Friday, March 19, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Mansion polish: does what is says on the tin

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 11:48 PM PDT


Use sparingly

Lord 3: steampunk mask

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 11:47 PM PDT

Picture 110, Rodney Alcala

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 08:02 PM PDT

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Police in Huntington Beach, CA are asking for the public's help in trying to identify possible victims in photos belonging to convicted rapist and serial killer Rodney Alcala (the "Dating Game" killer). Above, photo #110, from a series of hundreds taken on of before July, 1979, many believed to have been shot by Mr. Alcala. The prints were found in his Seattle storage locker. Some have been ID'd since the scans were published online.

(Random case fact: he is reported to have studied film under and worked for Roman Polanski.)

Afghanistan: Taliban chops off nose, ears of 19-year-old girl for "shaming" her in-laws

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 07:16 PM PDT

aisha.jpg"When they cut off my nose and ears, I passed out." Bibi Aisha, 19, of Afghanistan, who was punished by the Taliban for "shaming" her in-laws when she ran away to escape torturous domestic abuse. Her father sold her to her abusive husband when she was 10.

Atia Awabi, a CNN International correspondent based in Kabul, says "If you are moved by [this] story you can help by donating to womenforafghanwomen.org." CNN interviewed this young woman in January, and ABC News followed recently.

Women for Afghan Women has posted an update on her story here (some people may find the full image of her brutally disfigured face disturbing).

Her husband "kept her in the stable with the animals until she was 12 (when she got her first menstrual period)." More:

Aisha has been recovering these past months from the unimaginable trauma she has suffered. She has brought criminal charges against her father for giving her away in the illegal practice of "baad." She would like to also bring charges against her husband, but since he is a Talib in Uruzgan, he is unreachable. Aisha has decided after weighing all the options before her that she would like to come to the United States for her surgery and post-operative care. Just as important as her surgery, will be the support system we organize for her recuperation. We are currently engaged in setting up that support system for Aisha.
You can donate here. (CNN blogs, via Kristie LuStout)

EULA for Chinese takeout food at Dubai hotel

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 06:30 PM PDT

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Above, a "food indemnity form" for takeaway food at a hotel in Dubai. Tweeted by CNN International correspondent Atia Awabi, who is based in Afghanistan.

Michael Musto on the joys of urban cycling

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 06:39 PM PDT

Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, whom I've been a fan of for many years, talks about why he loves riding his bike around the streets of New York in this fun video profile.
dolcemusto.jpg[He] has been riding a bike in New York City for more than 25 years, long before it was fashionable or we had bike lanes and cycletracks. Musto has never had a driver's license, and he tells us the bicycle is an advantage in his profession. Although he's had his share of bikes stolen (he recommends buying a used, cheap bike), he has nothing but positivity and praise for the velocipede.
I love the part at the end, when Michael addresses safety concerns. Bottom line: "You're gonna be fine." I enthusiastically agree with that, but I would respectfully add: consider wearing a helmet!

Streetfilms: Michael Musto, Il Ciclista Dolce (Streetsblog)

Rentokil's misleading marketing is "brilliant"

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 06:10 PM PDT

British bug-killing company Rentokil recently put out a press release containing made-up numbers about the prevalance of bug infestations on public transport. The missive — "2,000 bugs taking a ride in every train compartment," parsed one quality daily — resulted in widespread condemnation. Especially on Twitter, where Rentokil went from zero to defensive in record time.

And bafflement resulted:

I asked Rentokil for more details on what vehicles they had studied, where, and how, what was counted, how the bugs were collected, and so on. ... [but] No buses were studied, and no trains were studied either. Brands2Life and Rentokil both declined to show me ... Wherever it came from, these numbers did not come from measurements and counts, they are actually based on a "theoretical model".

That was Ben Goldacre at Bad Science. But what does he know? Misleading claims, it turns out, have an undeservedly bad rap! Massaged facts and scare tactics are effective promotional tools, according to someone representing themselves as the chief of a PR company, RMS:

Love it, love it, love it. Three things.

1) The initial 'scare' press release - brilliant. Did exactly what it was intended to - got published everywhere, got people talking and raised Rentokil's profile while conveying the message of what it does - KILL BUGS.

2) Everyone who's has been offended by the massaging of facts in that initial story appears to be in the marketing profession - surely you should know better. Consumers - yes, those people Rentokil is seeking to attract - will now be aware of the name and what it does. They will not be indulging themselves in theoretical/philosophical talk about the actual figures - they will be scared witless about bugs and moved to pick up the phone to Rentokil. Surely, all you marketeers out there get this?

RMS, however, is ethicy. Its website says "No fluff. No lies. No empty promises." What part of "surely you should know better" does this company not understand? Perhaps the part that knows the Advertising Standards Authority also "gets this."

The comment prior, similarly laudatory of Rentokil's ingenious 'spin, apologize, grovel' marketing strategy, oddly is signed with the name of another RMS client.

For its part, Rentokil no longer appears interested in innovative viral marketing. Its own official blog oscillates between "routine" maintenance downtime and increasingly prostrate apologies, one of which flatly states that the press release was "wrong and misleading."



YouTube: Viacom secretly posted its videos even as they sued us for not taking down Viacom videos

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 04:04 PM PDT

In a scorching post on the company's blog, YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine accuses Viacom of going to great lengths to secretly upload videos to YouTube in order to take advantage of its promotional value even as they were suing YouTube, arguing that YouTube should be able to tell the difference between Viacom videos that were uploaded by actual infringers as opposed to Viacom employees and agents being paid to pretend to be infringers.
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Given Viacom's own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.

Broadcast Yourself (via /.)

(Image: Kara Swisher and Philippe Dauman, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Joi's photostream)

Previously:


Edible QR Code cupcakes

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 03:49 PM PDT

Entertainment industry sours on term "pirate" -- too sexy

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 04:21 PM PDT

After years of trying to cloud the public mind by calling it "piracy" instead of "unauthorised downloading," key copyright industry reps are starting to realize that "piracy" actually sounds kind of cool. So now they're lobbying for the even less intellectually rigorous term "theft," which describes an entirely different offence, enumerated in an altogether different section of the lawbooks.

This has all the dishonesty of calling everything you don't like "terrorism" (or as my friend Ian Brown says, it's like rebranding jaywalking as "road rape").

"Piracy" sounds too sexy, say rightsholders

(Image: Pirate Cory, taken by Gordon Doctorow, Hallowe'en 1974)

Previously:


Is the UK record industry arrogant or stupid?

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 03:30 PM PDT

In my latest Guardian column, "Is the music industry trying to write the digital economy bill?", I look at the last two weeks' events in the life of the UK Digital Economy Bill, a piece of legislation tailor-made for the record industry at the expense of the public interest, freedom and due process. The question I can't answer is, does the record industry put on these vastly over-reaching shows of power because they don't care about backlash, or are they just so arrogant that they don't imagine that there will be a backlash?
[T]he next day, Bridget Fox, a LibDem prospective parliamentary candidate who had spoken out against her party's new pro-censorship stance, introduced an emergency motion to the LibDems' spring conference. This motion called for the LibDems to follow a policy that puts internet freedom front and centre, categorically rejecting web censorship and disconnection of infringers and their families, and embracing net neutrality and all the other freedoms that you'd expect from the "party of liberty". In other words, the LibDems had declared themselves to be not biddable by the entertainment industry, and indirectly but firmly rebuked the Lords who'd done the BPI's dirty work for them.

By all accounts, the "debate" following Fox's proposal was a one-sided affair. No one came forward to oppose it. Instead, for half an hour, speaker after speaker stood up to declare the importance of a free and open net. When the vote came, it was near-unanimous (I hear that there was one vote against the proposal). If the BPI had hoped to have an ally for the years to come in the LibDems, they blew it by asking for too much - and getting it. Their greed in exploiting their influence over the LibDem Lords galvanised the LibDem rank and file into enshrining a rejection of the BPI's agenda into the party's official policy.

Is the music industry trying to write the digital economy bill?
Previously:


Here's a YouTube embed of that Hot Chip video directed by Peter Serafinowicz

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 03:15 PM PDT

When that crazy Hot Chip video went live a few days ago—the video with the dude shooting death-lasers out of his mouth?—I blogged here on Boing Boing. At the moment of release, the only version available was on MySpace. No more! Feast your eyballs, a YouTube version in high definition technicolor. Directed by Peter Serafinowicz.

Raiding Eternity

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 02:43 PM PDT

raiding.jpg

What pageviews may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil? A beautiful piece of experimental prose by our former colleague Joel Johnson, formerly of Boing Boing Gadgets and now of Gizmodo, about ghosts in the cloud: mortality and connectivity, and how internet permanence might change memory of those who pass, after they're gone. Snip:

Chances are we'll each be lost to time. 100 billion people have been born before us. Most of them no longer exist as individuals in our memories. No names. Faces only reflected in our own and not in any way that really matters.

But not us. We might be remembered forever. All our Twitter updates, our email, our Vimeo movies, our Xbox Live profiles, our wormy FourSquare maps. They won't be important. Not to most people, anyway. But they'll be there if the sysadmins take care of us, if the corporations and machines to whom we've entrusted our records do not fail or are not destroyed.

We won't matter to most. But our memories will be cataloged, indexed, made available along with our stories, our names. $viewcount++.

Raiding Eternity (Gizmodo)

Mark Dery: What do zombies Mean?

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 01:47 PM PDT

201003181336 Mark Dery has another wonderful essay on True/Slant, called "Dead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean?"
The zombie is a polyvalent revenant, a bloating signifier that has given shape, alternately, to repressed memories of slavery's horrors; white alienation from the darker Other; Cold War nightmares of mushroom clouds and megadeaths; the post-traumatic fallout of the AIDS pandemic; and free-floating anxieties about viral plagues and bioengineered outbreaks (as in 28 Days Later and Left 4 Dead, troubled dreams for an age of Avian flu and H1N1, when viruses leap the species barrier and spread, via jet travel, into global pandemics seemingly overnight. Which may be why the Infected, as they're called in both the film and the game, move at terrifying, jump-cut speed, unlike their lumbering, stuporous predecessors.)
On his blog, Mark provides Attention-Conservation Highlights: "Karl Marx's goth-iness; cultural historian of horror David J. Skal's take on zombies as poster children for the econopocalypse; Haitian zombies and post-colonial trauma; white supremacists' Turner Diaries dreams of circling the wagons and holding off the "golden horde" of multiculti urbanites with "boomsticks"; Nazi zombies. Oh, and braaains."

Dead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean?

Previously:


Happy New Year Luie!

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 01:20 PM PDT

If you've never seen anyone handle their instrument like Charlie Patton might have, this musician from Botswana is incredible--I think I can safely say I've never really seen anyone play a guitar before:

Youtube user Bokete7, (who shot the video), told me he is: "Ronnie Moipolai from Kopong village in the Kweneng district 50 km west of the capitol Gaborone. He is 29 years old and goes around the shebeens selling and playing his songs for 5Pula each (80dollarcents). He learned guitar from his now late father, has 3 brothers that also play guitar (KB is one of them), has also a big sister and plenty of kids in the yard. Nobody has a formal job and his mother sells Chibuku beer and firewood they get from the bush trying to make ends meet."

The Sound of Thirsty Trees

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 01:18 PM PDT

ako trees shot small.jpg Bioacoustician Bernie Krause has recorded the amazingly rhythmic vascular systems of thirsty trees: 

alt : http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/18/guestblog/tree2%20copy.mp3

He discovered that the cells in the xylem and phloem of the tree fill with air to try to maintain the osmotic pressure that's usually produced by the sucking of water up through the roots.  At a certain point the cells burst. Krause adds "When they pop, they make a noise: we can't hear it, but insects can. And when insects hear multiple cells popping, they're drawn to the tree because certain ones are programmed to expect sap. And when the insects are drawn to the tree, the birds are drawn to the tree to eat. it's all a microhabitat formed by sound: The sound of popping cells."  (Incidentally, when the xylem cells pop, they die and form the rings of the tree).  Recordings are made at their natural high frequency (about 47 kHz!) with a hydrophone and then slowed down by about a factor of seven. 

Bernie's done some fascinating work in the field of "biophony", which is based around the idea that every animal in an eco-system has its own acoustic territory, or bandwidth of sound that it vocalizes in. If something comes in and takes over a certain bandwidth (like the regular route of a noisy airplane) entire populations can suffer, or be forced to adapt.

You can find more of his recordings here

Jessi Buchanan, mystery artist

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 01:14 PM PDT

557hi.jpgJessi Buchanan is a Georgia artist who takes all the normal obsessions of an average American boy -- lawn ornaments, corn dogs, giant mutant koalas with laser-beam eyes -- and gives them back to the world in colorful, cartoony canvases. Other than his work, not much is known about Buchanan. Some say he doesn't really exist. Some say he's never been spotted in the company of the much more successful Jeff Cohen; others say nothing at all. Most mysteriously, Buchanan seems to have abandoned an ambitious cycle of paintings called The Jessi Buchanan Alphabet at the letter "M" (for "mullet"), sometime in 2006. Will he ever re-surface?

Lego Minifigure Ultimate Sticker Collection

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 01:09 PM PDT

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I haven't paid much attention to Lego kits for the last 20 years or so. But a new book, Lego Minifigure Ultimate Sticker Collection, was a fun way for me to appreciate the cleverness, artistry, and humor of the little characters that people the kits. This DK book has over 1000 "reusable" stickers of characters ranging from Plankton (the little one-eyed jackass in SpongeBob SquarePants) to Slave Leia from Star Wars. I'm not much of a collector of anything, so this book was an excellent way to admire these fun figurines with the expense and clutter of buying and keeping them. I just gave the book to my six-year-old daughter and she is enraptured.

Lego Minifigure Ultimate Sticker Collection

What's more awesome than discovering a temperate planet outside our solar system?

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 12:27 PM PDT

How about discovering a temperate planet outside our solar system that will actually be relatively easy to study? Spanish researchers have done just that, according to Science News. The newly spotted planet, COROT-9b, is 1,500 light years away. It isn't, itself, Earth-like—think something more akin to Jupiter or Saturn—but its atmosphere might contain water vapor, and, if it turns out to have any moons, those could be habitable. Most important, though, is the fact that researchers can actually study the thing.

Although a number of extrasolar planets with moderate temperatures have been discovered, only a planet that passes in front of -- or transits -- its star can be studied in depth. The starlight that filters through the atmosphere of the planet during each passage reveals the orb's composition, while the amount of starlight that is blocked outright indicates the planet's size.

All the other transiting planets seen so far have been "weird -- inflated and hot" because they orbit so close to their stars, notes study collaborator Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory in Sauverny, Switzerland. Deeg, Queloz, and their colleagues report their findings in the March 18 Nature.

  • Deeg, H.J. 2010A transiting giant planet with a temperature between 250K and 430K. Nature 464:384. doi:10.1038/nature08856

(Via Ecospheric blog)

Wounded vet gets seeing-eye tongue

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 01:06 PM PDT

A British soldier blinded by a grenade can now "see" using his tongue. A prototype system called the BrainPort converts images to electrical signals which are sent to a plastic "lolly pop" that the user puts in their mouth. The learning curve—users have to be taught to translate an electric "pins and needles" sensation into meaningful information—sounds a bit rough, and you can't use the BrainPort while eating or talking. But the soldier can now locate and pick up objects without help or fumbling.

Science for Haiti

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 12:02 PM PDT

Ecological issues like soil erosion and deforestation play a major role in keeping Haiti locked in a cycle of poverty. The Haiti Regeneration Initiative is working to help Haitians improve their environment and, with it, their lives. I LOVE seeing science in action like this!

(Via Jorge Salazar)

Photo series of baby dressed up as ruthless dictators

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 10:34 AM PDT

Baby-Mussolini Artist Nina Maria Kleivan dressed her baby daughter Faustina up in outfits of infamous dictators and took photos. She says the photos are a reminder of how "we all begin life the same. We all have every opportunity ahead of us. To do good, or inexplicable evil."

Nina Maria Kleivan's "Potency," Exploring The Meaning Of Evil (Thanks, Dollyhead Books!)

Man kicked off train for writing song list that included band name "The Killers"

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 10:27 AM PDT

Dollyhead Books says, "A musician has spoken today of his shock at being removed from a train for 'behaving suspiciously' by writing a list of songs which included the band name The Killers."
Tom Shaw was travelling on a South West Trains when he began writing a list of song titles which his band The Magic Mushrooms would play at a forthcoming gig.

But the 25-year-old was approached by two security staff employed by the train company and asked to leave the train at Fareham railway station.

Mr Shaw, who works with young people with learning difficulties, said that they told him he had been behaving suspiciously and asked him to explain the list he had been writing.

Independent: Man thrown off train over Killers gig list

Loud sex is a reason for cops to search your home, rules court

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 10:22 AM PDT

Brian McGacken of Farmingdale, New Jersey was sentenced to ten years in prison because police discovered he was growing marijuana while on a call to investigate loud sex. Daniel Tencer of AlterNet writes:
Appealing the conviction, McGacken argued that, once police knew the noise was consensual sex, they no longer had reason to search his home.

But the appellate panel at the Superior Court of New Jersey disagreed. On Monday, they dismissed McGacken's appeal, stating that "the potential for harm was too severe for the police to accept an explanation for loud screaming that could have been a cover-up of its true source."

The ruling stated in part:

The police are not required to accept the explanation that a person answering the door gives for a distress call. While loud sex may have been a plausible source of screaming, that explanation was not so reliable that the police acted unreasonably in investigating further....

Moreover, by first questioning defendant and his girlfriend, the troopers discounted the possibility that someone may have made a false report of screaming. Defendant did not deny that screaming had occurred in his residence. His admission made it unnecessary for the police to seek corroboration to establish the reliability of the anonymous 911 call.

AlterNet: Loud Sex Enough for Cops to Search Your Home, Court Rules (Thanks, Sean!)

T-shirts: robots, aliens, and zombies galore!

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 08:31 AM PDT

System Product Images 2780 Original Werobotmain V7 Char-1 System Product Images 2783 Original Alienwmainart V3 Choc
Chop Chop Store set up chop, er. shop, at the Boing Boing Bazaar in our Makers Market! Chop Chop Store are the makers of terrific "collection" t-shirts featuring icons of nerd celebrity, from robots to aliens to ghosts and zombies. How many characters can you identify? Collection Tees in the Makers Market/BB Bazaar

The politics of yakuza (or Q&A with Jake Adelstein pt 2)

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 08:19 PM PDT

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In part two of our Q&A series with Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein, we'll answer some basic questions about the yakuza: why people join, how they operate, and how much influence they have on mainstream Japanese culture. You will also find out why some parents might voluntarily send their kids to mobsters and how landing an innocent-seeming IT job could accidentally spiral you into a lifetime of crime.

If you haven't read part one, which is a more intimate look at Adelstein's own experience as a crime beat reporter in Japan, it's here.

Why do people join the yakuza?

They're usually misfits from Japanese society. The word yakuza itself comes from a losing hand in gambling. 893 (ya-ku-za). It's the worst hand you can have. So when they refer to themselves as yakuza, they're referring to themselves as losers. It's a very self-deprecating term.

In western Japan, there's still a lot of discrimination against burakumin, the outcast class. If you come from certain parts of the country, they might think you're inferior, dirty, and unclean. There are also a lot of Korean-Japanese yakuza because of the discrimination against them. It's getting better, but in the past, the job choices for Korean-Japanese were pretty much pachinko parlor, barbeque restaurant operator, sex club operator, or the yakuza.


Some of them are just normal people who are basically running a very small home security business. They collect money from bars and clubs in the neighborhood and in turn provide a service. If there's an unruly customer, they'll beat the shit out of him without calling the cops. If someone doesn't pay the tab, the yakuza will go to their door and politely ask for the money.


Do they come from broken families?


Not necessarily. A lot of them are from wealthy families — sons of cops, bureaucrats. [My bodyguard and ex-yakuza boss] Mochizuki-san's grandfather was a cop, and his father worked for a government institution his whole life.


Sometimes, if parents were worried about their kid's drug use, they would take him to the local yakuza and be like, beat some sense into this kid, get him off drugs, make him a man. And they would do it. And then the kid would join the yakuza afterwards.


But I'm sure that's not what the parents wanted!

Well at least their kid's not on drugs, right? And he has a job. In fact, lots of normal people go to the yakuza to solve problems. In Japan, civil lawsuits take forever to get resolved, and even if you win the lawsuit nobody will enforce it — if a guy owes you money but won't pay up, police officers aren't going to go out there to seize his assets. If someone owes you money or you're in a civil dispute, the yakuza will take half of whatever they can get out of the person who wronged you. But at last you get half, and it's fast.


Are there any misconceptions we have about the yakuza?

Mochizuki-san is a wonderful father to his child. He's incredibly patient and never yells at him. Some yakuza parents make sure their children don't become yakuza. Some of them actually do charity work and contribute funds to orphanages and things. It's rare, but it always surprises me.


The other thing that surprises me is that on their days off they're at home wearing Mickey Mouse t-shirts and sweatpants, and I'm like, wow. I never would have pictured you like this when you're off the job. I know one yakuza boss who is really into akachan play, where he gets diapered like a baby and sucks on a lactating woman's tits. I'm like, this is what this fearsome guy does for pleasure?


From what you've told me about him, he seems like a perfectly decent guy. What made him join the yakuza?


Excitement, thrills, the promise of women. He racked up huge debts in a Soapland — Japan's legal brothels. He kept putting it on his tab until he couldn't pay it back. He was trying to raise money when the yakuza Soapland owners were like, why don't you work for these guys and you can pay me back?


What happens a lot now is that people graduate college and go work for some IT startup, and then they realize it's being bankrolled by the yakuza. The yakuza go, hey, this guy's smart. He earns money. We could use him. So they'll say to him: how would you like to become a member? We'll make you a corporate associate so you don't have to spend two years cleaning the office and answering the phone. It's employment for life! Because of the reputation of the yakuza, most people would be scared and hesitant to refuse. When you're privy to knowledge of how a large front company works, it's kind of hard to back out.


Do yakuza kill random people?


The traditional yakuza value is: katagi ni meiwaku wo kakenai. We do not bother ordinary citizens. You can come to us for gambling, drugs, or sex, and that's our business. But we're going to leave ordinary citizens alone. We're not involved in robberies, thefts, or muggings, and we don't rape people. This doesn't hold true anymore. Now it's all about money. The ideals that held up the traditional system of meritocracy are gone. You can buy your way into power. The classic yakuza life scheme used to be that you started at the bottom doing whatever enterprises, loan-sharking or prostituion or drug-running or extortion blackmail, pretty standard yakuza stuff. Eventually there would be a gang war and you'd shoot up a member of a rival gang, go to jail, and come out after 10 years to a higher position with a better salary. But as gang wars have declined and the organizations have moved into financial crimes like stock market manipulation or running front companies that are listed companies, capital has become more valuable than honor. There used to be a premium paid on upholding codes of what was proper yakuza living, but nobody pays attention to them anymore.


How involved are the yakuza in the way business in Japan is run today?


In the financial markets, I'd say about 20% of listed companies are heavily connected to the yakuza. There's a hell of a lot more money to be made moving a million shares of stock than a hundred bags of speed on the streets.


How about in politics?


The Liberal Democratic Party was founded on yakuza money. Former prime minister Koizumi's grandfather was a member of the Inagawa-kai; he was tattooed all the way down to his wrists. According to magazine articles written in the nineties, the current minister of finance Kamei Shizuka received $400,000 from a yakuza stock speculator and certainly received donations from the emperor of loan sharks.


What about in pop culture?


A huge part of the entertainment industry is run by the yakuza. When a rather dumb cop accidentally leaked all the Metropolitan Police Department files on Goto-gumi in 2007, a company called Burning Productions — one of the most powerful production companies in the country — was listed as an organized crime front company. Nobody in the Japanese media will write that, though, because they'll lose have access to their stars. It's like Hollywood in the 50s when the mafia had a big share in everything.


Do you think that will ever change? Will Japan ever run as a non-yakuza society?


For this to happen, Japan needs a few things. There would have to be a criminal conspiracy law so you can prosecute people at the top for crimes committed by people below them. There would have to be plea bargaining so people at the bottom would rat out people above them, and a witness protection program so that the people who make plea bargains aren't killed as soon as they get out of jail. You need wiretapping laws that allow you to wiretap — the laws are so stringent now that they're almost never used. If you put all those things into place, then Japan could get rid of the yakuza groups. They'd probably go underground but they would never be this powerful again.


Part of the reason they are so powerful now is that they're so out in the open. You can look at the Yamaguchi-gumi headquarters on Google Maps. The Inagawa-kai office is across from the Ritz Carlton. Every year, the NPA releases a list of the 22 organized crime groups with their names and addresses. It's not a mystery who they are or where they are.


What's preventing change from taking place?


Polticians. They don't want a criminal conspiracy law in the books. I don't think there are any politicians who don't have any dirt of them. And if any politician starts coming down hard on organized crime — if they don't physcially kill him like they did the mayor of Nagasaki — they'll ruin his reputation.


Here's the thing: Japanese people kind of like the yakuza. They admire them. There are movies about them, comic books about them, there are fan magazines... they're part of the culture. They promote traditional values.


One of the reasons Japan has low street crime rates is because these guys are very good enforcers. In the neighborhoods where they're running businesses or collecting protection money, you won't see people getting mugged because the yakuza don't want people to be afraid to come there and spend money. They are a second police force and in that sense, and perform a valuable role in Japanese society.

Over the next few months, we'll be collaborating with Jake Adelstein to bring you a series of Boing Boing exclusive yakuza stories. In a few weeks, we'll go behind-the-scenes with Adelstein and his yakuza buddies to watch how they do ordinary things like play video games, use the computer, and chop off body parts. Stay tuned!

Photo by Ania Przeplasko; Model Lu Nagata, aerial performance artist and instructor

Previously:


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