(upbeat music)
Masahiro Nakai is a member of SMAP.
And I always forget what it stands for.
Smuddy,
masculine, you just say random words.
I know it’s sports,
music, maybe, and people.
SMAP, Japanese band names
don’t tend to make a lot of sense.
SMAP was the biggest boy band ever.
They’ve lasted in Japan for
like 30 years, maybe more.
They’re all in their 50s now.
They started when they were teens.
There was a time when I
came to Japan in the early
2000s when there was
literally a SMAP hosted show.
So a member of SMAP hosted a
show on every channel on Japanese TV.
So you could switch
channels and actually just
see like, oh, SMAP member
hosting a cooking show.
SMAP member hosting a chat show.
SMAP member hosting a clip
show or something like that.
And they all had like
six, seven shows each.
So these guys were like
massive money makers in Japan.
So they’re all insanely rich.
Masahiro Nakai is one of them.
And there was a dinner arranged.
It was Fuji executives arranged a dinner.
And it was a whole bunch
of people, him and a woman.
And then something happened.
And that’s the scandal.
The scandal is something happened.
We don’t know what happened technically.
But we do know that
he paid 90 million yen to
the woman to have her
not say anything about it.
And she’s not saying anything
about it because it includes an NDA.
And then I’m assuming
if she says something,
she’ll lose some of that
money, if not all of it.
That’s problematic in itself.
But that’s, she’s decided she wants
to keep the money and stay quiet.
We’re not judging her at all.
But this was, the arrangement
was a whole bunch of people
coming and then they all
started canceling canceling,
canceling, and then it was
just two of them at the table.
It’s clearly a setup.
It’s like this is a romantic
comedy or sitcom kind
of premise for an episode.
Like it doesn’t work in those shows
because it’s deceptive in its own way.
So why do they think it’s
going to work in real life?
This just makes me
think of like rich people.
They get to a point where they’re so rich.
They actually don’t think things through.
They don’t understand how
the real world works anymore.
So something happens.
And he’s paid 90 million
yen to keep a quiet.
And he kind of got
away with it for about six
months or a year but
then this story broke.
And then all these people
are like, is it acceptable
for someone to commit
some sort of sexual assault?
Pay a lot of money.
And then just continue his career on TV.
Is that morally acceptable?
And everyone’s like, no,
sponsors certainly didn’t think so.
So all his sponsors pulled their ads.
So we’re talking Nissan
Toyota, which to me?
Okay, conflict of interest.
If you do ads, you do
ads for Nissan and Toyota.
I assume in both ads you’re
saying that this car is amazing.
I guess it is technically possible
for two different car
companies to have amazing cars.
But it’s almost like
you should just pick one.
The Toyota is the amazing car.
Or the Nissan is the amazing car.
And that’s the one I support.
It feels kind of like double dipping.
Yeah, I don’t know how I feel about that.
It’s almost like, again, I believe there
should be some sincerity behind what you do.
I guess I’ve never been
in this situation where like,
Toyota is like, here’s a
million dollars to do ads.
And then Nissan comes over like, we’ll
also give you a million dollars to do ads.
And I’m like, why would I say no?
I don’t care about either
car ’cause I have BMW.
‘Cause I’m stupid, rich.
I should have chosen a better car
than a BMW, but we’ll just let that one go.
A Shcedo, which is a makeup company.
7-11, a life insurance company.
50 companies pulled
their ads that involved him
because they didn’t wanna be
connected to this sex scandal.
And this is kind of how
Japanese media goes.
Like these people, we know they’re
all doing dirty, gross, awful things.
But when it comes out, everyone pulls
their funding and you get sort of canceled.
Fuji TV said it did an internal
investigation and found nothing wrong.
Fuji TV, the executives
of which set up this meal
where all the other people canceled,
where all the other people disappeared
and just left, Nakayin, this
unnamed woman together,
they found that there was no
wrong doing in that situation.
Like, oh, it’s just a circumstance.
And this is one of the interesting things
about the whole idea
of internal investigations.
The people doing the internal investigation
work for the executive who do the thing
that set up the situation
that caused the sex scandal.
A week later, Nakayin retires.
So I, this started about two weeks
ago, and I was reading the stories,
but I didn’t wanna do it until I
actually saw like the actual fallout.
Does nothing happen,
which is actually very
possible because he was
that rich in that famous.
Or does he end up quitting or
does he end up trying to fight it?
‘Cause there was one guy in the comedy duo.
He sued for defamation and then dropped
when he had got caught up in a sex scandal.
And I was interested to
see if he went that route.
All TV shows and sponsors
ended their contracts.
That’s how he said it.
He did a press conference
he said, like I’m gonna retire.
All my TV shows and sponsors
have ended their contract.
So basically he just got fired
from everything by everybody.
Because, and then he
trying to justify his position,
he said, because the
money was paid and an NDA
was signed, he’s not
gonna say what happened.
And he fully expects the
woman not to say what
happened, which
again, feels really gross.
What, of course, he’s
obviously a really gross guy.
That’s how we got into this
situation in the first place.
There is a sidebar here of if
you are one of the most famous
dudes in a country and you’re super rich,
is it that hard for you to get a girl?
Like, I don’t know, there’s
gotta be a layer here
that I don’t understand
as a normal poor person.
Because if I really, really wanted to,
I could put a little effort into myself
and I could go out and I could probably
charm a person into spending time with me.
I could be nice enough to people
to get them to spend time with me.
If you add a layer to that of,
I’m super rich and super famous,
I bet it would be very easy to
get someone to spend time with me.
So why does he have
to go through this process
tricking someone into having a meal
with him and then sexually assaulting them?
Then at the end of
his statement where he
said, okay, he’s all his
sponsors and TV shows
have ended their contracts
and he’s not going to say anything
because of the NDA, he said
he will deal with it sincerely,
which I think if you examine his immediately
in previous statements isn’t true.
Fujitv will have a third party investigation
now, the station lost 75 of its sponsor.
So half of its sponsors actually
said, we’re not even going to
have our commercials on Fujitv
at all because of this scandal.
And they were discussing if
the Fujitv president should quit,
which is last night when I was making my
notes and then when I woke up this morning,
I looked through my feed really quickly and
it said the Fujitv president has desired.
The Fujitv president has decided to retire.
Little while ago we had
a guy on in the story was
that he was using AI to
pretend to be a woman
so that he could get
people to subscribe to him
and give him money to give them
dating advice and financial advice.
And there was a very gray
area as to how illegal this is
because they were paying for this
advice and he was giving this advice
but he was using an avatar to sort of say,
I am this attractive woman but he wasn’t.
So is that fraud?
Because you get the thing you paid for,
it’s just not from the source
you thought it was coming from.
I think the actual fraud
was a lot of these guys
who were paying for this
service were hoping they could
get into direct contact with
this very attractive AI woman.
Well, a 29 year old posed as a
high school girl on dating apps.
He would arrange to meet with a person
so they’re thinking
they’re going to meet a high
school girl and say, you
shouldn’t molest minors.
How much sincerity can you show me?
The market rate is 3 million yen.
So he’s saying, I’ve caught
you, your pedophile of sorts.
You’re trying to attract
or date underage women,
pay me 3 million yen
and I’ll keep it quiet.
He gets arrested.
He gets arrested because
he talks to a guy who
says, give me 3 million
yen and that guy says,
I don’t have 3 million yen.
So he calls his family and
says, can I borrow 3 million yen?
And then the family’s
like, this seems really
suspicious and probably
our sons and idiot.
That’s why he’s calling us
and asking for 3 million yen.
So they immediately called the police
and say, look, we think our
son’s being scammed right now.
Can you go check it out?
They go check it out and
they immediately arrest this guy.
He says, when he’s being arrested,
I didn’t say anything about money.
My goal was to make them
aware of what they were doing.
So he’s a vigilante of sorts.
He’s a beacon in the night
trying to protect young women
by pretending to be a
young woman on a dating app
and meeting these guys who are
creepy and telling them, don’t be creepy.
I just went into sort of
mental detective mode.
The first thing I would do
is check his bank account
and see if he’s got any 3 million
yen deposits into his bank account.
And continuing with our impersonating
other people theme, a 17 year old son,
impersonating people seems
to be a younger man’s game.
I don’t remember how old the guy
pretending to be an AI woman was online.
I think he was a little older.
He wasn’t enough to be able to
afford some very good AI avatars.
But last guy, how old was he, 29?
Yeah, 29.
So maybe 30 is sort of
your impersonating age.
And when you get into your 50s, you just
go like, ape shit and do whatever you want.
That’s most of the stories
you’ve done recently.
This is a 17 year old guy.
So he’s just like learning how
to be the criminal he wants to be.
The 17 year old
impersonated a police officer
because he wanted
to interrogate people.
He had a forged ID.
He got sort of a police
uniform off the internet.
He forged his ID.
He got like a fake Tokyo one and then
changed it to say Kyoto where he lived.
He said, I admired the
coolness of the police officers.
I wanted to act as a real
detective and question people.
He tried questioning a group
of teens who were hanging out
in a park and he wanted
their names and addresses.
Now the thing, he’s 17 and
I’m going to go ahead and guess.
I haven’t actually seen his picture.
I bet he looks 17.
And then a group of
other like 15, 16 year olds
are going to look at him
and go, he’s not an adult.
He looks more like us
than he does like them.
I think this is in a real police officer.
This is an interesting point of view.
Go back to the old TV show.
Jump street toward 21 Jump
Street where the police officers
were pretending to be high school
students and going into high schools.
And it was very obvious that
everyone in this police unit
was at least in their
20s probably in their 30s.
It’s amazing that show went
for as many years as it did
because again, you would age
out of that role very quickly.
This guy has the opposite problem.
He probably doesn’t look old enough to be
a cop and these other kids sniffed him out
and they started calling
the police and going,
we think there’s a guy
who’s here trying to get
everyone’s names and
addresses interrogating everybody.
We don’t think he’s really a cop.
So he bought a fake handbook in
Tokyo and he modified it to Kyoto.
He had handcuffs.
He bought a baton and he had an air pistol.
So he had a gun.
He had all the gear with him.
He said he did it three or four times.
The Tokyo Sunshine Aquarium.
Four people have been arrested.
One is the current deputy
director and a former director
of the Sunshine Aquarium
because they inflated the number
of endangered tortoises so
they could get government funds.
The staff gave away 10 of the tortoises
to private people, which
you’re not supposed to do.
That’s illegal.
Because of the space they had was limited,
but they continued to claim to have
all the turtles they gave away tortoises.
I got to get it right tortoises.
They gave away, so they
were reported to having 23
when they only actually
had 13 because they
took 10 and gave them
away to private people.
From 2002 to last year,
2024, they collected 1.
89 million yen and you’re
like, well, that’s not really
worth doing that fraud
over like two million yen.
Yeah, that’s a fair sum of
money, but it’s not enough.
And then you also think over 20 years,
that’s not very much
money to actually be getting.
Is it worth actually doing
this fraud and taking the risk?
Well, they weren’t taking
the risk to make a profit.
They were making a profit, but
that’s not why they were doing it.
The motivation was very interesting.
They didn’t do it for money.
They did it to hide the
managers in an aptitude.
So basically, the manager hadn’t
planned for having this many tortoises.
It’s like, god damn, we
have too many tortoises.
Let’s give some of the
tortoises away, but I don’t know
what everyone to know
that I gave away the tortoises.
So let’s just pretend
we still have those
tortoises and collect
that government money.
Yeah, I get it’s illegal to collect money
for things for tortoises we don’t have,
but we just won’t tell anybody, and
it’ll be fine, and there’ll be no problem.
And it went on for 10 years.
So actually, in a way, he
kind of got away with it.
It was just going to catch
up with him eventually.
It is illegal to own and
breed the tortoises.
Some other people, some other private
people who have them, may also get arrested.
(upbeat music)
The guy’s 46 years old, so
he’s on that early ’50s cuss,
but that we’re now very,
very aware of an industry panel.
He calls an ambulance at 6.50 in the
evening, because he has stomach pain.
Perfectly reasonable, perfectly
reasonable reason to call an ambulance.
I have stomach pain.
I need to go to the hospital
and call an ambulance.
Paramedic show up, and he’s really drunk.
Now, that already puts a
question of suspicion on the fact
that he’s got a stomach pain,
because maybe you have a stomach pain
because you’ve been drinking all day,
and they look them over and they say,
you don’t need to go to the hospital,
but you maybe just need to just drink less.
The guy got angry
at them for saying this
to him, and he threatened
them with a knife.
He grabs a knife, he goes,
I have a stomach pain.
I have to go to the hospital.
You have to take him to the hospital.
And yeah, I’m drunk, but
that’s just an extra bonus.
So somehow he got away from
them, and got to their ambulance first.
I would like to know the scenario.
So I assume they went into his
house, or he met them out the front.
There’s, again, this is
not in the story, so this
is me speculating what
actually how this happened.
Because if I say I have a stomach pain on
him in my house, I will call the ambulance,
and then I will assume they
come to my house and maybe
come into my house and then
take me out into the ambulance.
So they’re in checking
him over in the house,
and then he gets angry at
threatening them with a knife.
So maybe if he got
between them in the door,
but he goes outside, he gets in
their ambulance, and he drives away.
So there’s drunk guy who had stomach pain,
thinks the best solution to the
problem he’s having right now
is to steal the ambulance
that came with him.
The paramedics, I’m assuming, are just
standing gobsmacked in his living room,
and then they pull out their
smartphone really slowly and
call the police and go, hey,
guy, just stole our ambulance.
Can you go get him, please?
They found him 100 meters
away in a drugstore parking lot.
Didn’t even get that far.
Now we are lucky because,
again, this guy drunk driving.
He’s very dangerous.
So him going 100 meters and just parking
is the best possible end to this story,
because he could have
gone out and gotten hurt.
When arrested, he said, I thought I
would go to the hospital by myself.
A 55-year-old, yeah, Kuzal
leader and three other people,
but I’m gonna focus on
the 55-year-old, yeah,
Kuzal leader because
he’s now fitting my criteria
for insane people
when they hit their 50s.
This isn’t so bad.
This actually just takes
some of the shine off
sort of the yeah, Kuzal
lifestyle, as I believe it,
because all my real information
about yeah, Kuzal is very small.
It’s all from media, it’s all from the 1980s
when there was a Yakuza boom in movies.
Every action movie, the
back guys were the Yakuza,
the Yakuza were very rich and
very sexy and they handled things.
And that might have been true in the 80s,
but now whenever we
see a Yakuza oriented
story, it’s always some
really low-level stuff.
Stuff that I would be like, I don’t
see this as being a worthwhile
crime to perform, and certainly
doesn’t live up to the legend
that is the Yakuza
family clan kind of lifestyle.
These guys came up with a plan.
Now there are private roads in Japan,
and there are public roads in Japan.
I actually have my house
has essentially a really long
driveway that is shared between
my house and the house next door.
That really long
driveway is a private road.
So I cannot deny access to my
neighbor because they technically own,
I think it’s the far side of the road
and I own the inside of the road.
That just came as part of our property.
And it’s to ensure that we
don’t block each other off,
which is a hint as to
where the story’s going.
But we could come to an agreement and put
a gate at the end of our very long driveway
and say no one’s allowed in
because this is private property.
Now I can’t deny them entry,
they can’t deny me entry,
but if we agreed on it together,
we absolutely could put a gate there.
If we wanted to, we could charge people
to use that pathway to come to our house.
We wouldn’t be able to get
mail anymore, things like that.
There would be other
problems that might arise.
It’s also not worth it.
This for an hour situation is just, if
there’s an earthquake or something
and there’s damage to that road, this
city doesn’t have to pay for that road.
That’s actually the reason they did it.
It’s not to benefit me.
It’s not so that I have this
extra land that has extra value.
It’s just so the city
doesn’t have to pay for it.
I don’t mind owning it.
I have earthquake insurance
and all the other insurance.
As since that’s my land, it’s included in
sort of owning my house and other stuff.
It’s a very interesting piece of
information about living in Japan.
I very technically own a tiny, tiny road.
These guys found a private road that
was part of a town for the last 50 years
and it was used by residents
of the town for a very long time.
And they thought, “Ha, here’s
a plant, let’s buy that road.
” They bought that road.
They put barricades on the end of the road
and they’re like, “You cannot use this road
“unless you pay us 10,000
yen a month per household.
” So if you had two cars and
you paid 10,000 yen per month,
you could actually two
people could use the car,
but you’d have to be able
to prove it to the Yakuza.
This is, in this case, a form of extortion,
but it is a very legal form of extortion
when it becomes the problem.
So how did the police
arrest and stop these guys?
Because they’ve taken what was technically
the private road that was being used
publicly, it was being used by the whole town.
And again, for the last 50 years,
so people didn’t even know
it was a private road properly.
They distributed written
notices to the residents
of the town, saying, “If
you want to use this road,
“it’s gonna cost 10,000 yen
per month to use this road.
” Now, that probably set off a bunch of
people who probably call the police and go,
“Is this okay, is this legal,
is this allowed to happen?
“Hey, I’m angry, this is a
road I need to use every day
“to get to work or
something like that.
” They could not actually arrest
them for the attempted extortion
of people using this
road because it is a
private road, and they
are allowed to do that.
What they did do was arrest
them for violating Japan’s
organized crime punishment
act, which means you’re
not allowed to be part of
an organized crime family.
You’re not allowed to do things
as organized crime members.
So they didn’t arrest them for the,
we don’t know if they actually
extorted any money, the
proposed extortion, they
arrested them for just being Yakuza.
(upbeat music)
You’re at home, you’re sleeping, you know.
I’ve actually been sleeping
a lot lately yesterday.
I woke up at 11, which
is really late for me.
And then today I woke up at nine.
So either I’ve been really tired,
maybe doing the gym too much,
or it’s just that sort of like winter,
doldrums thing, I’m not really sure.
Really, really sleepy lately.
Just want to sleep all the time.
It was really hard for
me to get started today,
but a woman is sleeping
at either eight or nine a.m.
depending on how badly
you think my handwriting is.
She was awoken because her roommate
was attempting to stab her in the stomach
through her futot now for non,
for people who don’t know about
Japanese culture, futon is
just an incredibly thick blanket.
You throw futons down to act as mattresses.
Maybe you, I always have to stack
two ’cause they’re a bit too thin for me.
And then you put a different
futon on top to act as a blanket.
So it’s almost like a really heavy blanket.
But I mean, I didn’t think futons
were thick and strong enough
to stop you from getting
stabbed in the stomach.
So they said a knife, they
didn’t say how big the knife was,
but almost all these
stories, it’s a kitchen knife
because knives are not a very common thing
to have people around the house in Japan.
So let’s say she got a kitchen knife and
she’s stabbing her roommate in the stomach.
It doesn’t get all the way
through and stab her in
the stomach, but it is enough
to wake up the roommate.
She wakes up, she kind of like, there’s
no information of a struggle or anything.
So it seems like she
just got up, got out of bed
and the roommate who
was attempting to murder her
was like, oops, that wasn’t
what you thought it was
or something like that,
like making excuses.
Nothing actually seems to have happened
after the initial attempted murder.
And we aren’t given any information.
We know that she was
sleeping in her futons.
We know the other one, the
roommate was standing over her
stabbing her in the
stomach when she woke up.
It did not even penetrate the skin.
She called the police,
the woman was arrested.
She said, I stabbed her with a kitchen
knife, but I didn’t intend to kill her,
which brings up the question
of when you stab someone
in the stomach, what do you intend
to do if it’s not trying to kill them?
There has to be some
other stuff going on there.
I’m gonna follow the story as
much as I can’t see if there’s
a follow up, but I don’t
think there will be this again,
because no one actually
got hurt in any real way.
She got caught right away.
The motivation probably won’t come up.
(upbeat music)
So for our final story, the title
was enough of a draw for me.
You don’t even need the story after that.
A polygamous ex fortune teller on trial for
sexual assault dies in a parent suicide.
You don’t need a story after that.
You could just unpack that sentence.
A polygamous ex fortune teller.
So he used to, as a job teller, fortunes.
He’s now about 76 years old.
So, well, he was about 76 years old.
The polygamous party.
He lived with 13 people.
He lived with his wife
and eight former wives.
They all lived in the same
house and three children.
I wouldn’t be able to date
two girls at the same time.
I always sort of fascinated by
how these guys can manage this.
Like, are they that charming?
How do they get women
to just live together?
This is not the first polygamy story
we’ve had on the engineer’s Japan.
We had one, I think it
was about six months ago.
And it was the guy living
in a house with four women.
He was married to one, and
he was dating the other three,
and they all just lived
together and contributed.
And he didn’t do any work.
Like, they all just paid for him to live.
I am not that charming.
This maybe is the thing I’m realizing
is I have missed out on
a certain level of charm
where I can actually, I can’t even
get one woman to pay for my life.
He was arrested in February 2023,
and being accused of sexual assault.
He’d been arrested four
times before for the same crime.
So, the next one that he’s been charged
with the one in 2023, it’s probably true.
I mean, he’s already
been arrested four times.
This is clearly a pattern of behavior.
He was 76 years old, he was
found collapsed by his wife,
and it does bring into question
the fortune telling aspect of it.
Because I don’t believe in fortune telling.
But if you believed in fortune telling,
you think you’d be able to see
some of these arrests coming?
I guess people want to believe something.
I don’t want to talk about this
because I know I’m just gonna
get off on really weird content soon.
I, before I left for Japan, my mother
arranged for a little party for me
and my friends to say goodbye,
and she actually hired a fortune telling.
I don’t believe it, she doesn’t
believe it, but we do find it fun.
So, like, I used to read my horoscope.
I didn’t believe my horoscope,
but I was actually reading
it to see what level of
accuracy or accuracy it held.
The fortune telling was
kind of the same thing.
She’s like, let’s just see what
she says, and then as we go
through our lives, we can
track what she accurate and not.
She was so wrong.
She should have gotten more
things correct by accident.
Like, every single aspect of
what she said to me was incorrect.
So, I think if we look at
this case and we look at my
personal experience, we can
say, be aware of fortune tellers.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
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