- OSAKA -- A quick, easy loan
of less than £100 must have seemed the answer to Akiyo Nishihira's
prayers. In debt to several consumer loan firms, the 69-year-old housewife
knew there was nowhere else she could go for cash to pay her ailing husband's
and brother's medical bills and the rent on her council flat in the Osaka
suburbs.
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- Interest, the Tokyo loan shark told her, would amount
to a modest 2,000 yen (£10.50) if she paid up quickly. She had no
inkling that within a month, she would be asked to pay 50 times that amount,
eventually becoming trapped in a vicious circle of borrowing from one loan
shark to pay back another.
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- Three months later, Nishihira's options had run out.
Late one night she, her 61-year-old husband Katsuyuki, and her brother
Masayoshi Kawasaki, 81, huddled together on the track at a railway crossing
near their home. Shortly after midnight, their personal hell ended when
they were struck and killed by an oncoming train.
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- Their story is typical of the growing number of Japanese
who are falling prey to unscrupulous moneylenders. Helped by a 10-year-old
recession during which bankruptcies have more than quadrupled, the loan
sharks have moved in for the kill.
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- In the first six months of this year, more than 166,000
people were duped by loan sharks - 40,000 more than in the whole of last
year - according to the National Police Agency. So far they have paid out
more than 17 billion yen (£90 million), already exceeding the 16
billion yen total for all of 2002. Experts believe the real number of victims
is around a million.
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- The yakuza, Japan's mafia, is thought to be involved
in about a quarter of loan shark operations. Organised crime's tightening
grip on the industry was underlined last week by the arrest of Susumu Kajiyama,
a former gangster who earned the nickname of 'the loan shark king' for
allegedly running a 1,000-strong network of loan sharks whose profits were
passed on to the Yamaguchi-gumi, the country's most powerful crime syndicate.
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- Hours after he turned himself in to police in Tokyo,
riot police raided the headquarters of Goryo-kai, a smaller gang whose
boss is suspected of helping Kajiyama siphon off tens of billions of yen
from loan deals for the mafia in three years.
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- Loan sharks employ a mixture of friendly repartee and,
later, threats and intimidation to ensnare the vulnerable and gullible.
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- When borrowers fail to keep up repayments, their names
go on blacklists, which are sold on to sharks. Telephone calls follow,
typically offering modest sums in return for nothing more than the names
and addresses of a few guarantors, often relatives or neighbours. But they
soon find themselves paying annual interest well in excess of the 29 per
cent legal maximum.
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- Police said Kajiyama's ring charged between 27 and 380
times the legal limit. Annual interest of up to 10,000 per cent have been
reported.
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- Last year, a record 7,940 Japanese killed themselves
because of financial worries, 1,000 more than in 2001. When Mrs Nishihira
visited her local police station for help, she was told to stop paying
off her loan debts. But, despite police warnings, her loan sharks issued
threats right up until she died.
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- Public horror at the triple suicide is forcing the government
to fast-track tougher laws against usurers, entitling borrowers to cease
repayments if they are charged more than 109.5 per cent interest, but they
must still pay the principal on their original loan.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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- http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1020317,00.html
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