Word: japanism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Yakuza gang bosses in Japan give interviews on TV, dine openly with politicians and traditionally hand out business cards, so everyone knows how to find them. Roughly 40,000 mobsters belong to the Yamaguchi-gumi alone. Everybody knows that the yakuza get money from bars and restaurants, construction companies, even private-detective agencies. But these days some of their principal businesses include securities trading and management consulting. They are increasingly, Jake Adelstein tells us in his gripping descent into the underworld, Tokyo Vice, like bankers "with guns...
...Adelstein should know. As a rare foreigner working the crime beat at the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's (and the world's) largest-circulation newspaper, he got so close to the yakuza that he found himself buying cigarettes for former gang leaders and being guarded round the clock by a fiercely loyal retired crime boss. This all seems like an unlikely fate for a "goofy Jewish-American" in mismatched socks, as Adelstein presents himself, but his juicy and vividly detailed account of investigations into the shadowy side of Japan shows him to be more enterprising, determined and crazy than most...
...Adelstein arrived in Japan as a teenager, eager, as many foreigners are, to learn about Buddhism, tranquility and the nuances of Japanese. But soon after, he applied for - and, astonishingly, secured - a job with the Yomiuri in 1992 as a Japanese-language reporter. In some of the freshest pages of the book, our unlikely hero tells us about his initiation into the seamy, tough-guy Japan beneath the public courtesies, a racy world filled with reporters given names like Chuckles and Googly. He digs up details in "the Chichibu Snack-mama murder case." He sleeps with a yakuza's moll...
...early on. "We're in the information industry." As the kid from Missouri begins to disappear deeper and deeper into the demimonde - sleeping in police HQ, drawing dangerously close to a hostess who works at the Den of Delicious and taking on the gangs responsible for human-trafficking in Japan - he comes to lose all sense of where his life ends and the 8th Circle of Hell strip club begins. As a mobster's mistress (she is one of 15) notes, Adelstein is almost a twin to her criminal lover: "You're both workaholics, with high libidos, adrenaline junkies...
...Compared to the quantities consumed by oogui champs, the Windows 7 Whopper is a light snack. But it's just the kind of product that Burger King needs to nibble at McDonald's 75% share of the fast food burger market in Japan. After being squeezed entirely out of the Japan burger market in 2001, Burger King returned to Tokyo in June 2007 with a more regional menu, including a teriyaki Whopper. And this summer, Burger King launched the Angry Whopper, with a campaign that encouraged people to shout their frustrations at full volume to win a year's worth...