It’s already quite an old story by the time I’m writing this article, but I think I’ll try writing about how, around 17 to 18 o’clock on 8/29 in 2025 last year, and then also in the middle of the night a few days before that, a female stalker came to my parents’ house.
According to my father, when my mother went to the door and opened it, there was a brown-haired girl standing there (apparently there was mud on her skirt), and she asked things like, “Is Takuto-kun here? Do you live with your father? What kind of work does he do? Where in Tokyo does he live?”, and when told he wasn’t there she left without even giving her name.
A few days earlier too, it might have been the same kid or it might not have been, and they don’t even know whether it was a man or a woman, but around 11 in the middle of the night, someone rang the intercom and then banged on the door, and when they went out there was no one there, and there was a small bag of cookies put in the mailbox, apparently.
I’ve worked in the security industry and dealt with suspicious persons and information providers and the like, and of course it’s not as if I’m wearing a uniform 24/7/365 and carrying a baton around all the time, but I’m not scared at all. The other party is probably a woman, after all. It’s a complete mystery where the personal information leaked from, and I think it might be a kid who was a classmate or a senior or a junior from my student days. Of course, whether it’s scary and whether it’s dangerous are different issues, but as for whether it’s scary, it’s not scary at all.
I’ve since quit and am doing something different somewhere else, but until a little while ago I was a security guard at Bungeishunju headquarters in Kojimachi, Chiyoda Ward, and while it wasn’t on the level of Asahi Shimbun, which in the past had the Sekihotai attacks (terror attacks on Asahi Shimbun in 1987–89), it was still a place with pretty high security legitimacy, and I’d see politicians and authors and such (I saw Mr. Yuichiro Tamaki, Ms. Tomoko Tamura, Ms. Mizuho Fukushima, and Mr. Satoshi Hamada), and we were actually prepared for things like knife incidents and gasoline arson terror as threats that could really happen.
Also, apparently there was a time in the past when some YouTuber or streamer came and exposed us like, this is how Bunshun’s security guards handle things, and it seems some freelance reporter or whatever also once came demanding to be let in to see the company president, so that too is of course something that could happen, and I thought of myself as, half, like a public figure when I was in uniform and on duty. Same as community police officers or JSDF guards.
And now that I’ve published under my real name, I’ve become a full-fledged public figure. Also, while I’ve never actually auditioned for a theater troupe or anything, I’m interested in acting and theater, I studied acting for three months at a vocational school with professional instructors, and I can recite the roughly four-minute Uiro-uri, a signature piece of the Ichikawa kabuki family (a famous rapid-fire kabuki sales pitch monologue). But still, having someone come to my parents’ home, and that by that time even my given name was already known, was a bit… you know. I think my current home address probably hasn’t been exposed yet.
My father contacted me and said he’d decided to install a video intercom. As for that suspicious woman, he said he told her that I (Takuto) no longer live at our (my parents’) house, so she might not come again, but if she was a pro, she’d pretend not to know anything in the first place, say she didn’t know such a person, or else use patter to keep you talking and extract information, and moreover would definitely record the time and take down identities/particulars. I myself am not a graduate who’s had hundreds of hours of role-play training in stop-and-question at a police academy or anything, so I’m not all that good at it, but from my experience as a security guard at Bungeishunju, I can do it a little. My mother, however, apparently had absolutely none of those skills. Well, it can’t be helped.
When I consulted Mr. Katsumaru Engaku, a former public security police officer and writer/security consultant, via Twitter DM, he told me I should go consult the police, but since there’s been no further development after that, I haven’t gone to consult them yet. The police station with jurisdiction over my parents’ house is the Tama Chuo Police Station, and my current address falls under the Ome Police Station.
This is a bit of a digression, but the people spreading the so-called “group stalking” narrative (a Japanese internet-era conspiracy meme about organized harassment) are, I think, probably operatives of foreign governments who aim to turn Japan into a self-help civil-war state and collapse it from within, and it’s a challenge to the Japanese police.
On the night of August 25, 2020, in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old belonging to a militia, during a Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstration, while guarding to prevent destructive acts by a mobbed-up demonstration, was attacked by 3 male participants, so he countered with a rifle, killing 2 and inflicting serious injury on 1; later, at trial, the jury unanimously returned a verdict that the youth was not guilty. This is, in short, the judiciary recognizing private self-help by force by civilians, and it can be called a ruling that marks the defeat of police power in America. America was already, as of 2020, in a state of civil war.
In Japan too, in places like Kawaguchi City, Saitama, because the Saitama Prefectural Police are weak-kneed toward delinquent Kurdish groups, there are moves for local residents and the like to organize vigilante groups to stand watch, and it will be interesting to see what happens next. Because of the Saitama Prefectural Police’s weak-kneed stance, Japan ends up as a country in a self-help civil-war state, and although it’s an impossible scenario, for example if neighboring countries (like China or South Korea) were to deem it a politically unstable country in civil war, and the Chinese or South Korean military intervened and came in to garrison, Japan would be finished.
That’s why public safety is also a defense issue. In the case of North America, Mexico is in a civil war state between drug cartels and the national military, and is regarded by foreign countries as a politically unstable country in civil war, and it wouldn’t be strange if at any time it lost its sovereignty due to intervention and garrisoning by the U.S. military or the Colombian military. In Mexico’s case, because the national military and the police are not reliable, local residents organize vigilante self-defense groups for self-help, and those vigilante groups transform into cartel-like entities, and then, because as a sovereign state the government must monopolize force, it tries to disband the vigilantes or absorb them… and so on; apparently there are all sorts of things like that. Also, when a country’s public safety deteriorates and it becomes a civil war state, there can be sanctions from the United Nations, or foreign companies withdraw and the economy slumps and the country declines. Well, in Japan’s case, an intervening U.S. force has already been stationed and garrisoned for over 80 years as it is.
Back to the point, Japan is not a self-help civil-war state like the United States or Mexico. If you get caught up in, or are about to be caught up in, some trouble, you either report it to or consult with the police, or, if you have the money, you can hire a private detective company or security company that has permission from the Prefectural Public Safety Commission to conduct the detective or security business, and have them attach bodyguards to you or commission an investigation. Because security work is defined by the Security Business Act as something that must be performed in response to other people’s requests, security guards are not allowed to engage in self-help or act as private soldiers. They have to rely on other security companies or detective agencies.
When you seem likely to get caught up in trouble, legitimate self-defense or necessity is the last resort, and before that stage you must think about a way of living that relies on others, on third parties. Also, this stalker is probably the type of stalker who has romantic interest in me as the opposite sex, so I don’t think it’s that kind of thing, but you can also commission a shrine or temple, a religious organization, or a psychic to perform prayers and have them exorcise “a low-grade spirit like a downer, ennui-type mentally ill person that scrambles the doing-type stuff and the being-done-to-type stuff, making everything incomprehensible.”
However, in 2013, when Akira Kurosawa, a 1st Class Ground Staff Officer (Colonel) who was the head of the Special Operations Office overseeing the Ministry of Defense’s counterterror special forces, was struck at high speed by a motorcycle and run over and killed while crossing at a crosswalk on a clear-sight road in Kojimachi, Chiyoda, Tokyo, the Public Security Bureau of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department launched a thorough investigation of the perpetrator and those around them, on the grounds that it might be terrorism or the covert work of a foreign government or foreign military. If someone like a downer, ennui-type antisocial mentally ill sort who scrambles the doing-type stuff and the being-done-to-type stuff and gets worked up picking fights were to, in a sudden, spasmodic fit of a tantrum, seriously stalk and target you, then even an elite JSDF 1st Class Colonel, far more brilliant, sharp, and stalwart than the likes of us, can be taken out. You almost certainly won’t survive. Trying to protect yourself is pointless. In that case, give up. But if it’s a black company ruled by antisocial mentally ill types, you can escape by quitting, so flee at once. Or if it’s school bullying, in the worst case, you can transfer schools. There is no need to take your own life.
Long ago, often in police crime-prevention classes for civilians—and maybe it’s still the case even now—
- Avoid places that look dangerous. Do not approach.
- If you encounter a pervert, run. If there are people around, call for help.
- If you are robbed, hand over money and valuables without resistance. (File a victim report with the police)
- Only when someone is 100% coming to target (kill) you, and moreover you cannot get away, does self-defense make its first appearance.
- If you exercise self-defense techniques, it can become excessive self-defense. If people who have learned martial arts or combat sports strike back or get into a fight, it becomes excessive self-defense.
That kind of content, they say, was at one time taught carefully and painstakingly like a “good child’s magic spell,” but in the world of martial arts there’s the word riai (the inner logic/principles of technique), and from martial artists who seriously study riai and have deepened their research, or professionals who have received military training, or people with experience in the security industry, you’ll hear, no no, there’s more beyond that, and—
Even once you’ve entered the self-defense phase, there are all sorts of possibilities to consider, like simply creating a timing to break free and run when you’ve been grabbed or choked, or, since some half-baked flexible response seems utterly unlikely to calm the other party down and will only make them get even more carried away, striking a single, ferocious blow and then fleeing, or, when your escape route has been blocked and even if you run you’re likely to be chased—i.e., the worst possible situation—fighting (beating them down), or pinning them and asking “Are you done? Are you going to stop?” and, once they’ve cooled off, saying “All right, got it,” then loosening up little by little, disengaging, and taking distance, or else keeping a solid pin on them and calling for help, and so on and so forth—many things are conceivable, and (those last two are like acting as auxiliary police, so they’re impossible for the weak, and even if you can pull them off, they could count as a private arrest by an ordinary citizen and earn you sanctions from the justice system).
Also, something you often see in overseas videos, there’s self-defense that isn’t just running away but rather drawing a barrier line or caution line—“don’t come over here, if you come close I’ll pound you, back off”—(in some cases it’s actually more effective to maintain advantage by setting a barrier line than to flee; the situation where a runaway car has driven into a crowd and ends up getting pummeled by the crowd is a kind of this too), and apparently this drew quite a lot of criticism and heckling and people were exasperated. It’s like an urban-legend-type story, so I can’t guarantee it’s true.
In training at a security company, in the teaching materials on facility security (Type 1 security), I learned content like not cornering a suspicious person (intruder) too much, but instead deliberately creating an escape route so they flee and you protect yourself, and also patrolling using clearing methods like CQB clearing in the military. The details are company confidential, and there’s the possibility of misuse, so I can’t make them public, but they’re practical content written by someone who truly understands the world of underlying principles. As for materials on protective transport such as cash-in-transit (Type 3 security) or bodyguards (Type 4 security), since I’ve never belonged to such companies, before even getting to the points about company confidentiality or the risk of misuse, I simply haven’t seen them.
Well anyway, I’ve watched YouTube videos featuring Katsumaru Engaku, a former Public Security Police officer now a writer and security consultant, and I know about things like “inspection and sanitizing,” and I’m thinking that when I go back to my parents’ home I might do inspection and sanitizing so I don’t get tailed on the way back, but about two weeks ago, on a train, because sound carries and there are lots of people, so you can’t pinpoint from where or from whom, there was a moment when a smartphone camera shutter sound suddenly went off. My own phone often, inside my chest pocket, launches the camera on its own and ends up taking multiple pitch-black photos, so there’s also the possibility of that kind of accidental malfunction, but if it was covert filming, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to prevent something like that. There will inevitably remain domains where nothing can be done.
2026 (Reiwa 8) 2 month 05 day (Thu)
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