Word: pachinko
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...They were supposed to protect the family," says sociologist Yoko Shoji. "Now people just pity them." So what does oyaji mean now? Kazuhito Suzuki, a 20-year-old construction worker who admits to beating up an oyaji, snorts and rolls his eyes. Sitting on the front stoop of a pachinko parlor, he takes a drag on his cigarette and watches a parade of older men passing by. None of them looks him in the eye, none dares ask him to stop blocking the doorway. "They smell," he says. "The minute I get on a train in Tokyo, I can smell...
...Joji Obara was born in 1952 to an impoverished Korean family in postwar Osaka. His father had been a scrap collector, then a taxi driver who worked his way into owning a fleet of cars and a string of pachinko parlors from which he amassed a fortune. Perhaps mindful of the discrimination faced by Koreans, when the young Obara - then known by his Korean name Kim - was asked to pen a farewell sentiment in his junior-high class yearbook, he wrote: "Upbringing is more important than family name...
...times, leading a desultory, undistinguished existence, punctuated by his disastrous forays into real estate speculation. He formed an investment company, Plant, in 1988, relatively late in the bubble cycle. When the economy collapsed, nearly taking Obara's assets with it, his mother, who still controlled the lucrative pachinko operations, helped bail her son out, at one point paying off a creditor nearly $33 million in cash. Following these business failings, Obara's company reportedly became a front for the Sumiyoshi yakuza - branded Japan's second-largest organized crime syndicate by the national police - who kept him afloat by employing...