True Crime Japan by Paul Murphy

Author:Paul Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-4-8053-1342-8
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Make-believe

Forty-eight-year-old Koji Miyashita was the opposite of Mr. Ishii. He obviously dreaded the thought of going back to jail and appeared not to be scared of his mother at all, though she was furious at him. He was in court on charges of stealing four gallons of heating oil from a building company and two packs of cigarettes from a convenience store. He had already been jailed twice for theft, so another spell behind bars was a certainty. He was also being charged as a habitual offender, so he could expect a stiffer sentence than before. His mother, who looked close to 80 years old, was called as a witness. She bowed in three directions—to the prosecutors, to the judge, and to the people in the public gallery—before she reached the stand. Like many Japanese people her age, she was small and dignified. She was mortified by her son’s behavior. He looked mortified, too, at the sight of his mother heading to the witness stand. He furrowed his brow and sucked in his lips.

His mother ripped into him. “I have never felt anything like it. I am in such a rage with him that I can’t even look at him. He has done this type of thing so many times now I have lost count. On top of that, he has deceived me again and again and again. I’m furious…I can’t forgive him.”

Before his recent spells in jail, Mr. Miyashita had trodden the familiar path of mankind: he had gotten married, had a family, and worked steadily. But then he lost his job and got divorced. “His family hit hard times,” his mother said. “His wife came to me for help. I helped them—not with money, but with vegetables and rice.”

“Why did he commit these crimes?” the lawyer asked.

“After the divorce he started to gamble,” said his mother. “He now has a habit, I think, of stealing, and he is addicted to gambling.”

The gambling to which she referred was in pachinko parlors, which are gambling halls masquerading as game arcades. Pachinko is played by putting small silver metal balls into a machine and hoping that they fall in particular ways to yield a prize that can be exchanged for cash. The pachinko parlor has become an institution in postwar Japan. The Japanese equivalent of the Irish Sunday morning pub queue I remember from my childhood is the morning pachinko line of gamblers who hope that early arrival will guarantee a seat at their favorite machine. The attractions of the pachinko parlor are not immediately obvious to outsiders. The interior is usually a wall of noise and a cloud of cigarette smoke; there is virtually no social interaction, and the game itself appears thoroughly uninteresting at first glance.

In the weeks before he was arrested, Mr. Miyashita had been spending his days in pachinko parlors. But that only partly explained his mother’s rage. She was mostly furious because the money he was gambling there was cash that she had given him while he was waiting to get payment from a phantom “job.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.