世論 What Japan Thinks

Regardless of how long I live here, and how often people try to explain the Yakuza to me, I always shake my head in disbelief when I see stories like this one on the guys who put the Organised into Organised Crime.

Crime syndicates in Japan had around 86,300 members as of Dec. 31, down some 700 from a year earlier, marking the first drop in 10 years, the National Police Agency said Thursday. The Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi, accounted for 50.1% of all the members, passing the majority threshold for the first time.

What sort of questionnaire got these answers? Do the gangs submit annual reports? I can only imagine the text: “The chairman reports that outstanding bad debts are down 22.9% due to a 16.3% increase in the number of kneecaps broken. Workforce loyalty is also strong, as indicated by a two-thirds reduction in pinkie removals.” Three significant figures of accuracy suggests relatively detailed numbers are being obtained from somewhere, but where?

Note that the graph above may not, in fact, be truthful. In fact, I may very well have made it all up!

I obtained some figures of international marriage in Japan, which I shall summarise here, giving the historical trends from 1985 to 2003. The exact source of this statistical data is unclear, but presumably from some government agency.

UPDATE: I found the source, an Excel sheet on the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare web site.

	1985	1990	1995	2000	2001	2002	2003
All couples	735,850	722,138	791,888	798,138	799,999	757,331	740,191
Husband and wife both Japanese	723,669	696,512	764,161	761,875	760,272	721,452	704,152
Either foreigner	12,181	25,626	27,727	36,263	39,727	35,879	36,039
Husband Japanese, wife foreign	7,738	20,026	20,787	28,326	31,972	27,957	27,881
Wife Japanese, husband foreign	4,443	5,600	6,940	7,937	7,755	7,922	8,158

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