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 ¡ª with another 20,900 counted as ¡°apprentice gangsters.¡±