The chilling stories behind Japans evaporating people nypost.com
banzaitokyo
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8 years, 4 months ago
As a newlywed in the 1980s, a Japanese martial arts master named Ichiro expected only good things. He and his wife, Tomoko, lived among the cherry blossoms in Saitima, a prosperous city just outside of Tokyo. The couple had their first child, a boy named Tim. They owned their house, and took out a loan to open a dumpling restaurant.
Then the market crashed. Suddenly, Ichiro and Tomoko were deeply in debt. So they did what hundreds of thousands of Japanese have done in similar circumstances: They sold their house, packed up their family, and disappeared. For good.
One other common method of handling debt was getting divorced, on paper, so that the family can keep some of their assets without surrendering them to the banks. This is one reason that I dislike the financial institutions. They would simply take risks and play money games, and others suffer.
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