(upbeat music)
Survey was done about work.
A lot of surveys about
work, a lot of people work.
Pretty much everybody works, socks.
Only the most interesting part
of the current work situation
is the change in attitude,
specifically in Japan.
Japan is known as a very
hard working work culture.
They work the long hours.
You have to stay later than your boss.
There’s a lot of rules and stuff
that go with working in Japan.
This is changing.
And I’ve said that there’s
going to be really big
changes in Japan over
the next two generations.
Because the generation that’s coming up
now that’s going to be replacing the bosses
and replacing the politicians and stuff,
they have a wildly different attitude.
And the generation that
follows them that sees that there
can be change, I think is
going to make massive changes.
Currently, only 20% of workers
say they want to become managers.
So 20% of people in a company who just work
like office, staff, different positions,
most of them, 80% don’t
want to become managers.
They don’t want that responsibility.
They don’t want to move up in the company.
They want to do this because
they think it’s more important
to maintain a good home work life
balance as in prioritizing the home part.
The quality of their
personal life is now just
more important than
their actual work life.
They were working to
live and not living to work,
which is the exact opposite of the
post-war Japanese attitude towards work.
It was about work work work.
And this is we’re going to rebuild Japan.
They rebuilt Japan.
They had the bubble.
They had the 80s when Japan was super rich.
And everyone was throwing money around
and they thought, oh,
this is going to last forever.
It didn’t.
Then they went into a recession.
There were sessions
been like 30, 40 years now.
And they’re slowly clawing their way out,
but they’re also not because Japan’s not
state competitive, declining birth rate.
All these other issues
come into play later.
But right now, what younger
people and people who are not
in managerial positions
are prioritizing is
themselves, which is a very
interesting shift in Japan.
They did find that management
style drastically impacted
whether or not people
wanted to become managers.
So if, of course, everyone
prefers if your manager is
trying to create a positive
team working team building
atmosphere, they’re trying to
make it a good place to work.
They’re trying to make you happy.
They’re trying to make
work a good place to be,
which is exactly what
these people are saying.
Like I’m working.
It’s not the most important thing in
my life, but I’ll do it because I have to.
But if I can work in a place
that’s nice, I’ll be extra happy.
That’s even better.
We did the story it was
last week about the company
that let you take mornings off if you
were hung over and let you drink at work.
And like basically like we
pay minimum wage, we pay shit.
And we have almost zero turnover
because people love working here.
So money has become less the priority
and more I want to happy
life has become a much
bigger priority for the
average Japanese person.
That story from last week about the company
that pays really low
wages and lets you drink
at work is a unique
entity in the world.
But this, most people don’t
want to become managers.
They don’t have that
sort of ambition anymore.
That shows a whole mental shift of
most of the people who live in Japan.
If you have a good boss though, so the 20%
who did say they want to become managers,
a lot of them said the reason
they wanted to become a managers
because they had a good boss
and that boss treated them well
and they would like to
then move up into that
position and maybe do
that for someone else.
(upbeat music)
Man’s in a food court.
He’s having lunch of course with his lunch.
I’m gonna go ahead and assume
this is an old Japanese man.
Just from the next
sentence, he was smoking.
So Japan like most countries
are making most areas smoke-free.
If you’re in a big city, if
you’re in a company or
something, there’s basically
no smoking areas left.
When I came to Japan, smoking
was still pretty common on the streets.
It’s now a lot of streets
are actually making it.
Like you can be fine for
smoking on the streets.
A lot of buildings had a
smoking room or a smoking area
that was enclosed and
man, they were disgusting.
They’re getting used less and less.
So smoking is becoming less common,
which again, this is why I think
this might be an older dude.
Of course, because he’s
in a mall, public place,
no smoking, staff walk up to him
and say, “Hey, please, don’t smoke.
“Could you put
out your cigarette?
” That kind of thing.
He decides the most appropriate
response to that request.
Very reasonable request
is this is where I do a quiz.
If I had done any sort of
prep, which I have not done,
February’s been a shambles for me.
I was gonna be just put
that out there right now.
Maybe I should put a personal
report at the end of the episode.
So if you actually want
to know about my life
and complain to whatnot,
you could listen to after the
end song, but I’m trying
to keep it out of the show.
It’s just weird ’cause it rolls
around in my head as I’m talking.
It’s actually easier to get it out
than to just pretend it’s not there.
But you know, pretending it’s not
there is how men deal with problems.
So let’s just keep doing that.
Staff ask him to stop.
So he pulls out a gun
and points it to the staff.
Now, here’s a question.
Guns are pretty hard to come by in Japan.
That is true.
This gentleman had a gun-shaped lighter.
So he thought, ah, I have a thing
that looks like a gun on my pocket.
He pulls out a gun and points it to the
staff and tells them to leave him alone.
The staff then sort of
does leave him alone.
They certainly do leave.
They of course immediately
go and call the police.
Having a gun pointed at you in
Japan is gonna be particularly weird
because you’ve probably
never seen a gun before.
Like I’ve seen in Japan guns on the
holsters of police officers on occasion.
Like most cops don’t actually carry guns.
Some of them do.
So it’s an unusual thing to see.
This, of course, then led to the police
showing up and he was arrested immediately.
He did do the smart thing in remain silent.
So if we’re gonna give
our criminal advice section,
he followed the advice that had
been given in previous episodes.
He did not talk to the police.
He just stayed silent and
it turns out he was drunk.
There have been a spate of heists,
crimes involving food.
I know there was an egg heist in America.
I actually wanna look into that.
There was the really famous
maple syrup heist in Canada.
Like a tanker truck of
maple syrup was taken away
and disappeared, probably
just taken into Vermont
and then sold as Vermont
maple syrup, that kind of stuff.
There was a high egg
heist recently and I wanted
to look into that story
but have been very busy.
In Japan, this is not a heist per se
but it kind of fell into the same thing.
Like food now is becoming
a valuable commodity
and people are stealing or committing
crimes based around food more often.
Three people were arrested
because they had 240 million
yen’s worth of Wagyu beef bound for
Cambodia that they rerouted to Hong Kong.
So that is 30 tons of frozen
beef that was supposed
to go to Cambodia is what
they wrote on all the forms.
When it got out to see,
they took a left turn.
Let’s see if we put down my left turn.
Maybe I’ll do like a 380.
I immediately actually started
looking at a map of my brain
and to see which way you
would actually have to turn
if you were heading towards Cambodia
and then turned to go to Hong Kong.
30 tons of frozen beef sent
that they put on the forms
was gonna go to Cambodia,
they rerouted it to Hong Kong.
Why did they do this?
Because the inspections
for beef going to Cambodia
are lower and more lenient
than those going to Hong Kong.
So they could save money on inspections
and send them meat to Hong Kong.
So this was essentially
going to be not only
Wagyu beef, it was going
to be a legal Wagyu beef,
which I would actually
guess is particularly delicious.
And that got me into the
sort of the scam frame of mind.
So I really, I found this
one very interesting.
We’ve actually mentioned this before in a
previous episode, the arrest warrant scam.
There are a lot of scams
targeting older people in Japan
using technology and stuff that
they don’t understand they’re
not comfortable with and this
causes them a lot of trouble
because it’s harder to see a
scam if it comes from a source
and you don’t know it well
enough to know it’s a scam.
I mean, that’s how what they do.
They prey on people who don’t know stuff.
So this is one that has come to
the forefront in the last little while.
It used to be, they have
the Japanese famous
for it was Ore Sagi,
Sagi, Sagi, Ore Ore Sagi.
I forget what it is.
Ore is me and Sagi is like, I’m
in trouble, help me kind of thing.
But the ideas they would
call up and just call up random
numbers and go, oh my
God, I’m in trouble, I need help.
Can you help me?
And they might throw in a
grandma or a grandpa in there
if a man or woman
answers that kind of thing.
And then there’s older person thinks
that their grandchild is in
trouble and needs money.
They would go direct to the ATM
and transfer money, that kind of thing.
Hoping that they set them into such a panic
that they start behaving
and acting on defensive
their grandchildren without
actually thinking it through.
So that was a scam.
I heard about it, man.
It was going on for years.
This is a new version
of that where you’re in
trouble and you need to
pay money to get out of it.
So that’s already the first thing.
If you are being approached
by someone and they’re saying,
you have to pay money
to get out of trouble.
That’s actually never how you get out
of trouble when it comes to legal systems.
You never give someone
money and make it go away.
You always have to go through a
process and then like a finance issued
and then a ticket is
issued or that kind of thing.
If you have an arrest
warrant, which is what this is,
this is the arrest warrant scam, you don’t
just pay the money and make it go away.
You have to go to court.
You have to talk to the police.
You have to go to the police
station and that kind of thing.
So this guy gets a call.
He’s about 70 years old and on
the phone, he says, I’m a police officer
and your phone number
has been used in a crime.
We’re going to suspend
its use in two hours.
Now, actually the first step
would be to wait two hours
and see if they actually
suspend its service.
If they don’t, these people’s clearly
don’t have the power they say they are.
But they are trying to put you into
a position where you start to panic.
He thought, oh, maybe my phone
number was part of a data breach
or something like that
and online scam and they’ve
taken my phone number
and they’ve used it in a crime.
And so now he’s starting to
feel like, oh man, maybe I will be
implicated in this even though
I haven’t done anything wrong.
Then they tell him an account
was opened in your name
in the Bank of Columbia in
Canada, which is not a real bank.
And you have received
10% from money laundering,
which makes you an
accomplice in this crime.
Now, he doesn’t know if
he’s actually received 10%
and that 10% may not be going
into his personal bank account.
But he’s hearing this
story, his phone number,
he’s getting the 10% he’s now a part
implicit in part of a crime implicated.
He’s now implicated in a crime.
He’s starting to panic even more.
The arrest warrant has
been delivered to you already.
So he goes out to his mailbox
and there’s an envelope in there
and in it has a very official looking
document that is an arrest warrant.
Now, as you’ve watched on television,
arrest warrants don’t
tend to be delivered by mail.
They tend to be delivered
by police officers who show up.
And the reason is most
arrest warrants are for criminals.
And criminals don’t tend
to get pieces of paper
and go, ha, this says I
need to turn myself in.
I better go turn myself in.
They go, ha, the police are looking for me.
I better head to ground now and hide
out so they can’t actually catch me.
So arrest warrants are delivered in a very
specific way for a very specific reason.
Of course, this older
gentleman doesn’t know this.
For all, he knows this is
how arrest warrants are given.
Because for all, he knows this is
how arrest warrants are delivered
because he’s not a criminal and he
doesn’t know how criminal things work.
He doesn’t know how arrest warrants work.
It said it was from the
Tokyo District Court.
The numbers he was getting
the calls from all had a plus one.
So they are out international numbers.
So he asked, why are the police calling me?
The Japanese police calling
me from international numbers.
And the police officer,
the defect detective
on the other side said,
we don’t use regular
numbers because this is
a top secret investigation.
In fact, you shouldn’t tell any other
police officers or financial institutions
because there may be
people working with them
on the criminal side
in those institutions.
So if you tell anybody,
then you’re going to
be implicated and they
might come after you.
So now they’re trying to show,
we’re trying to help you out, buddy.
We’re trying to make sure that
you don’t actually get in trouble
for this implicated 10%
money laundering you just did.
So don’t tell anyone, we will save you.
Then they tell him to prove his innocence,
he can transfer money to
a financial services agency.
And they’ll use that to confirm
the bank accounts and stuff.
And in that way, he can prove
his innocence and not actually end
up going to jail, not have to
worry about the arrest warrant.
A woman took over the phone.
So this is like a team of people
who are working on this scam.
And she tells him to go to the ATM.
She stays on the phone with him
and she walks him through
the steps of transfer money.
There’s a limit to only sending
200,000 yen a day from ATM in Japan.
And this is for this reason.
So many scams try to get you to empty out
your bank account as quickly as possible.
They try to put a limit on it.
So you can only transfer
so much money every day for,
again, this is sort of a
defensive against scams.
They badgered him to
transfer every single day.
They tried to get him to take money out
and then go to the counter
and transfer it that way.
So trying to do it different ways.
He’s got to get more money out.
And again, he’s in a panic.
It took him a few days before he’s like,
is this how police are going to talk to me?
Is this how, because they
are now on the side of like,
oh, you need to prove your
innocence or prove your innocence,
they wouldn’t be treating
me like a criminal anymore.
And so it took about a
week and he started to
realize, I don’t think
these are police anymore.
By that time, they
had already taken 3.
7 million yen from the guy.
Now they didn’t interview
with him and he was, of course,
very defeated and very
embarrassed and it’s a terrible thing.
But he said, I want, like,
I don’t watch the news.
I don’t watch a lot of TV.
I just, I’m retired.
I read a lot of books.
I’m sort of disconnected
from society in this way.
I didn’t know what this was real.
And there are other
people in similar situations.
I want them to know so
that they don’t get scammed.
And I think this is shining
the light on the scam
is one of the best things you
can do because it hopefully
will save someone else
from suffering the same fate.
Dating apps.
I’m of the generation before dating apps.
So I never have really used one, certainly.
I’ve never used one successfully.
I don’t think I would
be good at dating apps.
I can honestly say that.
Like I, I’m pretty good at
talking to people in real life.
Once I get comfortable,
now that I’m certainly not
trying to impress anybody, it’s actually
very easy for me to talk to anyone anytime.
I’m probably way more
charming now that I’m not trying,
trying back within when I
was younger and actually trying
way too hard and probably
looking like a huge idiot about it.
Dating apps were not my thing.
I’m certain I would
have been really bad at it.
This guy was meeting girls on dating apps.
And his thing was like, hey, why
don’t we train at my private gym?
That sounds pretty cool.
Give a private gym.
It means you’re pretty well off.
That’s pretty attractive.
I don’t know what the pictures are like.
Let’s just assume he looked
pretty good in his pictures.
Girls were saying like, OK, yeah,
let’s go train at your private gym now.
I’m going to go into dad mode
for a minute and go first date.
The word private should
not be involved in there.
It should only be a very public thing.
And as soon as he says, let’s go to my
private gym, I was like that suspicious.
That’s already very, very suspicious to me.
I don’t– I’m not
happy about that.
I don’t want anyone
to go to a private place
on their first date because
you don’t know this guy.
And that’s all it really comes down to.
Do a couple public dates.
Go get some ice cream.
I know it’s the opposite of
training, but it is certainly fun.
Go to a public gym.
That’s fine.
Do not go to a man’s claimed private gym.
When they would meet, he
would actually take them to a hotel.
I assume they mean a love hotel.
Now, second point.
I do not want a victim blame.
But if you look at a love hotel,
you are going to immediately
recognize that this does
not contain a private gym.
Do not go into that
building with the man who’s
clearly now lying to
you about this situation.
Like, hey, let’s go into my private gym
that just happens to be in this love hotel.
I’ll get us a room.
Rooms are usually done relatively
randomly on a computer or something.
Not that I would know.
I don’t know anything about a love hotel.
But you now know something’s up.
You now know he’s not being forthright.
You now know he’s not being honest.
You should now bail as soon as you can.
Just run away.
Then he took him to the love hotel.
He would say you’re my type and basically
trying to force himself himself on them.
One woman escaped.
Sometimes victim blaming is OK.
No, no.
Because it’s only a
not OK in this situation.
There is– OK.
If I can deal with that
statement, because I’m taking
information from the news, I’m
not getting all the information.
So I don’t know how
charming, how impressive.
We don’t even really know.
It said hotel.
It might have been a proper hotel
and it looked better, something like that.
I don’t know anything about it.
So I don’t want a victim
blame because that
actually takes me to the
territory of assumption.
And once I start assuming, that’s when I’m
going to make some incorrect statements.
If I knew all the information,
sometimes it is OK to victim blame.
I think I could agree with that.
But you need to have
all the information first.
We do have a lot of
dumb people in the world,
and they deserve to be blamed for
the things that go wrong in their life.
But if your date says,
let’s go to a private
gym and then takes
you to a public love hotel.
That’s sevens of it.
It’s diplomatic answer.
I try to be very honest
and engineers Japan.
And I try to give factual
information more than anything else.
And when I make assumptions
and stuff, I do try to say.
But yeah, it is diplomatic.
Because again, I don’t know.
Maybe it was convincing is the problem.
Like whenever we talk about
scams, it’s the same thing.
We talk about scams.
And it’s always like,
how did you believe that?
But the previous story, the whole point
was to set that guy into a
panic so he wouldn’t be thinking.
Scams are designed by people to create a
situation where you’re not thinking clearly.
And then you don’t
realize afterwards and
afterwards, yeah, it
is terribly embarrassing
to realize you just got scammed
out of a whole bunch of money.
He would say you’re my type.
And then he threw them on the bed.
One girl struggled and got away.
She went down the emergency
exit and called the police.
And he got arrested.
Last story, creepy, creepy guy.
He goes into a cafe locker room.
And he gets one of the staff
members’ keys and he copies the key.
And then he breaks into the woman’s house
and he goes through her underwear drawer.
Now you would think this is just
a regular underwear theft story.
I actually don’t do those very often anymore
because we did so many at the beginning.
It’s now just become
a repetition of this guy
steals a lot of underwear, which has nothing
interesting, I can say about it anymore.
This guy gets arrested when he’s arrested.
He goes, I didn’t intend
to steal the underwear.
I just wanted to know
what kind of underwear
she was wearing as if
that was somehow less
creepy than the actual
stealing of the underwear.
I think at any point, once
you’ve gone into someone’s house,
the level of creepiness,
what your intent is,
suddenly does not assuage how
awful everything you’re actually doing is.
I didn’t intend to steal.
I just wanted to know what
kind of underwear she wore.
He’d enter her, entered her
house or apartment 10 times.
Now, was he going in and
stealing underwear every time?
No, what he said was the room was very
clean and sunny and it was very comfortable.
So he’s actually just like to sit there.
So he basically was breaking
into this woman’s house
and just sitting there having
like a peaceful afternoon
apparently it would stay for like two
hours and watch like music shows on TV.
I just relax in this woman’s
house, which I actually
find almost creepier than
stealing the underwear.
I don’t know why.
It’s like someone coming and
just making themself at home
is so violating to the
sanctity of your home, I guess.
When the police arrested him, they
found he had 10 copies of other keys.
So they’re actually wondering
if maybe he’s been just
like moving around from house to house.
Has he actually been
sleeping in these houses?
These different things.
But they do know he’s been
getting keys, copying the keys
and spending a lot of time
in other people’s houses.
Please be careful.
Get 20 locks and put
them on your doors, please.
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