Waseda Grads in the News: Manabu Miyazaki

As you might expect with one of the top schools in the nation, Waseda graduates often go on to do pretty cool things. Today's Japan Times has an article on one of our most interesting alumni, Manabu Miyazaki:

Miyazaki's life... has been nothing if not exceptional and eventful. Born as the second son of a yakuza boss in Kyoto, he grew up interacting with reckless but warmhearted members of the extended underworld "family," which also ran a demolition business.

Then, influenced by his left-leaning private tutor, he was won over to Marxism while in high school, and soon after he entered the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo in 1965, he was busy networking, organizing and demonstrating as a member of the Japanese Communist Party in that decade's numerous, and often violent, student protests against "injustices," such as tuition-fee hikes and issues such as Japan's postwar treatment of its Korean residents.

However, like many others who were deeply involved in that movement, Miyazaki ended up dropping out of college. Then, after a brief stint as a reporter at a weekly magazine, he went back to Kyoto to take over the troubled family business, trying to meet one bank debt obligation after another.

Along the way, he says, desperation drove him to start getting involved in riskier business deals. The debts, though, kept growing, and the demolition company finally went bankrupt owing ¥2.5 billion on Oct. 25, 1980 — Miyazaki's 35th birthday. Persuading angry creditors to write off the debts exasperated him further, especially when some took to threatening him personally with swords and pistols. Then, in an unrelated incident, on one occasion in 1986 two gunmen stormed into a Kyoto cafe and shot him and the two men he was with. Though he recovered from the bullet that went through his stomach, his companions both died on the spot.

But Miyazaki's drama-packed life wasn't all bad during that decade in which Japan's asset-inflated bubble was growing at its most heady rate. In fact, he rode the wave in style, amassing huge sums — and spending lavishly — by landing one real-estate deal after another as a jiageya (land shark), whose job it is to nudge or intimidate individual owners of small parcels of land to sell them and make way for major property developers to move in.

The full article is worth a read- it goes on to interview the author about reactions to his autobiography, life in the underworld, and the place of organized crime in modern society.

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