There's a tendency in some societies to associate a period of history with the crimes that occurred therein. This is why we use expressions such as "crime of the century."
And Japan? Crime certainly figures prominently in a 264-page mook published by Bungeishunju titled "Heisei 1989-2019 wo Yomitoku 51 no Jiken" ("Fifty-one Incidents for Reading and Understanding the Heisei Era"), with 14 of the 51 incidents, or 27.4 percent, involving violations of the criminal code.
Meanwhile, another mook recently published by Yosensha titled "Gekido no Heisei-shi" ("The Turbulent History of Heisei") devotes eight pages to crime and four more exclusively to the yakuza, whose full-fledged membership at the end of 2016, author Atsushi Mizoguchi reports, had declined precipitously to 18,100 — with another 20,900 counted as "apprentice gangsters."
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