here again. The “YAKUZA RECOVERY” is gonna bring back butt-boy tattoos. Meh.
Yakuza on the rise again in Japan
ABC Radio. The World Today – 21 May 2006
SHANE MCLEOD: After 15 years in the economic doldrums, things may be finally looking up for Japan. …For Japan’s organised crime gangs, the Yakuza, the return of good times applies to them as well.
Raisuke Miyawaki is a former head of the National Police Agency’s organised crime division.
RAISUKE MIYAWAKI: The Yakuza have always had a strong connection to the Japanese real estate business in performing with Jiage – obtaining separately owned properties through coercion, and joining with them into a single developed property.
SHANE MCLEOD: Mr Miyawaki is known as the man who labelled Japan’s economic downturn as the ‘yakuza recession’. He pointed out that the bad times had been more prolonged than they might have otherwise been, because of Yakuza links to many of the bad debts being carried by Japan’s banks. Now, with the dark years apparently in the past, things are looking up, and looking like a Yakuza recovery.
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Oh great. Just what I was looking forward too. More organized crime.
During the last economic Bubble of the 80s, I had all sorts of run in will the tattooed butt-boys, the Yakuza. Hell, I even walked into a Japanese drive-by shooting back in the Bubble Days, 1989…. I rounded a corner at a pachiko parlor and walked into the haze from a full-clip burst of a silenced Mac-10. The chimpira hard emptied a full-clip, 30 rounds into the windows of the brand-new “rival” pachiko parlor. His eyes were closed—very spray and pray. There in Komagome Toshima-ku, obviously the new pachinko guys had not made accomodations with the other pachiko parlors in the area.
Nope. The Yakaza Recovery is not something I’m happy about.
Anyway, you can also listen to audio of the above broadcast radio story in MP3 (or crappy Real Audio and vile Windows Media).
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