Author: VD

Disorganized Crime

Having caught the occasional glimpse of the younger Yakuza in their leisure hours back in the day, I was fascinated with the effect that the Exclusion Laws of 2010-2011 have had in almost eliminating the power of organized crime in Japan, although I do wonder how much of that was related to the rise of the Clown World-friendly Princes of the Yen that took place over the same period. In any event, the vacuum left behind was always going to be filled, which, of course, is exactly what the new book, TOKYO TOKURYU is about. However, it occurred to me that since few would necessarily recognize what tokuryū is, or why it even exists in the first place, a basic primer might be useful.

Tokuryū (匿流) is a term coined by Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA) in 2024 to describe a new and growing form of loosely organized criminal groups that have emerged as an alternative to traditional yakuza organizations. The term combines the Japanese words tokumei (匿名, anonymous) and ryūdo (流動, fluid), reflecting the groups’ absence of hierarchy and their flexible, anonymous operations.

According to the National Police Agency (NPA), more than 10,000 people arrested between September 2021 and February 2023 are classified as tokuryū. Yasuhiro Tsuyuki, chief of the NPA, said shortly after the 2023 watch theft sentencing: “Such robberies committed in busy shopping streets in the city centre in daylight have reached unprecedented levels. The police nationwide need to cooperate on investigating quickly and effectively.”

In Fukuoka prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu, police last month established a 100-member division to combat the growing tokuryū threat. The prefecture is a former yakuza stronghold.

Violent crime is rare in Japan, and a string of dozens of burglaries across the country from 2021 to 2023, one resulting in the death of a 90-year-old woman, shocked the country.

The burglaries are alleged to have been orchestrated by a Japanese group operating out of the Philippines. Nicknamed “Luffy” after a famous manga character used by one of its leaders on messaging apps, the gang also ran telephone scams and extorted Japanese businesspeople working in Manila. More than 30 of its members have been extradited to Japan, with a handful still detained in the Philippines. Among the members are former yakuza. Other tokuryū groups have formed alliances with traditional gangsters, and are suspected of sharing profits with them.

After continuous crackdowns on yakuza syndicates, their membership fell to 20,400 last year, from a peak of more than 180,000 in the 1960s, as the older generations found it harder to tempt young men with promises of easy money.

Stricter laws, including those targeting businesses with links to gangs that had once operated with near-impunity, have made a life of crime increasingly unappealing: yakuza members are forbidden from opening bank accounts, obtaining a credit card, taking out insurance policies or even signing a contract for a mobile phone.

If you’re interested in the post-Yakuza Japanese underworld, or if you like Higashino novels, give TOKYO TOKURYU a try. There will be more Inspector Toda novels coming out this year.

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Too Crazy for Bluesky

Popehat, aka attorney Ken White, has been permanently banned from Bluesky, apparently for a post in which he suggested there was a moral upside to Elon Musk’s death. The Bluesky body politic, meanwhile, is losing its mind over this. Popehat is one of their heroes.

Because Mr. White, once deemed one of Salon’s 25 conservatives worth following on Twitter, is, quite literally, mentally ill, he naturally doesn’t see why he shouldn’t be able to advocate murdering a man who opposes the violent invasion of the UK by foreigners. Also, a correction – he wasn’t permanently banned, he was only suspended for four days.

Elon Musk is the world’s richest man — a trillionaire, briefly, until a market correction. He and his ideology are also supported by the administration of the most powerful nation on Earth. He is immune to normal social, economic, political, or legal limits. He can use his hugely influential platform to encourage pogroms without social, economic, political, or legal consequences.

It’s simply factual to say, as I did, that the only thing that will stop him is dying. Because my medium was a short Bluesky post, I mentioned him being killed. I suppose it would also stop him if he overdosed on Ketamine or choked on a piece of steak or got ass cancer or crashed one of his vehicles or something. But that would make a long post. Though the post has drawn plenty of criticism, nobody has explained to me how I am wrong about the limited circumstances that will stop him from encouraging racial violence.

I wonder if he would apply that logic to other rich people, particularly those who advocate racial genocide in the Middle East?

Regardless, and presumably because Mr. White is mentally ill, he clearly doesn’t understand that he shares what he believes Mr. Musk’s position to be. By his own logic, if there is no way to stop poor, non-white, downtrodden people from invading the UK and victimizing the English people through normal social, economic, political, or legal means, then the only thing that will stop them is the very fate that he is advocating for Mr. Musk.

Of course, Mr. White’s position isn’t the same as Mr. Musk’s position. Mr. Musk wants those poor, non-white, downtrodden people who are invading the UK, and other countries around the world to be repatriated to their home countries, peacefully and legally. And he is warning people, as I have warned people for more than two decades, that every failure to repatriate the immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers will eventually result in large scale violence and war, regardless of whether the country invaded is the UK, Palestine, Germany, Japan, or the United States.

So, ironically, we have a mentally ill individual advocating the killing of someone who is not advocating death for anyone. And, unsurprisingly, Bluesky decided to unsuspend Mr. White after four days, because it is a safe space for mentally ill people who want to be able to publicly advocate the death of public figures on the basis of their positions on social policy in other countries.

Now, I would be remiss if I failed to give Mr. White a chance to defend himself concerning his mental illness.

I’ve made an effort for years to be open and honest about things like depression and anxiety, because I know it’s healthier, and because the social stigma around it should be crushed. This incident resulted, as is often the case, in losers mocking me for being crazy, and slightly more pretentious people obliquely referring to my mental heath. 

Mr. White wishes that we would stop observing that he is, by his own admission, mentally ill, and instead pay attention to the illogical incoherencies and death wishes produced by his mental illness. And, presumably because he is mentally ill, he does not comprehend that doing the latter leads invariably to the former.

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The Useless College Degree

It used to be that at least the possession of a university degree meant that you weren’t an innumerate, half-illiterate peasant. This is no longer the case.

Gone are the days of university freshmen reading classical philosophers like Plato or contemporary pedagogues like Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, incoming college students are lucky if they can get through Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.”

According to a new “Survey of Adult Skills” conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development – a forum for 38 high-income, predominantly Western countries – a not insignificant number of adult students enrolled in higher education are now reading and doing math at a level which, in a more functional society, would be alarming for a middle schooler.

The survey, first spotted by the Economist, tested around 160,000 people of all ages, across all 38 member states. It found that across all OECD member countries, a full 8 percent of college students are reading at the level of a ten-year-old, if not worse. While countries like Germany and France rang in at under 5 percent, countries like Poland, Israel, and the United States blew the curve at 21, 20, and 14 percent, respectively.

The numbers aren’t much better when it comes to math.

Across OECD countries, 9 percent of college students do math at or below a ten-year-old level. In Italy, the US, and Slovakia, that figure jumps to over 15 percent — only outdone by Israel, where roughly 21 percent of college students were underachieving at the same low benchmark.

This certainly puts the lie to the concept of Progress, or the idea that we are smarter than our ancestors because Science. But giving pieces of papers to peasants no more makes them educated or intelligent than giving pieces of paper to foreigners modifies their genetics.

Part of the reason for the decline of the Western countries is the mass importation of sub-100 IQs bringing down the average. But a more significant element is the convergence of the schools and universities, neither of which are still capable of performing what used to be their primary functions.

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The Verdict of Mars

Success always contains the seeds of failure. Unfortunately, Donald Trump doesn’t realize that his strategic bluffery has been comprehensively called by Iran and its allies.

US President Donald Trump has declared the fragile ceasefire with Iran “over” after the US military conducted a series of strikes on the Islamic Republic over alleged attacks on three tankers that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz. On Wednesday, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said it hit dozens of Iranian ground and navy targets “in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz,” denouncing Tehran for “aggression [that] was unwarranted, dangerous, and a clear violation of the ceasefire.”

Iranian media reported that one of the tankers – which was linked to Qatar – was attacked as it was sailing through the strait and “ignoring repeated warnings.” A government source told Press TV that any traffic through the chokepoint should be approved by Tehran.

As tensions escalated, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) said it launched strikes on dozens of US military assets in Bahrain and Kuwait, adding that it downed an American MQ-9 drone.

Speaking on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye, Trump lashed out at the Iranian leadership, calling them “scum,” “cuckoo,” “sick,” “vicious, [and] violent people,” and confirmed that the ceasefire is “over.”

“I don’t want to deal with them… I’ll speak to our negotiators that want to negotiate… [but] as far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars,” he said.

So when the economy implodes, understand that it is Netanyahu and Trump who are the two primary individuals responsible. They chose to fight this war. And it looks like every deranged leader in history who couldn’t bring himself to accept the verdict of Mars and throw in the towel before defeat became undeniable, they’re going to take the ship down with them.

Remember, Iran defeated the Epstein Alliance with only a small amount of assistance from its allies. Even if the US and Israel up their antes, Iran will be able to call them and raise. And I don’t think the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia are going to stay onside for long.

UPDATE: “the USS Michael Murphy (DDG-112) took a direct hit from an Iranian “Noor” ASCM, after their IADS system failed to intercept a swarm attack, last night. The ship is on currently on fire and there are significant casualties. Multiple KIA. Early reports of the her sinking are premature.”

The report is as yet unconfirmed, but don’t hold your breath expecting the Department of War to do so even if it was sunk and lost with all hands.

UPDATE: In the initial response to this aggression, the naval and aerospace forces of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, in a joint missile and drone operation, struck 85 locations of important US military facilities at Salman Port, the US Fifth Fleet area in Bahrain, and Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait”

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How to Stop Corruption

China has a less-corrupt government system than any government in the West these days.

A court in eastern China has sentenced a former city official to death for taking more than 2.2bn yuan ($325m; £243m) in bribes over 30 years.

Yang Youlin, who served in various positions in Nanjing city from 1993 to 2023, was also convicted of embezzlement, abuse of power and money laundering, with his ill-gotten gains amounting to one of the highest in recent years.

The 69-year-old exploited his roles to help others secure engineering contracts, land transfers and financing, in exchange for money and valuables, said state media.

Yang was investigated as part of President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption crackdown which has cut through military ranks and high-level banking, among other sectors.

Yang, who spent much of his career working on economic and technological development in Nanjing, had committed offences “of an extremely serious nature” and “caused exceptionally heavy losses to the interests of the state and the people”, a court in Changzhou city said on Monday.

Since coming to power, President Xi has launched waves of anti-corruption drives, which critics say have also been used as a tool to purge political rivals.

Death sentences for white collar crimes however remain rare, though they are meted out occasionally, typically if the cases involve large sums exceeding 1bn yuan.

For instance, former finance chief Lai Xiaomin was executed in 2021 for taking 1.8bn yuan in bribes over a 10-year period.

Li Jianping, a former Inner Mongolia official, was executed in 2024 for embezzling and taking bribes totaling more than 3bn yuan.

In many other cases, the courts handed out jail terms or suspended death sentences, which get commuted to life imprisonment after a specified duration.

If your political rivals are corrupt, then obviously an anti-corruption campaign will purge them. That’s a feature, not a bug. The difference between Xi and the ineffectual Trump could not be more obvious than the former’s massively successful war on corruption and Trump’s total failure to arrest or convict, let alone execute, a single traitorous and corrupt government pedophile.

There’s no excuse for that. Waging a stupid and disastrous war on Iran while failing to make peace with Russia is always going to be a major stain on his legacy. But that’s how things go for big-talking cowards. Sooner or later, the rhetoric has to become real, or it just looks ridiculous.

Trump isn’t a terrible president. But he had a real opportunity for greatness, and for one reason or another, he failed to seize his moment. Now, barring the possibility that there are things going on that we can’t presently see, it appears he’ll go down with his friends in Clown World.

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The Introduction of Inspector Toda

Castalia House is introducing both a new imprint and a new series. Today marks the launch of KURO NOIR, also known as 黒書房, which is our line of books focusing on Japanese crime literature, including both English originals and original translations. We’re pleased to announce the Inspector Toda series, written by Masashi Sato, which introduces the detective from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police in TOKYO TOKURYU.

TOKYO TOKURYU

When a retired widower is found beaten and stabbed in his home in one of Tokyo’s most exclusive old neighborhoods, Inspector Keisuke Toda has every reason to believe it’s just another in a series of home invasions targeting the elderly. The method appears to match. The victims are consistent. The cross-departmental task force investigating the crimes is satisfied that it is no different than the previous ones..

But Toda isn’t.

The first four robberies left their victims alive. The fifth left an elderly man dead on a tatami floor in a way that tells a different and more insidious story. As Toda’s team works the series alongside a separate investigation into a papa katsu ring exploiting teenage girls, a pattern begins to emerge in the architecture of both operations. The same anonymous recruitment pipelines. The same disposable teenage labor. The same invisible hierarchy.

And gradually, Toda begins to see what no one else on the task force has observed.

Written in the tradition of Keigo Higashino’s masterful procedurals, TOKYO TOKURYU is a novel about the difference between what a crime looks like and what it is, and what happens to the survivors when the truth finally emerges.

In addition to the publication of the first Inspector Toda novel, the second one, THE PLATINUM TRIBE, is now available for preorder and will be released on August 5th.

EXCERPT

He went home that evening at a reasonable hour for once. Asako had made nikujaga, and for the first time in a week the four of them sat down to dinner together. Sōta was talking about a baseball game at school. Yuki was quieter than usual, stealthily glancing at her phone in between bites until Asako finally told her to put it away.

“Something at school?” Toda asked.

Yuki shrugged. “A girl in my class got in trouble. She answered a job listing she found online. It was supposed to be easy work, like handing out flyers or something. They told her to send a photo of her student ID.”

“Sounds sketchy.”

“Yeah, another girl told her it was just a scam, so she stopped.”

Toda set down his chopsticks. “What kind of listing?”

“I don’t know. It just said ‘easy work, same-day payment. ¥30,000 for a few hours.’ It looked like a regular part-time job ad.”

“Where did she find it?”

“I don’t know. Some messaging app. I don’t remember which one. It’s not that unusual, Dad. People post stuff like that all the time.”

She said it matter-of-factly, the way a fifteen-year-old states something about the world she lives in that her parents don’t fully understand.

“Well, I hope you don’t answer anything like that. It sounds like one of the ways traffickers recruit young—”

“Keisuke!”

Asako broke in and interrupted him before he could say ‘prostitutes’.

“Ah, young people,” he shifted gears lamely.

Toda looked at Asako and nodded ruefully. The warning in her dark, beautiful eyes was perfectly clear. Not in front of the children!

He didn’t raise the subject again that evening. After dinner he sat in his chair in the living room and tried to read. The book was a collection of Matsumoto Seichō’s short crime fiction that he’d been working through slowly for the past two months, but tonight the sentences didn’t seem to want to connect to the next one. He found himself reading the same paragraph three times in a row and still couldn’t have told anyone what it was about.

Temporary. No fixed membership. Jobs posted on messaging apps. Kids recruited with the promise of easy money, asked for ID photos that became leverage. A girl in his daughter’s class had almost walked into it, whatever it was, and had been saved only because her friend recognized the trap.

He put the book down and stared at the wall. Somewhere between what Ōnishi had told him and what Yuki had mentioned at dinner, there was a shape he couldn’t quite see yet. The robberies were connected, somehow, but the people involved weren’t, necessarily. They were connected by a method that was being distributed, like a product, to whomever was willing to carry it out.

Toda didn’t know how to describe the situation. There wasn’t a word for it. But he was beginning to understand that his four cases were not a series of crimes in the way he’d originally believed them to be, crimes committed by a crew, or even two crews, working a territory. They seemed to be something more subtle, more insidious.

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Diversity Victory Lap

It’s not white supremacy that is going to cause massive violence across the West. It’s diversity doing victory laps:

Xbox Indian CEO Asha Sharma just announced firing 3,200 Americans.

She filed for 5,000 H-1B visa hires this year.

Asha was appointed CEO of Xbox in February by Indian Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

How is this not a matter of national security? Why are any corporations being permitted any H-1B visa hires?

What happened to the real Donald Trump?

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The Zero Literature Campaign

We know about Clown World’s Zero History campaign. We can see signs of it everywhere from Fructidor to the Khmer Rouge. But it was also accompanied by a Zero Literature campaign. This is not just our imagination at work. You can still see it in action. But the campaign to disappear traditional literature with historical Western values began at least a century before the ALA was cancelling Laura Ingalls Wilder.

A division of the American Library Association has voted to remove Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a major children’s book award over concerns with how the early-to-mid 20th century author portrayed blacks and Native Americans.

The Association for Library Service to Children’s board made the unanimous decision Saturday at a meeting in New Orleans. The name has been changed to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

The association says the work of Wilder — best known for her Little House on the Prairie novels — “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values.”

The first award was given to Wilder in 1954

I have no doubt that if Laura Ingalls Wilder had published a century before she did in a language other than English, we would never have heard of her. Both Benito Perez Galdos and Zenaide Fleuriot were much more significant in their native languages than Wilder was in English, and yet somehow, the English publishing world never saw fit to translate them despite producing dozens of editions of far less popular, far less marketable, and far less significant works.

This is why it is absolutely vital to stop blindly supporting those things that the mainstream feeds you, and go out of your way to find those things and support those things that are in line with your values, and not the “core values” of things like the ALSC.

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Defense is Not a Spectator Sport

That was some impressively bad defense over the last two days, first by Brazil, then the USA.

Gabriel is not capable of going toe-to-toe with Erling Halland physically. He knows this from their Premier League battles. He just got overpowered on Halland’s first goal.

Both Gabriel and the other Brazilian were a little lazy on Halland’s second goal. He was obviously going to shoot, but he wasn’t far enough out for them to be content with that. Gabriel just waited in the box and the other defender didn’t go down to one knee to block the shot, which is what allowed Halland to put it right through his legs. But you have to commit to blocking the shot at that range, especially when you’ve got a man behind you for support in case it’s a fake and he is going to break into the box.

I only saw the first half of the USA-Belgium game, but Tim Ream was terrible. Not only did he stand around and watch the Belgian forward score the first goal, but he jumped too early and took himself out of position for the second one. And every time he had the ball, he’d hold it too long, then pass it backwards.

I really don’t understand these coaches who just love passing the ball backwards and are content with one single shot per half. Do they understand that you don’t get any points for possession? The primary correlation with winning in soccer is shots on target, not time of possession. Anything you’re doing that reduces shots on target is reducing your chance of winning. The USA had 56% possession, lost the shots on target contest 7-2, and lost 4-1.

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