Job Discussion Forums

[uberscheisse]

last night started out festive. my coworker's birthday, izakaya then karaoke. we were having a great time singing badly.

it went sour after i went to the bathroom. some dude in the bathroom was trying to strike up a conversation with me, and because of my elementary japanese and his drunkenness i really didn't understand him. i did my best to smile, shrug and "sumimasen. nihongo wo chotto hanashimasu. wakarimasen deshita." i gave a little bow and went on my way. i'm polite like that.

he followed me to our karaoke room, barged in and sat down. it was funny for about 30 seconds, after which he started getting aggressive with the female quotient of the room, and we asked him to leave. he didn't take that well. after he left, he started barging the door again, which i barricaded. turned out he had dropped his little glass bead buddhist bracelet, which i returned to him with a "gomen nasai" and shut the door again.

this made him irate, and we called both the staff and the cops after he started getting more aggressive. both parties proved useless.

he pushed the birthday boy's wife, and he shoved my head. i don't mind being shoved by a drunk idiot, it takes a lot more to get me to fight, but the first infraction was inexcusable.

during this he kept gesturing at himself saying "japanese mafia! japanese mafia!". this i only sort of believed.

in the lobby of the place it almost ended up in fisticuffs because he was demanding i bow to him and say sorry. i said sorry, but i refused to bow any lower than eye contact because the guy was such a piece of work. this made him even madder and he shoved me a couple more times, but we eventually left, ignored him and cooler heads prevailed.

so, foresight and hindsight were both 20/20 here, despite the fact i was also a little tipsy. but this person was more deserving of a beating than anyone i've met in the last 10 or so years. he really needed to get knocked on his ass, but we turned the other cheek and let him be the drunk moron that he was.

had he actually been japanese mafia, i suppose it's a good thing i didn't punch him out, as i'm one of maybe 40 (visibly) gaijin folk in this town.

in vancouver, if i had beat up a dude like this, the cops may have been called, and i would have been patted on the back for a job well done.

however, i lived in korea for a few years, and if a foreigner fights a local there, the law is rarely on their side, no matter who is justified. there is also a thing often referred to as "blood money" where the person who loses the fight usually wins a settlement from the winner for their doctor bills. as a result, you see very few fights in korea. (korea got a lot of its laws and infrastructure set up during the japanese occupation, so many things end up being similar, i find.)

which leads me to my first question - 1. what's it like in japan?

please don't take this as a "hey, can i punch people out and get away with it?" query. i'm not a violent guy. i don't go looking for fights. i will, however, jump down the throat of a bully and happily get my ass kicked in the process. or win, whichever happens.

i am confident that i could have painted the sidewalk with this guy's face, or at least subdued him to the point where he would stop being such a kook and realize that there may be dire consequences to being aggressive with my friends.

2. what would the legal consequences have been for me? i'm especially wary of the possibility that japan's legal system is similar to korea's, and i will end up paying 200,000 - 1,000,000 yen in fines, or jailed if i can't pony up. i am aware that gaijin can be jailed for an unreasonably long time without trial in japan. just wondering what the cops' reaction would be, if they'd be more fair than korean cops, who are notoriously lazy, discriminatory and racist.

3. i am right in assuming that anyone claiming that they are yakuza is probably full of shit? am i right in assuming that a real yakuza wouldn't 1. be in a chain karaoke bar 2. wouldn't be starting random shit with strangers 3. wouldn't loudly proclaim himself to be part of a secretive organized criminal society in front of a bunch of onlookers?

and am i right in assuming that if i pound the crap out of someone who acts this way, the only repercussion would be that his 4 buddies might join in and that the cops may be called?

once again - please don't read anything into this. i'm not about to start looking for more poser gangsters to fight. i just am curious about consequence, since last night, doing the right thing involved punishing this guy. i don't regret not punching him, but i really wish i could have. he truly deserved it.

thanks.

[Miyazaki]

Unreal! Similar thing happened to me last night and I've never been threatened by someone claiming to be yakuza.

we were wating in line at a movie theater and suddenly this guy says in broken English "Get to the back of the line!" I was really surprised and kind of said, "What?" He repeated, "Get to the back of the line!" I told him that we were waiting in line and that we had been waiting for several minutes and had even got there before he had. He took out his phone and said, "Get to the back of the line f*cker or I'm going to call my friends and they will come and beat you up. Do you know who owns this place?" (I believe he was suggesting that he was mafia and that his boys would come running down to beat the sheit otta me).

I shrugged my shoulders and said, "I'm not going to get into a fight over this" and we walked away. I'm not really worried about any of these guys one-on-one, but I didn't dare call his bluff because I just did not know whether he was serious or not - he dfinitely sounded serious!!!

Uber, you seem like a bright guy but you need to remember a couple of things. Rule number 1: DO NOT fight with Asian guys - whether you're in Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, China or Korea. If you were to hit this guy it is very likely that he would get on his phone and have his boys come down to help him. I've seen this play out several time sover the years in places like bangkok, phuket, tokyo, taipei - invariably 10 - 15 of these Asian guys come flying out of the woodwork - cars, neighboring bars - to attack the outnumber foreign guys. and there will always be more of them than there are me - I'm often alone and only have a few friends that i hang with - i'm not connected in any way (i.e., locally with family, school teachers, relatives, friends) and obviously have no local power. i'm just an EFL teacher! you could very well come out on the losing end - hitting a local guy in a bar or outside a club is high risk behaviour in Asia - or anywhere you don't have the support of friends.

a guy from Edmonton I knew was attending Niigata INtl. University doing an MBA back in 2002. He was out partying in Omiya, Saitama one night with friends and went into an Izakaya but they were refused serivce (No Gaijin Allowed!). He and his friends reacted negatively and started mouthing off to the staff, telling them that they were racist, etc. and i think they also demanded to be served and basically refused to leave. The staff must have called in the local yaks in to solve the problem. he told me about 15 japanese guys came running up the stairs and grabbed him and his 3 or 4 friends and literally threw them down the stairs into the street and started beating, kicking them. he was hurt so bad that he spent over a week in the hospital - the japenaese guys were kicking him and broke his jaw. there were more injuries but i forget what else happend to him, but he said his jaw is still fugged up. in the end, they all filed police reports and the police advised them to let it go. the police were very clear that the men that had beat them were yakuza and that it was in their best interest to forget about it. the police were very reluctant to do any investigation into the assaults.

about 6 years ago, a colleague of mine was saying how he was dancing in a night club and there was an altercation involving local guys near where he and his friends were standing. he was grabbed by a local guy who put a gun to his head. he sheit. he was with a few local friends who were able to quickly explain that it was anothere guy who had done whatever it was that upset them - that they had the wrong guy / group. the gangster realized he had made a mistake and let my colleague free. i said, "There are all kinds of fake handguns - BB guns that look like a Baretta or Glock -how did you know it wasn't a fake!" He was like, "I don't know - it felt like a gun on my head an dlooked like a gun."

one final recent story comes to mind where I had to walk away even though i didn't really want to. i was walking home from drinking with friends one night and saw this guy, maybe in his 20s, run up to a girl (his girlfriend it probably), grab her by the hair and throw her on the ground. I said, "Hey!" and ran up to him. He looked at me and calmly said in English, "This is none of your business." I looked around and there were other local men looking on and standing on the sidewalk (the coupel were actually on the road) and I suddenly realized that I was out of my comfort zone and worried. i just shook my head and walked away. who knows what would have happend to me if i pushed that guy or got into it with him. again, i have no back up - there is only one of me and dozens of them.

oh yeah, about Vancouver - don't be so sure about that my friend! People get shot in the face outside bars nowadays in Vancouver. I'm not going to spend time googling the news articles, but it isn't always gangster-on-gangster gun violence either (although there is a violent gang war going on in Vancouver at the moment).

discretion, man. your mouth can work for you or against you in these situations. smile and just walk away if they give you the chance - and often before they beat the crap out of you, it seems they do give you a chance to fugg off. and then you never know if the guy has a knife, gun or taser or pepper spray or some kind of weapon. and last night, instead of getting into a fight; maybe getting seriously hurt or even killed, i was drinking beer with my friends.

i'm sure other posters here (and Korea - since i know you've spent a lot of time living and working there) can relate other similar stories.

[gonzarelli]

What do you think will happen to you if you beat up a Japanese guy and the cops are called?

[Glenski]

You were wise not to get into a fight. Yakuza are not to be messed with, for all the reasons and examples described above. You will either be ignored by the police, or considered the aggressor. Tie into a yakuza, and you risk a lot. Have heard of a guy that refused to say he was sorry for bumping into a yakuza, escalating the conversation into insults, and then later getting similar treatment to what Miyazaki described.

You did the right thing. If someone says they are mafia, do you want to risk the truth? They probably have nothing to fear by saying who they really are.

[Apsara]

Quite possibly a chimpira (junior yakuza), showing off.

I know an Australian guy who punched a Japanese guy in the face and broke his nose. He claimed the Japanese guy started it, but it was the Australian guy who spent 23 days in prison- definitely not something to risk.

[uberscheisse]

[Chris_Travel_the_world]

How many yakuza members you think there are in Japan? And if you're not in a big city what are the odds that you're going to run into any?

My friends dad pretends that he's yakuza sometimes to get better service or just mess with people. I really doubt that the guy you met was a yakuza member but I do think walking away was the smart thing to do. I'm not sure if I would have had the self restraint.

Interesting to hear these stories,