So by now Pokemon GO is kind of old news in the US. It was the big thing
this past summer but it seems like the whole Pokemon fever that people had for
a while has really subsided. With the decline in people playing Pokemon GO in
the US there has also been a sharp decline in the amount of news stories you
hear about Pokemon GO players. The first few weeks after Pokemon Go was
released I remember reading and hearing about all kinds of crazy stories. There
were people finding dead bodies and getting hurt and going to places they
probably shouldn’t be going to. Anyway, those stories are completely gone now
but in Japan there’s still a fair share of these strange Pokemon GO related
stories. Today I’ll talk about something that happened to a Pokemon GO player
in October.
So last month a young company worker in the Tokyo area was
looking for pokemonin in a park at night. He happened to meet another young man,
also looking for pokemon. In a sane world these two would have become friends
and gone pikachu hunting and lived happily ever after. But this is not a sane
world and that is not what happened. It turns out that the other Pokemon GO
player that young company worker met that night was a member of the Yamaguchi gumi,
the biggest yakuza group in Japan. The yakuza, like other organized crime
groups largely stay in the shadows. They generally stick to things like
extortion, money laundering and the sale of illegal goods. In any case, this
yakuza guy ends up doing what he does best, he shook down the poor innocent
company worker. They yakuza guy ended making some bogus claim that the company
worker broke his car window and demanded the equivalent of about $1500. The
company worker, having not much of a choice paid up. In the end the police did
get this yakuza guy but I don’t know if the company worker got his money
back.Poor guy though, he just wanted to catch some pokemon and ended up going
through this crap. Anyway, there’s still more Pokemon GO stories from Japan that
I might cover in a future post. There’s a particularly sad one which I’d like
to discuss next time.
