(electronic music)
The Sakurai SoulKey, Crime Family Organization, is based in Shizuoka.
Due to a loss of membership, lower accrute, (imitates gun)
Fuck!
I thought I was gonna be able to do one with zero edits.
I was, that was kind of my goal.
I had a personal goal today.
Do an episode of Ninja Ninja Japan
and not have to edit it at the end of the day, impossible.
Due to low recruitment numbers and falling profits,
they ran mostly illegal street vending stalls,
which didn’t seem like the most, the best criminal,
so when I think of Yakusa and criminal families and stuff,
I think drug dealing, prostitution, murder, you know, maybe movie stuff,
street vending doesn’t seem like the way to build a criminal empire.
Wow, what do I know?
I don’t know.
‘Cause I’m not part of a criminal family, maybe that’s awesome, but apparently not,
because they, as a criminal organization, have decided to disband.
The president of the organization, or someone representing the organization,
went to the police for a dissolution notification submission
ceremony, which is something I desperately wanna see.
What is it?
So your head of a Yakusa family, and you go to the
police and say, “We are not a Yakusa family anymore?”
My first thought, like, is it a, like is it
a, okay, ’cause they even call it a ceremony.
Is it a ceremony?
Do they have like a dinner with the cops and they like, you know, hang out?
But my first thought was, I’m running a criminal’s organization.
I go to the police, I declare my criminal organization
disbanded and then we can do more crime with less scrutiny.
It seems the police chief, I don’t know if he’s rumored in,
he’s like, I hope you become a more sensible member
of society, which is kind of a bullshit thing to say from being honest.
So I, this is the first I’ve heard of, this is a thing.
So I’ve lived in Japan like 20 years now, and I’ve never heard of this before.
So I was really interested in this.
I can’t get any details.
It’s some kind of like secret ceremony between the,
the police and the Yakusa seem to have a very odd relationship anyways.
They, they seem to know about each other and
organize with each other and almost work together.
And then, you know, then there are crack downs and stuff.
I don’t know.
The crime rate in Japan peaked in 2002.
So crime has been going down steadily since 2002.
In 2002, they had 2.73 million criminal cases.
In 2021, there were 568,148 criminal cases.
That is 25, that is 21% of the peak.
So crime has dropped so much that we are now at 21%
of the crimes being committed annually as in 2002.
2002, just quite incidentally, is the year after I came to Japan.
So I mean, if someone could say there’s a correlation
causation kind of thing, I mean, if someone who is pale
is the moon, you know, stalked the streets at night,
punishing criminals to the point where they feared the ghost of Nagoya.
I mean, if that was the thing that happened
and drove down the crime rate, I mean, that person,
surely they should be thanked, but maybe because they live
a masked crime fighting lifestyle, you wouldn’t know who they are essentially.
I mean, it would be someone who knew a lot about stories
in the news and what was going on in the streets,
maybe even took time out as a hobby to report it to you.
If that kind of person existed, I mean, it might be worth saying thank you to them.
I’m certainly no superhero, and if I was,
I wouldn’t admit it because then that would
just give the criminals a target to go after.
So keeping that secret identity secret is very important to me.
But if, you know, on behalf of the ghost of the night,
the palest superhero that ever lived, you’re welcome.
I mean, if I knew him, and I knew what he would want
to say to the people, by reducing the crime
rate from 100% down to 21, I mean, I think a,
a thank you’s in order from everyone in the
country, but you’re welcome is also there.
Japan’s hydrogen efforts, they want a sixfold increase
over the next 15 years aimed at decarbonization.
They are looking for more hydrogen cars on the street by 2030.
They’re aiming for zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
There is sort of an issue with hydrogen,
I learned a couple of years ago, is that the hydrogen production.
So it says in the story, it says they are partnering
with Australia and other in some countries in the Middle East
to produce hydrogen because hydrogen, it’s very hard to get.
That’s the problem, but it is very effective.
It’s much more explosive, so it’s a little more dangerous to handle.
But what I learned is that to produce hydrogen in Australia, they use coal.
So they have a coal plant, produce the hydrogen,
ship the hydrogen in a big boat over to Japan.
So they produce zero emissions in Japan.
But if they produce the emissions on the boat
and in Australia, is that really zero carbon emissions?
That’s one of the problems of kind of the zero carbon
conversation because they talk about it in country.
But if the country is doing stuff outside of
country to get the hydrogen into the country,
then they’re not really zero greenhouse gases, aren’t they?
And so this is why I’m a little disappointed, because I think, again,
the intent is correct, but the efforts, the reality, isn’t quite there.
Will hydrogen catch on?
It doesn’t seem to have caught on anywhere else.
Japan, as a country, is still very, very pro-hydrogen.
They really want to make this work.
I mean, Japan has been referred to as the
Galapagos, several times and several things.
One of the things I noticed, so I came to Japan.
My sister had been here before, so this would have been the late ’90s early 2000.
They had mini-disc.
Now, in the West, we had cassette tapes, and it moved to CD.
And then it moved to MP3 after that.
In Japan, kind of only Japan, they had mini-disc,
which was like a hard, floppy disc, that had more capacity
than a cassette tape, but less capacity than a CD, I think.
But the fidelity was good.
It was basically an MP3 player.
But you could had to swap out little drives.
And that was only in Japan.
And so that kind of Galapagos feeling
means that something can be successful in
Japan, and not even get picked up anywhere else.
So maybe Japan will be the land of hydrogen cars.
Maybe not.
I have no idea.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens, because the world isn’t going that way.
Does Japan sort of stay course and keep doing the thing they’re doing?
It’s a very Japanese thing to do.
Or did they give in and join the rest of the world?
I don’t know what’s going to happen.
Gassy is– he was arrested last week, and I kind of didn’t want to talk about him.
It’s not that I didn’t want to talk about him.
When they arrested him, they didn’t say anything
particularly interesting about the arrest.
So there were no details.
He was arrested for intimidation, specifically of celebrity.
So I don’t know if that made it more of a case.
Because intimidating people should just be intimidating people.
Intimidating celebrities shouldn’t matter.
Shouldn’t make a difference.
But what I did find out is he made 100 million yen from his YouTube videos.
And let me just check.
I have made zero yen from my YouTube video.
So I’m following a little behind Gassy in the YouTube Finance area.
He had 100 million yen.
He was trying to move it around.
So he had multiple bank accounts.
He had, like in his parents’ bank accounts and
stuff like that, trying to hide it essentially.
So he didn’t want to pay taxes.
Or there was some sassy stuff going on with his 100 million yen.
Should I ever get 100 million yen from YouTube,
I will be very forthcoming and honest about what I do with it.
Because my lifestyle is very dull.
I will probably just put it in the bank and live the exact same life I live now.
I would probably quit my job.
And then just make videos and stuff all the time.
I don’t know.
Or I’d become a complete douche.
Who knows?
He admitted during questioning that in his videos,
he would expose everything a celebrity did.
But at the same time, he thought saying I will expose the most
private details of a famous person’s life was not criminal.
In Japan, a very privacy-oriented country, I think you would know that is criminal.
You know how in videos in America, they’re always like,
they took a picture of me without my permission.
You can’t do that.
And then the cops are like, well, actually,
if you’re in public, it’s perfectly acceptable.
In Japan, it’s not.
You actually can’t take pictures of people without their permission.
So if I take a picture, and there’s a whole bunch of people in the background,
technically I should get all their permission.
I think realistically, well, no, the reality.
That’s not really going to happen.
But if I wanted to put that picture online, I should blur out all their faces.
So you’ll see comic-con things and other pictures of groups.
And they’ve actually taken the time to cover out the faces.
Legally, they should be doing that.
I don’t think it happens all the time.
But again, there’s the reality.
And I think if I was pointedly taking picture of an individual,
they would actually have a criminal case against me.
A juvenile.
I didn’t show it.
I haven’t used the word juvenile.
I’m getting old.
I think I could start calling people juvenile.
Like just as young juvenile, you should–
I don’t have any of you follow up with that.
A juvenile was smoking in front of a convenient store.
And the police approaching their car.
He sees the cops.
He’s like, going to Scarper.
Here’s a British phrase for anyone in my audience who’s from the UK.
You’ll enjoy the very Canadian accent usage of the word Scarper.
So he did a Scarper.
The cops turn on the reds, and they start chasing him in a car.
Like, I’m already in my– Mr. Worm has jumped saying he goes, he lagged it.
So I’m trying to decide, should I do my Dick Van Dyke horrendous British accents?
Or should I just stick with the North American accent
that I have that is natural for me and do British phrases?
It’s actually a thing that was rattling around the back of my head for some reason.
Because if I did slang from another country
and did not put on the accent, it would be funnier and weirder.
Like, good day, mate.
There’s my Aussie.
And don’t do the accent.
So Mr. Worm has put in the– I’ll have to revamp.
Let’s start again.
A juvenile was smoking in front of a convenience
store, the police approach, and he lagged it.
The cops chased after him in a car.
I always thought that was a bit extreme.
Why are you chasing a kid who’s running in a car?
There’s actually a few downsides of that, but we’ll get to those in a second.
Kid jumps offence.
Perfect strategy.
I’m almost on the kids’ side, especially because I know the end of the story.
The cops start, turn off the siren, and they’re patrolling around.
They’re going to hunt down this kid.
This is what they do.
This is the problem with the white shadow,
the ghost of Nagoya, having brought the crime rate down
so low as the police have nothing to do, but chase kids who
were smoking a cigarette for the first time in their life.
So again, I don’t know who the pale ghost of Nagoya is.
I think maybe he has to work on his superhero name,
but he does apologize that the crime rate is so
low that the cops are doing this kind of stuff,
because I can tell you, the pale ghost of Nagoya
superhero would not waste his time chasing down a kid who was smoking a cigarette.
I might talk to him, be like, hey, you know, smoking?
Not cool.
So the cops turn off the lights.
They’re driving around.
They’re hunting for this juvenile delinquent.
They go down a one-way road the wrong way.
They see the kid somewhere up, maybe at the other side.
There’s an intersection.
They race after him, blare out into the street, and hit a car.
Three people are injured, a mother, a seven-year-old, and a one-year-old.
Now, please remember, this crashes the result of
them chasing a kid who was smoking a cigarette.
So the young scallywag, smoking the cigarette, I would say it’s not worth it.
I didn’t believe that it’s just it.
It’s not worth the risk of injuring other
people, because they didn’t have their lights on.
The car was just driving normally.
They booked it after this kid.
And then they smashed into a car.
The seven-year-old was hurt really badly.
So I’m assuming that one-year-old was in one of those
child seats that was really secure, and maybe just bounced around.
But the seven-year-old was just sitting like a normal seven-year-old.
He was hurt quite badly.
The I.G. police say that cops did not violate the law in the pursuit.
So driving up the wrong way of a one-way street is not a violation of the law.
Having their lights off while in pursuit is not a violation of the law.
I think maybe they need to find another way to spend their time
than chasing after a young scally-wag puffing on a fake.
Someone’s going to get upset that I said that word.
Even though I am, again, using British slang, that actually is the risk.
If I say that with an American accent, it does not come across as slang at all.
And therefore, I am just using a slur.
It is, I believe, pride month.
I’m very supportive.
I’m not going to show– [INAUDIBLE]
That’s– I support gay people and rights and equality.
I also support the right for me to not show my penis
to my friend who’s claimed that it is the wrong thing for me to do.
All right, so a while ago, a couple months ago,
sort of near the end of the corona pandemic,
there was a group of people selling corona super eggs.
So there were eggs you eat.
There were like 10,000 yen and egg or something stupid like that.
It was a pyramid scheme, multi-level market, and kind of deal.
I’ll sell you eggs, you sell the eggs, you sell the eggs.
And then the guys at the top made a ton of money off these essentially magic eggs.
Well, they’re not the only ones who thought to get on the scam train.
A Tokyo-based company sold water with medicinal properties in quotes.
And now the thing is, water does have medicinal properties.
Hydration is important.
If you don’t hydrate, you need to be hydrated.
Therefore, it is medicinal to hydrate yourself.
So you could, in the most technical sense, say that they didn’t lie.
I don’t think that’s true.
They were saying that the water is effective against influenza.
It would kill 99.9% of the influenza virus in your body.
In one minute, the company was called the Superl–
the company was called the Supermineral Research Institute.
Now, I don’t know why, but as soon as they said Superl, I’m like, it’s a scam.
If you said these are vitamins, I would go, OK, let’s take a look at the vitamins.
If you said these are super healthy vitamins, I’d be like, it sounds like a scam.
I think the use of the word super might be a scam indicator.
So be careful of that.
So a two-liter bottle of water costs 10,000 yen, which is insane.
The company made 430 million yen in five years.
So they were selling two-liter bottles of regular water for 10,000 yen.
It’s probably like $100 American.
And people were buying it year after year after year, no one sort of caught on.
So please be careful of anything with super in the title.
That’s claiming to be good.
So there’s acid.
He super dry the beer.
It’s just beer.
It’s saying it’s super beer, and it’ll get you super drunk.
That’s true if you drink enough of it.
The super healthy stuff, be careful of that.
Sushi dough.
So we had the Sushi terrorism kind of swept the nation.
The kid who licked the soy sauce bottle, the Sushi dough corporation came after him.
So they have decided to sue the family.
I said that it was tough, because how much do you
sue a family for Japan’s not particularly litigious,
but they’re like, we have to set an example of
someone so that people don’t keep doing this.
People keep doing this.
It’s going to destroy our company.
They are going after $67 million yen, which is $480,000.
So a kid, teen, went in with his friends, licked a soy sauce bottle, put it back.
Their friends video that put it on the Internet, it caused the stock price to crash.
I think it was– they said like $9 billion yen in stock value was lost.
It caused an incredible decrease in customers.
That’s actually the next part.
The video went out.
There was a sharp falling customers.
Oh, so I wrote it down.
$16 billion yen stock drop.
They had to install plastic sheets, like plastic
covers, to cover the Sushi that was on rotation.
That had a cost of $90 million yen,
because they had to do it at 600 different outlets.
So Sushi are going after this kid.
They’re not going after $16 billion yen.
They’re not going after the $90 million yen.
They’re going after $67 million.
I don’t know how they exactly came to that number,
but they were trying to get something, I think, just to prove a point.
The defense team for this kid is saying
that the video was for sharing amongst friends
and therefore is not causative to the drop in stock price and the drop in customers.
That is a pretty weak defense, because that’s
like saying, I didn’t intend to murder him.
I just pointed the gun and pulled the trigger.
The fact that the bullet hit him in the head, that sort of just happened stance.
And therefore, I shouldn’t be held responsible.
So the fact that they didn’t intend for the video
to be put online, but the thing is, I think,
is friends didn’t tend it, because they posted it online.
Because things going online is not accidental.
So someone had to purposely post it to, I think it was probably TikTok or Twitter.
Someone did that on purpose.
There’s multiple steps you go through to upload a video.
So I think the counter-argument to that is, yes, you did.
So the defense team’s claim is there’s no causal
relationship between the video and the drop in customers.
It could have been stiff competition.
The problem is, the competitors suffered the same
drop, even though they weren’t the initial victims.
So that argument also falls apart.
I’m not a prosecuting attorney.
But if this is the quality of the defense teams,
I think I have a chance to be a really good prosecuting attorney in Japan.
Yamunashi is a prefecture in Japan.
They are declaring a state of emergency because of population decrease.
This is the first state of emergency declared because of a population decline.
Back in 2000, there were 895,646 people in Yamunashi.
And in 2022, last year, there were 796,231 people.
That is a 100,000-person drop.
The fertility rate in that area is 1.40.
The target is 1.87.
You actually need a 2.01, like a 2.0-point
plus, to be able to maintain your population.
That’s not even a population increase.
You are basically– you make two babies to replace the two parents.
That will maintain population.
The problem is, some kids die.
So you need 2.0-something to be able to actually
maintain the population, not even increase it.
You need a 2.5 or something like that, to actually increase the population over time.
I’m wondering what this is going to lead to.
They’re saying they’re going to– if you’re worried about having kids,
we’ll have government stuff to help you with children.
I was wondering if they’re actually going to go with mandated sex, because they are.
I might be moving to Yamunashi.
That one wants my seed.
All right, last story.
Boom.
An online pawn shop.
I didn’t know online pawn shops were a thing.
But you can contact pawn shops on a Zoom meeting and say, hey, here’s my bottle cap.
Let’s do an assessment of the value of that bottle cap
and then decide whether I should sell it or not, sell it with your company.
So they do, basically, appraisals online.
This guy gets online.
He says, I want you to appraise my watch.
He holds a watch up the camera.
The lady looks at it.
He says, well, it’s maybe worth 10,000 yen or 100,000 yen or it looks like that.
That’s a great watch.
It’s worth a million yen.
And they have a little conversation.
He goes, great.
Next is this.
And then he shows them her dick.
Da, fuck to the sense.
Then he shows her his dick.
I guess I shouldn’t be gendering people.
But the guy with the dick was targeting women.
So there actually, that sentence can be gendered properly.
That’s something I used to never worry about getting right.
Now I actually have to think about it.
That’s not a bad thing.
So basically, he would try to fake them out, look at my watch, assess my watch.
And now, so my question– my question has always come hard and fast.
Did he stand up and pull down his pants for the camera,
or did he move the camera down to his exposed area?
Is actually the question I have.
The women, of course, this is sexual assault.
Sexual assault is not a joke, but the women did miss an opportunity for a joke,
because they could have appraised his penis.
They could have given it a really harsh realistic appraisal.
They could have been, you know, well, the girth
isn’t really what it could be, the length.
While average is not particularly impressive,
and therefore won’t garner you any sum of money
beyond the standard sum of money, does it do any tricks?
Something like that.
Like, she could have– do you have the original papers?
Anything, if they had done– it’d not been shocked.
I know it’s impossible.
OK.
And I do actually feel bad for these women.
But all I need is this one cold-hearted woman to the guy moves the camera down,
and you’re looking at his like weird-looking penis,
and she just starts appraising it correctly.
Would have been devastating and stopped him.
He was arrested pretty quickly, because he’d done this
like three or four times, and they sort of had his information to a degree.
And he was arrested, and he said he got off on the shocked look on the women’s faces.
We’ll see how that helps them hold up in prison.
In Japan, he’s probably not going to prison.
He’s probably just going to get a fine.
If he’s found guilty, it’s just too bad.
But if you would like your penis appraised, send a picture to– I shouldn’t do that.
Someone would actually send me a dick pick.
I don’t want your dick pick.
And if I say anything to the gender I am
attracted to, no, I’m committing sexual assault.
So let’s just end that there.
Don’t send noods to anyone.
I have no conclusion after that.
I should have planned out something.
I had the idea in my head of the appraising penis.
Next time, it should something like this come up again.
I’ll actually plan out a penis appraisal.
That is my promise to you.
That, and I am not the pale ghost of Nagoya.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[Music].