Jun 14 (Japan Times) - A citizens’ group has filed a criminal complaint against former head Tokyo prosecutor Hiromu Kurokawa, who resigned after a weekly magazine reported he had played mahjong for money, which is an illegal act.
Moreover, the group pointed out that Kurokawa and his three mahjong companions had violated social distancing requests made by the authorities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Others are also demanding he be prosecuted, including Takeshi Okano, an attorney who runs the YouTube channel Takeshi Bengoshi. In a May 25 video, Okano explains why Kurokawa should be arrested and why he probably won’t be.
Okano says police would first need an arrest warrant and that requires the approval of a judge, who is effectively lower in position than a prosecutor, even a former one. The police could do their own investigation, but if they suspect prosecutors won’t indict one of their own, they’ll think it’s a waste of time. Gambling is technically a victimless crime, so prosecutors usually only proceed with a prosecution based on third-party petitions. Kurokawa’s de facto immunity was comically referenced last month when pranksters set up a table on the sidewalk in front of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Tokyo in order to hold the first Kurokawa Cup mahjong tournament. The police, unamused, shut them down.
The media has already gotten past the story and doesn’t seem interested in pursuing it further, which isn’t surprising since Kurokawa’s mahjong companions were two reporters and one former reporter.
In his May 29 column for the Asahi Shimbun, current affairs “explainer†Akira Ikegami pondered this aspect. As a former NHK reporter who covered the police, Ikegami has complicated feelings about the case. The two reporters worked for the Sankei Shimbun and the ex-reporter still works for the Asahi Shimbun in another capacity. These two newspapers, says Ikegami, are considered adversaries in terms of editorial ideology — Sankei leans to the right, Asahi to the left — but, practically speaking, there is little difference between the two. They were gambling with Kurokawa for reasons that went beyond recreation, hoping to pick up something in passing that would make for an exclusive story, even if the intelligence was most likely obtained improperly.
Ikegami seems impressed by their initiative, since he was never able to get as close to his sources when he worked for NHK. He left the police beat after two years without ever having scored an exclusive, a matter of great disappointment to him. What’s interesting about his analysis is that he implies such methods are the only way to get a scoop, which is arguably what it’s all about.
