Developers have used yakuza as far back as the nineteenth century to clear title to land... But with the Bubble Economy, the stakes had escalated...

Tamako Nishiyama, a seventy-year-old widow, had refused repeated requests to vacate the two-story wooden home she had occupied for forty years. Over the next eight months vandals shattered most of the windows of her house, smashed in its front doorway, and covered the outer walls with red graffiti. Her front bell rang mysteriously at all hours of the night and delivery boys appeared seeking payment for Chinese food she never ordered. One evening she returned to find the first floor of her house crawling with poisonous centipedes.

Still, Nishiyama refused to budge. After months of this harassment, one night while she attended class at a nearby school, two men broke into her home, soaked its tatami mats in kerosene, and set the building afire.