£5,000 to catch robot arm thief

A £5,000 reward has been offered in an attempt to find the thief who stole a rare robotic arm.

The £22,000 arm is such a specialist piece of equipment that it would be "useless" to anyone who does not know how to operate it, police said.

Chris Lokuciewski, owner of Hydro Lek Ltd in Finchampstead, Berkshire, has offered the reward after the theft of the arm on Saturday afternoon.

Mr Lokuciewski had packed it into a car shortly before the vehicle was stolen.

'Worth £60 scrap'

He said: "Unless he works in the underwater industry the thief will not be able to use it.

"I imagine it's already been scrapped, as aluminium it would only be worth £60 scrap."

A low-pressure hydraulic power pack worth £4,500 that powers the arm was also taken when the thief stole Mr Lokuciewski's silver Audi A6 from outside his company on the Hogwood Industrial Estate.

Pc Daniel Barritt, of Thames Valley Police, said: "Both of these items are very rare and made by the company.

"They would be useless to anyone that does not know how to operate them."

J&K issues 120 "most wanted" terrorist list

JAMMU: The Jammu and Kashmir government has submitted to the centre a list of 120 “most wanted” militants sheltering in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Pakistan after engineering terror in the state.

The J&K government has urged New Delhi to take up this issue with Islamabad.

“We have handed over a latest revised list of over 120 most wanted militants being sheltered in PoK and Pakistan to the Union Home Ministry during a review meeting in New Delhi recently, so that centre takes up the issue with Pakistan,” said a top state intelligence source.

All these ultras are wanted in connection with terrorist activities in the state and all of them have crossed the Line of Control and are sheltered in PoK, said the source.
Of these 120 militants, 33 are Pakistani nationals, while the rest are Kashmiris, said the J&K government.

From the Kashmiris, 60 are from Poonch district, one from Baramulla, four each from Srinagar and Rajouri, five from Anantnag, three from Pulwama, two from Udhampur and one each from Budgam and Doda.

Lashker-e-Taiba Chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, LeT Operations Chief Bilal (alias Salahuddin), Jaish-e-Mohammad Deputy Chief Mufti Asrar, and JeM Operations Chiefs Shah Faisal and Madni are among the Pakistanis whose names are present in the list, said the J&K government.

The fact that the militants are taking shelter in PoK and operating from there is proof that Pakistan is actively aiding and abetting terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir, said the J&K government.

"We therefore want the government of India to take up the issue with Pakistan," said the source.

Japanese stunned by mayor’s assassination

A woman offers a bouqet and prays at the murder site of Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Ito yesterday

NAGASAKI: Stunned Japanese yesterday laid flowers and called for even tighter controls on guns after the mayor of Nagasaki was shot dead by a member of the nation’s largest underworld gang.
The rare political killing in one of the world’s safest countries led authorities to tighten security around political leaders ahead of local polls this Sunday, in which the mayor was campaigning for re-election.
“This criminal act during the election campaign is a challenge to democracy. It cannot be forgiven no matter what,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in Tokyo.
Sixty-one-year-old Iccho Ito died before dawn yesterday due to massive blood loss hours after being shot outside his campaign offices in Nagasaki.
“This is not an act by a human being. If he had grievances, he should have said them to the mayor instead of shooting him,” said Yoshinori Hirano, 57, a gas company worker, as mourners left flowers at the shooting site.
“To see an important person get killed violently is very shocking because Nagasaki is the city of peace,” he said as he started to weep.
Police said the assailant belonged to the Japanese mafia, or “yakuza,” who hold wide interests in seedy nightlife and are linked to most of Japan’s gun-related violence.
Chief government spokesman Yasuhisa Shiozaki said authorities would look into how criminal groups were able to skirt Japan’s tough gun controls.
“The government will make more efforts to crack down on gun trafficking at ports through co-operation with police, customs houses and coast guards, as well as other countries,” Shiozaki said.
Police said they were investigating how the suspect, 59-year-old Tetsuya Shiroo, obtained the lethal weapon, a 0.38-caliber US-made Smith and Wesson “Bodyguard” revolver.
Amid the widespread condemnation of the attack, gaffe-prone Defence Minister Fumio Kyuma came under fire for saying the shooting would boost the chances of the opposition.
Ito’s son-in-law, a 40-year-old Tokyo-based newspaper reporter who has never held elected office, said he would run in Sunday’s election.
“As a journalist, I have always distanced myself from my father, Iccho Ito,” Makoto Yokoo said. “This is something I never thought about before, but someone has to carry on the job that Iccho Ito wanted to do.”
Police said the assailant was an executive member of a local group affiliated with the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest criminal syndicate with some 40,000 members nationwide.
Motohisa Mizuta, the local affiliate’s leader, went in person to a police station and handed a letter saying that Suishinkai was disbanding, a senior police officer told reporters.
“Our organisation has caused trouble to society,” the officer quoted the letter as saying.
The Suishinkai, whose membership is estimated to be in the dozens, is the Nagasaki affiliate of the Yamaguchi-gumi, which has more than 40,000 rank and file across Japan.
But police said they were still questioning Shiroo to learn his motives. Shiroo had grievances with the city after his vehicle was damaged at a construction site four years ago, police said.
But a city spokesman said an official who dealt with Shiroo doubted the accident was his real motivation. News reports said the dispute may be linked to a public works contract.

Yakuza gang boss's daughter tells tale of gritty triumph

"Yakuza Moon" is a shocking story of the side of Japan most Japanese would prefer the rest of the world never knew about.

But thanks to Kodansha International, yakuza gang boss's daughter Shoko Tendo's best-selling autobiography is now out in English and accessible to a wider audience.

Tendo has a gut-wrenching tale that drags the reader with her down into the depths of misery brought on by abuse and addiction and then back up again as self-confidence raises her to the heights of her chosen profession as a bar hostess and onward to further challenges.

"I'm thoroughly honored and left speechless with joy that my book has been translated into English. But, there was nothing special about my experiences, they were all worries and problems that just about anybody can go through. I was born a yakuza's daughter and raised in a yakuza lifestyle (with yakuza philosophies). This could sometimes be painful and a burden. But my father, a yakuza living on the fringes of society, told it to me straight -- no matter how poor you are, sometimes there are things in this world that money just can't buy. I think what my father said to me on his deathbed -- 'Shoko, believe in yourself' -- said it all," Tendo told the Mainichi Daily News in an e-mail interview.

"And you should never stop dreaming. You should keep after them until they come true. Then, they stop being dreams and become reality. I had no formal education, but dreamed of being a writer from the time I was small and I eventually became a writer, a fact I believe was possible because of my father's teaching. I'm glad that I was plucked into this world as the daughter of a yakuza father and the woman who silently supported that father from the shadows, and I feel proud about that. Now my book is in English, I would be delighted if it were able to help those suffering from the same worries I had to go through to take even a single step forward."

"Yakuza Moon" tracks 38-year-old Osaka-born Tendo's life from her early years where her status as a yakuza gang boss's daughter started her roller-coaster ride through luxury, bullying, discrimination, domestic violence and reform school. It moves on to her time as a teen biker gang moll sucking on first paint thinner and then shooting up speed, a substance that later become an addiction fostered by one of the many brutal thugs she shares her life with in early adulthood.

More vicious beatings, exploitation by infidel men, rape, miscarriage and heartbreak follow. Reconciliation with her parents is tempered by grief at their deaths. Mental illness and a suicide attempt add to the already bleak picture. But as "Yakuza Moon" is written with such candor and huge investment of emotion, it's impossible to desert Tendo and put her book down.

Shoko Tendo (courtesy of Kodansha International)

Fortunately, inner strength, the support of friends, family and the Jigoku Dayu -- a traditional courtesan tattoo Tendo has etched on her back that seems to empower her -- combine to help the yakuza's daughter rip-start her life anew.

Tendo's Japan is a far cry from the Japan National Tourist Organization-like brochure images of dark-suited salarymen corporate warriors, flamboyant kabuki actors or dainty, demure, kimono-clad beauties performing flower arrangements and tea ceremonies. Instead, it's a warts-and-all story of the gritty triumph of a -- perhaps unconsciously -- powerful woman that should not be missed by anybody interested in learning about a rarely seen side of Japan. It's certainly not a side of this country many Japanese would like outsiders to see, but one they obviously wanted a glimpse of themselves, judging by the 11 printings "Yakuza Moon" has undergone in Japanese since its release in 2004.

Special mention should also go to Louise Heal, whose English translation is outstanding, especially with the dialogue, which comes as close as possible to recreating Tendo's native Kansai dialect.

Tendo's "Yakuza Moon" is one that shines brilliantly whatever the time of day. (By Ryann Connell)

Evil behind Tokyo's lights - Yakuza Story

A verdict this week may bring justice for the family of an Australian woman who died in Tokyo 15 years ago, writes Justin Norrie

Joji Obara was a guarded man. Throughout his adult life, the Japanese millionaire studiously avoided cameras, and despite having surgery to make his eyes rounder he invariably wore sunglasses to shield them from the world.

But behind the closed doors of his condominium at Zushi, a seaside town one hour south of Tokyo, the playboy property speculator kept fastidious records of his achievements, police allege. Buried among more than 5000 videotapes, hundreds of cassettes, bottles of drugs and vast piles of junk amassed over 30 years, they found a diary full of names and a brief but ominous entry.

It had been scrawled down the page in a light hand alongside the name of a young Australian woman, Carita Ridgway, and read: "Too much chloroform."

Carita, a 21-year-old acting student who had grown up in Perth and settled in the Sydney beach suburb Clovelly, arrived at Tokyo's Narita airport in December, 1991. She had been drawn to Japan by the prospect of lucrative holiday work even as the country's bubble economy was rapidly deflating around her.

Tokyo police were not remotely interested when the former model, who had recently started working as a bar hostess, went missing and died in mysterious circumstances two months later.

Nine years would pass before they investigated the matter seriously. By then Carita's death had become a vital element in the most sensational criminal case in Japan's recent history; a case that has widely been seen, inside Japan and out, as an allegory for the country's rise and fall, its boom years and subsequent economic and moral malaise.

On Tuesday a judge in Tokyo's District Court will hand down a verdict in the tortuous six-year legal proceedings against Obara, who is now 55. He is accused of raping and killing Carita and another foreign woman, Lucie Blackman, a British hostess who vanished in 2000 and was found dismembered in a shallow grave less than 100 metres from Obara's white stucco apartment building, the "Blue Sea".

It was only after Blackman disappeared, and her father lobbied the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to mention the matter on a visit to Japan, that the case exploded.

Tokyo police threw more officers onto the case than it had committed to the 1995 sarin gas attacks on the city's subway network, and in October that year they arrested and charged Obara. Police say that when they raided his apartment they found a mountain of incriminating evidence, including a receipt from the hospital where Carita had died.

Remarkably, the hospital had kept a sample of her liver, which was tested and shown to have toxic levels of chloroform.

Obara is also being tried for the rapes of eight other women - four foreign and four Japanese - but police believe that the tally is considerably higher. In persistent leaks to Japan's newspapers, they have told of finding at least 400 professionally-filmed rape scenes in his vast video collection. In many of the chilling images, Obara wears nothing but the mask of Zorro as he allegedly molests his unconscious or semi-conscious victims. Among them were more than 150 western women, including Carita.

Obara is alleged to have written in his diary, "My goal is to have sex with 500 people by the age of 50," and in a separate entry, "I can't do women who are conscious."

According to the prosecution case, he would typically lure the women to one of his seaside apartments, offer them a glass of "rare" wine that he had laced with drugs, then lug their limp bodies onto a bed where he would assault them with various objects for 12 hours or more. The video evidence showed that he would then place a chloroform-soaked rag over their faces to stop them from regaining consciousness. Many had little idea what had happened to them when they woke up, groggy and sore. Some may even have believed Obara's supposed story that they passed out after drinking too much.

"You were so drunk, you were a mess!" he would tell them, before giving them money and telling them to take a few days off work to recover, the prosecution told the court in its final statement.

Throughout the trial, which has been followed obsessively by Japanese media, Obara has steadfastly maintained his innocence. In some cases he argued that his alleged victims were drug addicts who indulged their habit too freely. "All of them agreed to have sex for money," he wrote in a statement to media.

Having kept a dignified silence, members of Carita's family have agreed to talk to the Herald for the first time about their disorienting Tokyo ordeal, the anguish of watching Carita die slowly in hospital, and the "insult" of being offered a 50 million yen ($500,000) payout by Obara's legal team.

"After 15 years it is even clearer how great a loss she is to me and my family; there is a gaping hole in our lives," says her older sister Samantha, who had been living with Carita at the time of her death.

"I am the sort of female that handles sexual harassment with a fast knee to the groin. Carita was a sweet person and unfortunately had none of those tomboyish qualities."

Japan had been in the grip of recession for a year when the pair took their month-to-month accommodation at a "gaijin" (foreigner) share house at Kichijoji, a residential neighbourhood popular with Tokyo's young, artistic set about 25 minutes west of the city's commercial hub.

Samantha, who arrived in Tokyo first to join her Japanese boyfriend Hideki, was teaching English at a nearby Berlitz language school. Carita planned to stay for a few months at the most, during which time she hoped to save some money to put towards her acting classes and the student fees of her fiance, Robert Finnigan, who was studying law at the University of New South Wales.

When she could not immediately find an English-teaching job, she responded to an advertisement in the English daily newspaper, The Japan Times, for hostessing work at Club Ayakoji in Ginza, an exclusive Tokyo shopping district dotted with department stores, boutiques selling luxury European goods, restaurants, night clubs and - away from its main streets - hostess bars.

Here, wealthy businessmen come after work to drink and sometimes practice their English with pretty young western women. The hostesses who laugh at their jokes and entertain them are not prostitutes, although some may choose to sleep with their clients. They could be described, very loosely, as modern-day incarnations of geishas, the traditional Japanese female entertainers who amused their clients with verse, music and light conversation - but not paid sex.

In her short stint at Club Ayakoji, Carita had not even been on a "dohan", a sort of platonic date for which customers must pay extra to cover dinner and the cost of getting the hostess to her bar afterwards.

"Carita's work involved lighting cigarettes, ordering drinks for the customers, and chatting. She avoided drinking alcohol herself as she wasn't keen on it," says her mother Annette Foster. Her father, Nigel Ridgway, recalls, "Carita didn't like hostessing much, but the money was ten times what she could earn in Sydney. Most of the girls just thought it was a bit of a laugh, nothing serious."

It is not clear whether Carita had met Obara before the night of her disappearance, but if she had, then she did not mention him to family or friends.

Born Kim Sung Jong in 1952 to poor Korean parents in Osaka, he had inherited with his two brothers the enormous fortune his family eventually made in pachinko parlours - Japan's garish, noisy equivalent of Australia's poker machine rooms - at the age of 17, when his father died in Hong Kong.

While studying politics and law at the prestigious Keio University in Tokyo, he took on a new, Japanese name - Seisho Hoshiyama - to hide his ethnic heritage, changing it again to Joji Obara when he turned 21. The only photo of him in public circulation, a fuzzy black-and-white picture from the early 1970s, was taken shortly afterwards.

In the mid-80s, when Japan's skyrocketing land and stock prices launched the economy into the stratosphere, property speculators like Obara were feted as national heroes. Many enjoyed extravagant lifestyles and some behaved as though their wealth should guarantee them access to anything they desired, including tall, elegant western women.

In the early years of the decade, friends say, Obara, who wore shoe lifts and took human growth hormones in an attempt to disguise the fact he was just 5 feet 6 inches tall, became addicted to hostess bars. He was particularly fond of visiting Roppongi, an notoriously sleazy strip of central Tokyo that comes to life after dark, when hordes of foreigners - drunken US marines, haughty Russian models, aggressive African bouncers, shadowy Romanian drug sellers, overpaid French bankers and other caricatures - congregate in the glare of enormous neon advertisements.

That is where he met Lucie Blackman. Carita, however, had chosen a more refined and apparently safer neighbourhood to work in.

Just before midnight on Friday, February 14, 1992, many of the customers and hostesses at Ayakoji, including Carita, accepted Obara's invitation to dine at a nearby "yakiniku" (Korean barbecue) restaurant.

What happened over the following 48-hour period is largely a mystery, although video evidence recovered from Obara's Zushi apartment has offered police a strong clue.

They refused to show the full video to the family, possibly to spare them unnecessary trauma, but Annette explains, "I did see a shot of Carita's face - she was unconscious - with Obara, who was wearing a mask".

When Samantha, who had spent the weekend at Hideki's apartment, returned to her share house late on Sunday morning, she was told by a housemate that someone had called and left a strange message about Carita. "Something about going away with friends for the weekend," Samantha later told police. "It was unclear who these 'friends' were, and no information about her return was given."

On Monday morning, when there was still no sign of her sister, Samantha became seriously worried. Then at 9am, a staff member from Hideshima Hospital, at Kichijoji, called the house to say that Carita had been admitted and was being treated for severe food poisoning.

At the hospital, staff told Samantha that an older Japanese man called 'Akira Nishida' had dropped Carita off an hour earlier. He had given them Samantha's name and telephone number, and told them that Carita had eaten bad shellfish in Kamakura, the ancient seaside town that sits next to Zushi on the Murui coast, south of Tokyo. He had left abruptly, without providing identification.

Against the advice of the attending doctor, Samantha raced to Carita's bedside to ask her where she had been. But Carita, who appeared to be falling asleep, did not answer. In fact, she was losing consciousness.

Doctors decided she might have hepatitis D (drug-induced), then hepatitis E, but still they had no idea how she might have contracted it. By Wednesday she had slipped into a coma and turned bright yellow. With her family at her side, the hospital started giving her an expensive liver treatment, then placed her on life support.

"It was a nightmare," Annette remembers. "We didn't know what had caused her condition, or what we could do about it, apart from the treatment she was having. We had to stand by helplessly and watch her die."

Strangely, 'Nishida' called Samantha at home several times during the week, repeating his story that Carita had got food poisoning at Kamakura, and explaining that he had called his personal doctor to give her an anti-nausea shot on Sunday when she complained of feeling sick. Each time Samantha challenged him to reveal his identity or provide a return phone number, he ended the conversation.

Despite several calls by Samantha and her boyfriend, Hideki, to Tokyo police, authorities made no effort to trace the mysterious caller and were even hostile towards the family.

The following Wednesday, doctors transferred Carita to Tokyo Women's University Hospital in Shinjuku, but by Saturday, three days short of her 22nd birthday, she was brain dead. Her family decided to turn off her life support machine. Staff dressed her in a pink kimono, laid her out on a bed, covered her up to her neck in flowers, and took her to a Buddhist shrine in the basement of the hospital for a wake. Each member of the intensive care unit lit an incense stick in her honour. Two days later she was cremated.

Looking back, Carita's parents admit that they should have insisted on an autopsy, tests for sexual assault and liver biopsy results, but say they were simply too overcome with grief and exhaustion to think straight.

In an act of either remarkable assurance or blind panic, 'Nishida' then arranged to meet them at an airport hotel to give his account of the weekend he had spent with Carita. Many years later they would describe the meeting in police statements.

Facing Annette and Nigel across a coffee table in a room that he had booked for a night, the strange-looking but immaculately-dressed man made a vague reference to yakuza - Japan's organised crime syndicates - possibly in an attempt to frighten them, before offering a rambling story about how Carita had become sick after eating oysters. "He was sweating profusely and mopping his face with a handkerchief the whole time," Annette told police.

Finally he said to them, "I loved your daughter and I wanted to spend much more time with her," insisting that they accept a diamond necklace and ring that he had planned to give Carita on her birthday.

Nine years later, in January 2001, Annette and Samantha returned to Tokyo to identify Joji Obara as the man who had met them at the hotel that day and offered to pay for Carita's funeral. The record of the cash transfer he made into Samantha's Japanese bank account, and the hospital receipt found at his home, would forever link him to the alleged rape and death of Carita.

"[In 1992] we were left in a limbo of grief, outrage and confusion," says Annette. "All that was reignited. The trial has been an exhausting six years."

When he returned to Tokyo in 2001 to give a police statement, Robert Finnigan says, "[the police] confirmed that Obara was never interviewed by them in 1992. When I expressed my shock and surprise at this, given the central role Obara had played in all this, they refused to discuss the 1992 investigation."

In October last year, as the court hearings were coming to an end, Lucie Blackman's father revealed he had accepted a 100 million yen condolence offer from a college friend of Obara. The practice is acceptable under Japanese law. But his ex-wife and children immediately denounced him for endangering the outcome of the trial.

"The sum of money that Obara offered us was 50 million yen," says Annette. "We didn't want the court to reduce his potential sentence so we didn't accept it. He would have also required us to sign a document saying that the reason Carita died was because the hospital didn't treat her properly."

Adds Samantha, "He tried to bribe my family with an insulting amount of $500,000 and not even an apology."

"I happen to like Japan and feel quite safe there but I was followed home a few times, endured three incidents of physical attack and was subjected to indecent exposure on three other occasions."

Last month, the murder of another young, beautiful western woman in a Chiba apartment, east of Tokyo, gave western media a chance to dwell on the details of the Obara case and raise again the issue of safety for foreign women in Japan.

On some blogs, posters invoked tired cliches about the "predictably Japanese" quality of bizarre sex crimes, and the Japanese male's supposed obsession with foreign women.

Lindsay Hawker, a 22-year-old English teacher from Britain, had been tied up, beaten and strangled to death, allegedly by a 28-year-old Japanese horticultural student who she had agreed to teach privately. Her body was partially buried in soil in a bathtub.

In its prurient fascination with Japan's supposed sexual repression and perversion, most media overlook the fact that the country has a very low rate of violent crime, and remains one of the safest places in the world for women.

Several hostesses, who spoke to the Herald on condition of anonymity, said that the risks of their profession had been grossly inflated by media. But one, a 29-year-old New Zealander who worked as a hostess in 2002 at Greengrass, the bar where Lucie Blackman had been employed before her (when it was called Casablanca), pointed out that "how safe you are depends on who you are. There are some "professional" hostesses who know how to play the game, and would never let themselves be put in to a compromising situation - unfortunately this is generally by learning from bad experiences."

Greengrass declined to talk to the Herald for this story.

"On the night I finally quit," adds the former hostess, who used the name Nikki at work, "I had sat at a table with a customer and [the manager] Nishi-san started talking to him in Japanese thinking that I couldn't understand anything, he said 'Nikki isn't that smart, but ... if you get her drunk you never know what could happen."'

- additional reporting by Laura Keehn

'Don of Roppongi' seeks peace in East Asia

It's a rum kind of shop. But then Takeshi Maki -- who, while regarding himself as a member of Japan's silent majority, is nicknamed the Don of Roppongi -- is a rum kind of bloke.

Takeshi Maki wants to start a Japanese version of the Nobel Peace Prize, with awards to those people who most contribute to building up Japan's "Constitution of Peace."

Next to the entrance to his store -- flanked by the flags of the United States and Britain -- is a garage, containing Maki's pride and joy: a vintage white Jaguar. Quite the Anglophile, it seems.

As to the store -- two crazy floors jam-packed with furniture, jewelry, pictures, clocks, lamps, china and even a suit of armor -- price tags can make the head spin. Near half a million yen for a grandfather clock that is not simply repro, but brand new?

"It's true," he says shrugging and laughing. "Sixty percent of goods are reproduction, the rest antique. Everything is a bit of a mess, because of all the stuff from Karuizawa."

Up until last year, Maki had a second shop in Nagano Prefecture. But he sold it -- what he calls "my chateau" -- and brought the contents to Roppongi. Now he is getting a Web site designed to sell off what remains. Maki, you see, is realizing his assets with a single purpose in mind: to lay his fortune on the table toward peace in Asia. He believes the Korean Peninsula should be a neutral zone like Switzerland rather than the flashpoint for conflict. If his money can help bring this about, all well and good.

"I'm 72. There's little I need or want, and I'm not afraid of anyone. I believe Prime Minister Abe and his cronies are doing all they can to stir up trouble with Asia, just as their grandfathers did to start WWII."

Abe, he points out, is the grandson of a convicted war criminal. Foreign Minister Taro Aso has family connections with Aso Cement, a company that rose on the back of Korean slaves brought over from the peninsula. "Embarrassed by the irresponsible statements made by politicians -- the foolish attitude of my country -- I want to do something about it. Since all I have is money, then this is what I will use. I don't know how. I just want to start the ball rolling, get people talking."

Maki's story helps explain his peace-loving position. He was born, he says, on the northern island of Sakhalin in 1929. But try to pin Maki down, and he will shake his head and say the past is a blur, that he can see only the vaguest outline of his early life.

"My father disappeared in Manchuria. Having close links with Russia, I believe he was arrested by the Japanese military. But I have no proof, and now it's too late. It's the same with my mother. She died when I was 7, maybe of a sickness. Anyway, I was shipped back on a supply vessel and set ashore in Hokkaido, with no papers, photographs, nothing."

Luckily, a rich businessman took Maki under his wing, sent him from Sapporo to Honshu, where he was put to work in Kobe, and then funded through fashion school.

When Maki first moved into Roppongi 45 years ago to open a shop offering the MK label, it was a very different place. Now he says, it's hard to find decent Japanese food anywhere around.

The road on which his address is sited (he has an apartment on an upper floor) used to be called Army Street. After the war it was re-named Antique Street, and he can remember there being 30 antique shops up and down the road. Today, there are only five, including Maki's Roppongi New Gallery (formerly Roppongi Old Gallery) sited within the tall pink building that he built during the bubble years.

Roppongi was just a village until the U.S. moved in an army base, he recalls. That's why so many bars and clubs opened up. The antique shops also, because American soldiers wanted Japanese souvenirs to take back home. When the base moved to Zama in the late 1950s, all the entertainment stayed put.

Maki was one of a group of artists and intellectuals that hung out in the area from the 1950s on. "All in our 30s, we had a great time. I used to go dancing with Kawabata."

Yasunori Kawabata (the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel prize for Literature) died in his condo at Zushi Marina in Kanagawa Prefecture. Until last year Maki had an atelier in the same resort complex -- another asset realized.

He remembers also the American writer Henry Miller -- whose wife, the Japanese singer Toki Tokuda, ran a club called Tropic of Cancer in Maki's basement -- dashing off scribbles and pictures in lieu of rent.

But keeping Japanese yakuza and neo-hipsters happy and running several businesses for near five decades years took its toll; the Don of Roppongi began to tire. "That's when I began to think about selling up, doing something useful with my money."

He regards settling the impasse on the Korean Peninsula to be of prime importance; and that he is speaking for the silent majority of Japanese who feel they are not being represented.

A long-time supporter of the idea of a Silk Road rail link between Japan and the Middle East, he believes that rather than seeking peace in East Asia, the current government is keen to see conflict develop, so that it can do away with the Japan's postwar peaceful constitution and rearm.

"Despite its cars, electronics and fashion, Japan has one unique brand that you can find nowhere else in the world: its constitution, and in particular Article 9, which forever renounces war as a means of settling disputes.

"Abe and his cronies are just like Bush and his close circle," he continues. "They're keen to whip up bad feeling between nations in order to boost so-called national interests and to line their own pockets.

"Look at how the government is using the abductions issue to push Asia into war," he says. "North Korea is desperate for money, food . . . Yet every time they seem willing to negotiate, Japan shrieks abductions, and the North steps back. It's as if Japan has never heard of diplomacy."

Maki wants to start a Japanese version of the Nobel Peace Prize, awarding the first to each member of the six-party talks, and then subsequently to that person or those people who most contribute to building up Japan's No. 1 brand -- Article 9 and the "Constitution of Peace."

He seeks to force Japan by the sheer will of world public opinion to not change its constitution. That is why he plans to be on hand in Washington when Prime Minister Abe comes to town, to offer the view of Japan's "silent majority."

As Maki writes on his Web site: "I'm hoping I can light a fire under the good Japanese, and all other similar-minded people throughout the world who are as embarrassed and angry as I am."