Mr. B had paid the first year's rent on his club's lake-shore site plus a site at a smaller lake and then failed to pay rent after that for more than a decade. In Japan, the law favors renters, and landlords have trouble collecting and evicting. Especially in rural areas, many think they have no recourse at all. These people will never see their money.
While there is strong resistance to the advancement of sociopaths in Japanese society, which I will describe in more detail later, once sociopaths acquire power over people, the Japanese are much more helpless and vulnerable to their manipulations. This is what led them down the unhappy road to World War II.
Club B members would receive calls from Mr. B's landlord in Tokyo inquiring about past-due rent on his luxury apartment. The Tokyo landlords knew that the trick was to harass the renter and his acquaintances persistently. After a while, Mr. B would leave that apartment and go pay the requisite three-to-four months rent in advance on a new place and live there rent-free until the calls became too embarrassing. No registration fees were paid on the club's fleet of vans, as one driver found out when the police stopped him. Thus Club B members were acutely aware of Mr. B's financial troubles and they had all heard rumors of his scary side. Nonetheless, they just ignored these signs. They were a rat pack.
Mr. B had taken up dealerships in several makes of jet-skis. He'd sell as many as he could while owing the manufacturers larger and larger sums, until they quit delivering; then he'd switch to a different company. On a particularly windy day, a fire broke out in some garbage near Club A's jet-ski storage shed and incinerated it along with its contents. Many of Club A's members then turned to Mr. B to purchase new jet-skis. Later, a fire broke out in one of Club B's jet-ski storage sheds, with less costly results.
Meanwhile Club B along with some Club A members continued flouting the rules. Of the resulting accidents, Mr. B would say, "In any collision, both parties are equally to blame." On the surface, it sounded to many like a good rule of thumb. Everyone should be alert. In practice, though, this favored the scofflaws, who took delight in running other jet-skiers into the rocks as the latter followed the rules in an attempt to avoid a collision.
One Club A member, aware of the situation, gathered evidence and wrote an expose on Club B, naming Mr. B as the biggest culprit. That writer woke up one cool autumn night to see a nasty glow in his kitchen and found a fish tank heating element plugged in and left on the wooden table, set for 16 degrees (60 F). A few other unseemly incidents finally resulted in pressure for Mr. B's ouster from Club A, where he had been a joint member. Club B started out explicitly as a group of scofflaws, thus it fits Lobaczewski's ("Political Ponerology") definition of a primary ponerogenic union: one that starts out with evil purposes. It was successful owing to the genius of Mr. B and the famous patience of the Japanese.
The whole world could see what was going on. In these cases, as in the case of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult that gassed Tokyo's subways, most of the people in the vicinity know what is happening, but are powerless to stop it. Few try to approach the police or initiate lawsuits. The police are typically unresponsive at first. They collect evidence that they can use to build a strong case against the group later on, but in the meantime, there are a lot of victims. This was the response of people within Club A, too. Hobbled by the need for harmony and compromise within Club A with members who liked Messrs. A and B, the leaders took to collecting evidence and ultimately cooperated with the police in prosecuting Mr. B.
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*A Yakuza member who has broken rules shows penitence by cutting off his little finger. This ritual is supposed to be voluntary, but in reality a great deal of force may be involved. People with multiple fingers missing are to be feared.
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