Thank you. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 221, The Monster with 21 Faces.

This week, I want to take a foray out of our usual territory and into something that we don't talk about

all that often on the show. True crime. Our story this week begins with a man named

Ezaki Katsuhisa, CEO of Izaki Glico Corporation. The shared last name will clue you

onto something right away. This is a family business dating back to 1910, when the founder, Ezaki Riichi, had found a way

to make candy from something called glycogen that he had extracted from an oyster.

Hence the name of the company, Izaki from the family name, Glico from Glycogen. By 1984, when our story starts, the company was famous less for oyster candy, and more

for things like its chocolate-covered pretzel sticks, called Paki.

However, this is not really the fun and light-hearted story of a candy company, because

we began at 9 p.m. Japan time on March 18,

1984, when two men forced their way into CEO Izaki Katsuhisa's home.

Both men had firearms, a pistol and a rifle, respectively, which is very unusual for street crime in

Japan. Japan has extremely tough gun laws.

Practically the only way for a civilian to even own a firearm is for it to be passed down within a family, and that's pretty uncommon.

The fact that they had guns is an immediate clue that these were not just irregular street criminals getting them required some connections and substantial organization

that organization was on display in the way they approached Azaki's home first they

hit the residence next door which Azaki good Japanese boy that he was, had purchased

for his mother.

The two men broke into the home, bound Izaki's mother so she couldn't go for help, though

she wasn't hurt, and took her spare key to the main Azaki house.

As a result, they didn't have to break the door to Izaki Katsuhisa's home down or anything

like that.

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