Jake Adelstein

The U.S. Department of Treasury on Wednesday announced sanctions against Japan’s third-largest crime syndicate the Inagawa-kai and its leaders.

As arrests mount in the Olympus accounting fraud scandal — the FBI took a Singaporean banker into custody today — Michael Woodford, the former CEO of the Japanese optics giant who blew the whistle discusses with The Atlantic Wire how nearly a billion dollars disappeared and the true hero who brought the scheme to light.

The world knows so little about the inner workings of the North Korean regime that the appearance of Kim Jong-Il's former sushi chef at a press conference held here at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan — well, it was bound to get scrutinized for shreds of new information.

Roughly one in five Japanese companies shaken down by the yakuza ended up paying them off, according to a study released by Japan’s National Police Agency.

Tadamasa Goto, former boss of the Yamaguchi-gumi Goto-gumi crime group, has agreed to pay ¥110 million, or $1.4 million, to settle the lawsuit filed by the family of Kazuoki Nozaki, who was murdered by members of the organization in 2006.

These days the price of a standard civilian hit-job can run as high as $2 million. That’s not the price to get the job done―that’s the price if one of your underlings gets caught. The whole inflationary spiral started with one dumb yakuza stiffing McDonald’s on the price of a cheeseburger in Kyoto a few years ago. 

Tadahiro Matsushita, the Minister of Financial Services, was found dead at his home today, on World Suicide Prevention Day in what police are investigating as a suicide.

Japan’s prosecutors officially began investigating Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and its former top executives on criminal charges today in relation to the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima following last year's March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Japan's national Diet approved the revisions of the Organized Crime Group Countermeasures Law (改正暴力団対策法) last Thursday which allows police to designate organized crime groups as “extremely dangerous” and then arrest any member of that group, without issuing a cease and desist order, if he (or she), makes unreasonable or illegal demands towards ordinary citizens.

An independent Japanese commission that investigated last year's nuclear disaster at Fukushima released its findings on Thursday, putting the blame for the disaster squarely on the shoulders of the Japanese government and the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).