Beyond the romantic notions of Japanese martial arts as some kind of path to enlightenment or self-realization, they still have lots of practical applications. Japanese cops are one group of people who still incorporate martial arts into their everyday work.

Japanese police work in a very different environment with a different set of tools and expectations than, say, American cops. While an American police officer using their gun is uncommon, it’s even more rare with Japanese police.

Using a gun in Japan, even if you’re a police officer, carries with it incredible consequences (the paperwork is the real killer), so it’s no surprise that the police have a wide arsenal of less lethal methods of subduing criminals.

In that arsenal is a martial art known as 逮捕術, or taiho-jutsu, which literally translates into “arrest technique.” It’s used by police, Imperial guard, the Japanese Self-Defense Force, Kamen Riders, Sailor Scouts, and pretty much every law enforcement and military agency in Japan.

May or may not use taiho jutsu

Japanese law enforcement has used martial arts for a long, long time, but the modern taiho jutsu didn’t start to take shape until after WWII, around 1947. Post-war Japan was more or less entirely ruled by the occupying United States forces, which placed some restrictions on the way that Japanese police operated, including limiting their use of physical force and traditional martial arts.

At first, this caused problems; the country was in ruins and unrest, and limiting police meant that they had a hard time keeping order.

Fortunately, Japanese police officers turned lemons into lemonade and took the opportunity to basically build a new martial art from scratch.

Fact: all criminals wear hockey masks

If you know about Krav Maga, the martial art developed by Israeli police and military, then you have a pretty good idea of what taiho jutsu is all about. Both were developed for military and law enforcement, and both are built out of other martial arts.

Taiho jutsu, unlike Krav Maga, had the benefit of being created in a place with a strong martial arts tradition. When the Tokyo police bureau was in the process of creating taiho jutsu, it gathered masters from lots of different martial arts including judo and kendo, along with experts in armed combat too.

The martial art that was created in the postwar era was existed ever since, with minor revisions along the way. It incorporates lots of ways of disarming people with hand-to-hand combat, in addition to using police batons and, heaven forbid, guns.

When Japanese police aren’t laying down the law against would-be criminals, they practice and show off their skills in exhibition matches between officers. Not only is it nice to work out aggression against co-workers in a sancation environment, but these exhibitions have the added bonus of providing officers with the incentive to train harder to beat their peers.

Of course, taiho jutsu looks a lot different on the street than it does in an exhibition where all participants are wearing protective gear and have the same training, but these sorts of exhibition matches are still impressive. You get to see it all in action without knocking over a Family Mart.

Not all police officers learn exactly the same thing; some parts of the country emphasize particular styles, whether it’s judo, kendo, or aikido. But one thing’s for sure: if you decide to break the law (like dancing past a certain time of night), you might learn pretty quickly what kind of martial arts your arresting officer knows.

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But more importantly, the Yamaguchi family has basically had a yakuza monopoly for the last few decades, gobbling up more territory and profits than any other yakuza family in Japan.

In one interview with online magazine The Rumpus, yakuza expert Jake Adelstein compares the Yamaguchi to the house that Walton built:

Adelstein: They basically have a monopoly. You can’t have a price war with Walmart.

Rumpus: The Yamaguchi-gumi is the Walmart of the yakuza.

Adelstein: It is. It occupies so much turf now.

How did the Yamaguchi get to be the Walmart of the yakuza, driving out all of the small, mom-and-pop yakuza families? Low, rollback prices? Big box stores? Elderly greeters at the front of every yakuza business?

It’s easy to imagine that the Yamaguchi became a monopoly through some dramatic chain of events that culminated in a massive shootout, but the Yamaguchi’s rise to power was a lot less cinematic.

A lot of it comes down to adaptation.

Going Underground

For a lot of Japanese history, the yakuza were more or less openly tolerated. A lot of what the yakuza did was obviously illegal, but the groups themselves weren’t necessarily outlawed.

Yakuza groups were sort of seen as just another part of society. Members used to carry their very own yakuza business cards and be friendly with police.

But in the last couple of decades, the Japanese have passed more and more laws that make it harder for yakuza families to operate the way they used to. Nowadays, yakuza bosses bear some legal responsibility for the crimes of their underlings, and restaurants like Pizza Hut even refuse yakuza service.

So the Yamaguchi family, under the leadership of Yoshinori “Mr. Gorilla” Watanabe, adapted to these laws and toned down the stereotypical yakuza image.

You won’t see a lot of the ornate, full-body tattoos that the yakuza are known for, and not many underlings are slicing their pinkies off, either.

And for a group of mobsters, the yakuza barely use guns. Because of Japan’s strict gun laws, firing a gun at somebody violates so many laws that it’s better to just forget about the whole thing.

The Yamaguchi and really, the yakuza as a whole, became more subdued and focused less on the tradition and pageantry that made them stand out, and more on the things that made them so incredibly rich and powerful.

The Future of the Yakuza

Even though the Yamaguchi has made it to the top of the yakuza ladder, it doesn’t mean that they have it easy. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

The Japanese government and foreign countries have continued to tighten the vice on the Yamaguchi and other yakuza groups. The #2 boss in the Yamaguchi was recently sentenced to six years in jail for extortion, and last year the US government froze all of the Yamaguchi’s American assets.

But despite all of the hardships, there’s no doubt that the Yamaguchi, and all yakuza groups in Japan, will continue to blackmail, extort, traffic, and generally terrorize Japan. It’s hard to keep a good gangster down.

Read More: Jake Adelstein’s Japan Subculture Research Center

But the more I learn about the death penalty in Japan, the ultimate punishment in the Japanese justice system, the more I’m upset by what I hear. For one, Japan is one of the few developed countries in the world to still carry out the death penalty.

Sure, the number of executions that Texas alone carries out dwarfs Japan’s, but I’d wager to say that the path to execution in Japan is much more opaque and convoluted than it is here in the USA.

In the US there are a lot of safeguards for the death penalty in a lot of states. Long series of appeals often makes a death sentence a decades-long legal battle in America; but in Japan, the path to execution is a lot straighter, shorter, and simpler.

The Trial

For one, trial by jury, a fundamental element of the American justice system, doesn’t exist the in the same way in Japan. Jury duty might seem like a pain to a lot of Americans, but it’s still an important part of civic life and lets ordinary people be involved in the system.

It wasn’t until very recently (2009) that the Japanese implemented any sort of system where ordinary people helped judge criminal cases, and it’s a lot more complicated than America’s trial by jury system.

In America, there’s one judge and a jury; in Japan, there are a total of nine judges: three are professional judges and six are lay judges, ordinary people picked to sit in.

Confused yet? It gets even more complicated: a verdict can only be reached if a majority with at least one member from each group comes to a consensus, and these lay judges are only used for certain types of cases.

And the principles of presumption of innocence and reasonable doubt that are so important in the American justice system aren’t considered as much in the Japanese system.

If you’re prosecuted for a crime in Japan, then you’ll almost certainly be convicted. Japan has over a 99% conviction rate, which leads to pretty lousy chances of being found innocent. It’s apparently pretty common for Japanese defense lawyers to have only a handful of victories under their belts during the course of their careers.

How do the Japanese achieve such a high conviction rate? A large part of it is long and intense interrogations that prisoners go through, which leads to lots of confessions. Unfortunately, if you interrogate anybody for that long, they’ll say pretty much whatever you want, meaning a lot of those confessions are false.

The Escapist has a really interesting write-up about how Phoenix Wright accurately represents the Japanese justice system with surprising accuracy, if you’re into that.

But once a suspect is convicted and receives a death sentence, things go from bad to worse. Turns out, death row isn’t as cool as Suge Knight made it out to be.

The Execution

In the US, press and officials often witness the execution, and the prisoner gets last rites, last words, and a last meal (unless somebody ruins it for everybody).

Executions in Japan are a lot less ceremonial and predictable. Convicts on death row usually don’t know when they’ll be executed until a few hours beforehand, and their families might only find out after the fact.

To this day, Japan’s method of execution is hanging, a practice that seems almost primitive compared to the more humane options for execution practiced in other parts of the world.

Improvements

The picture seems kind of bleak, but things are (believe it or not) looking up. A series of legal reforms in the mid-2000^s added the lay judges mentioned earlier, and human rights advocates in Japan and across the world have been making their voices heard. Several former Japanese Justice Ministers have rallied against the death penalty and even refused to sign execution warrants.

For the over 100 prisoners on Japan’s death row, there’s still hope.

Read More: Japanese Officials Reveal Execution Chambers, Japan Housewives May Judge Killers as Lawyers Condemn Hangings, Just plead guilty and die

I’m so fascinated by North Korea because it’s just such a weird place — as Shane Smith from Vice puts it, North Korea is a country where nothing normal happens.

As strange as North Korea is for me as an American, it’s much stranger for North Korea’s neighbor, Japan. While there are some bright spots in the relationship between Japan and North Korea (like a mutual love of sushi and Tokyo Disneyland), most of the relationship is pretty sour.

One thing Japan and North Korea can agree on: roller coasters.

North Koreans, for the most part, hate Japan. Japan occupied the Korean peninsula during the early 20^th century, and Japan is close allies with the United States, North Korea’s enemy ^#1. North Korea talks about the evils of Japan in its propaganda all the time, and every few years the North Koreans threaten to shoot a missile over Japan (though it usually explodes before or during launch).

But what’s scariest of all is the reality of North Korean kidnappings. Over the years, Japanese people have been plucked from their home country and taken to the hermit kingdom. Officially, something like a dozen Japanese people have been kidnapped by the North Koreans; but unofficially, there may be hundreds of Japanese kidnapping victims.

Thanks to a summit between Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and Dear Leader (and expert looker) Kim Jong-il in 2002, five Japanese kidnapping victims, along with their children and spouses, have been repatriated. They’ve been able to bring back with them a glimpse into the twisted inner workings of North Korea and here’s what we know:

Why do North Koreans Kidnap Japanese People?

There are a lot of reasons the North Koreans kidnap people, but it all boils down North Korea’s isolationism. Since North Korea has essentially cut itself off from the rest of the world, the country doesn’t have the kind of trade and immigration to get the kind of things it needs.

But more specifically, there are lots of particular reasons North Koreans kidnap Japanese people.

Education

North Korea has a dire lack of people who are educated in anything but loving the Kim family, so when it comes time to educate your people in say, Japanese language and culture, how do you do it?

In any sane country, you would probably hire a Japanese person with experience in education but in North Korea, where logic doesn’t apply, you kidnap a random Japanese person and force them to teach classes full of military officers, soldiers, and spies.

These teachers, taken from Japan, educate their students on how to speak Japanese and teach them the nuances of Japanese culture so they can blend in to avoid any subtle, Inglourious Basterds-type cultural giveaways.

Marriage

Probably the weirdest reason North Korea kidnaps Japanese people is to marry other kidnapping victims. Women from all over the world, including Japan, have been kidnapped and taken to North Korea to marry kidnapped men. This was mostly the case for Hitmoi Soga, a Japanese woman who was taken from her hometown when she was just 19.

What’s really messed up about this (as if kidnapping people and essentially forcing them to marry) is that the children of these marriages are usually trained to become North Korean spies from a very young age.

And while the parents of these North-Korean-born foreign children usually try to protect them from the brainwashing and propaganda, these kids don’t really stand a chance.

Silence

Some Japanese people have been kidnapped not for their value in North Korea society, but to keep them quiet. Slate reports that’s why Megumi Yokota – who was only 13 years old when she was kidnapped and couldn’t really teach, act, or marry – was taken from Japan by North Korean agents.

Even though the last officially recognized kidnapping was close to 30 years ago, there are almost certainly still Japanese citizens being held captive in North Korea.

We’ll probably never know the true extent of North Korea’s kidnappings until North Korea’s government completely collapses, or North Korea and South Korea reunify.

Even though people have been predicting the imminent failure of the North Korean state for close to 20 years now, I’m really optimistic that I’ll see Korean reunification during my lifetime.

Besides all of the obvious benefits to Korean reunification and the end to the Korean War, it might finally bring some closure and peace to Japanese families of missing people who have been wondering for decades to find out what happened to their loved ones.

Read more: Why North Koreans Were Kidnappers, 10 years after, former abductees still trying to erase the horrors of North Korea, Soga calls for abductees’ return

In Issei Sagawa’s case, he became famous from eating another person. Yes, you read that right — Sagawa is a cannibal, and openly admits to it.

And yet, he lives a free life in Japan, and has even been interviewed on TV programs and has published a few minorly successful books.

How did this happen? How is Sagawa not behind bars?!

The Crime

Sagawa has said that he’s had the urge to eat somebody since he was young — not your typical childhood. But it wasn’t until he was attending graduate school in France that he go to fulfill his twisted fantasy.

While in France, he invited one of his classmates over to his apartment to study. While she was there, Sagawa shot and killed her, and over the following days, slowly ate her body. After a while, he decided to try and get rid of (what remained of) the body. He was caught, and arrested by the police.

How He Got Away With It

The law becomes a bit murky once it crosses international boundaries. In France, authorities found Sagawa to be medically insane, meaning that he couldn’t stand trial there. So Sagawa returned back to Japan where Japanese officials attempted to try him for murder.

But the French refused to give up any evidence for the case, saying that the case was closed as far as they were concerned. Even more bizarre, Japan’s own psychologists somehow found Sagawa sane.

Through this series of unexpected twists and turns, Sagawa ended up scot-free. Nobody (including Sagawa himself) could deny that he had killed and eaten another human being but legally, there was nothing to do about it.

The Most Famous Cannibal

As Sagawa returned to Japan, he found that he had become a minor celebrity in Japan. For years following his return, he wrote books about his crime, was a popular interview subject and even restaurant critic.

Maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising. I mean, people became incredibly fascinated with OJ Simpson after he was accused of killing his wife. I can only imagine that a killer like Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer would receive an enormous amount of attention is they were out of jail.

In recent years though, it seems that Sagawa’s past has caught up with him in a big way. After his blip of fame right after the initial killing, people lost interest with the free cannibal and began to treat him more like a criminal.

Sagawa says that after his spurt of fame in the 80s and 90s, he’s had problems finding work and holding down a job. His infamy has been working against him, as Sagawa’s name alone is often enough to get him disqualified from a job.

It’s not very surprising that people are beginning to shun Sagawa considering, y’know, the guy ate somebody, and to this day admits to cannibalistic fantasies. I still get queasy just reading about Sagawa, even though I’ve been aware of him for years.

But with every passing year, his crime fades into memory and he falls further into obscurity and I take some comfort in knowing that while he wasn’t legally punished, the social pressures are enforcing at least one type of justice. As he said in his Vice interview:

if you’re out in society, you have to somehow make a living and find a place to stay. What harsher punishment can there be? It’s brutal.

Read more: Who’s Hungry? An Interview with Issei Sagawa, Cannibal

That perception might be changing in Japan. It turns out that the elderly, more than the young, are committing more and more crimes each year.

Over the last couple of months I’ve written about old men attacking people with swords not once but twice! I thought that these two incidents were weird, isolated attacks but apparently, they might be a sign of a bigger problem in Japan right now.

Japan’s Aging Population

It’s not too surprising that old people are committing more and more crimes when you consider that Japan’s population is aging.

Every year, the elderly make up a bigger and bigger percentage of Japan’s population. It’s a fact that’s become hard to ignore and has quickly turned into Japan’s greatest demographic issue.

There are a few key reasons why there are more old people in Japan than ever before. Fewer and fewer Japanese people are getting married and as a result, the birthrate has all but flatlined. Fewer births mean fewer young people, meaning that the elderly take up a bigger chunk of the population.

Japan’s births have plummeted.

As the elderly have reached a record 23% of Japan’s total population, the graying of Japan has had lots of obvious implications: schools are getting emptier and nursing homes are filling up as the balance shifts from young to old.

But a rise in crime is a strange, unexpected side effect.

Old Crooks

The two old Japanese men attacking people with swords were just a taste of what old Japanese criminals are up to.

The Wall Street Journal ran a story earlier this week about an 80-year-old man who’s been arrested for killing his wife and stuffing her in a freezer. While it might seem crazy that such an old man would be capable of such an evil things, he’s not the only one, and not by a long shot.

Don’t let their adorable looks fool you; these two can be dangerous.

Even though the murder rate in Japan has gone down over the last decade, the number of elderly murderers has gone up. It doesn’t stop there, though: crime among the elderly has doubled over the last decade.

The Wall Street Journal explains:

Assault-related crimes paint a more vivid picture, jumping more than 570% to 2,337 offenses in 2010 compared with just 348 in 2002.

But theft has been the most prevalent. Robberies make up about 70% of the crimes committed by the elderly.

It’s easy to speculate just why crime has gone up so much among the elderly, but ultimately it’s hard to say for sure. Some people speculate that it’s simply because there are so many elderly people that crime was bound to go up. Others say that the elderly aren’t getting the care nor attention they deserve.

Again though, nobody really knows. Maybe the elderly are just feeling especially rebellious!

While the whole situation might seem a little strange, this is the reality of 21^st century Japan.