Maruyama Gonzalez was saying that suspicious deaths related to politics are way scarier in local politics. Unlike national lawmakers who face strict oversight, many local politicians are supposedly deeply tied to organized crime.
Local assembly members don't have the kind of security national politicians get, so if organized crime threatens them, they have no choice but to obey.
They probably have ties with local construction companies and contractors. Hamako was even a real, hardcore yakuza back in the day.
There's also that story about a guy who was found dead sitting upright inside a septic tank, rumored to have been killed by organized crime over a village election.
You hear news like that pretty often in Fukuoka and Kitakyushu.
I heard Yamanashi is pretty sketchy too.
Gonzalez's story was probably about Otocho. The central government has specifically called them out to clean up their act.
The stuff Maruyama Gonzalez was talking about happened around Chikuho. It's not just limited to there, but local politics are so sketchy that he apparently prefers not to get too involved.
Down in Chikuho, there are places where the assembly hasn't even held a session in about 20 years. That guy hands out money to the townspeople so he always wins the elections, but he's total yakuza.
The Chikuho stuff is famous enough to have its own Wikipedia article, like Otocho and Tagawa. I forgot which district it was, but an NHK regional documentary for Kyushu actually grilled the mayor live on air about bid-rigging suspicions.
Speaking of Chikuho, it reminds me of the rumors about nuclear plant workers. Especially places like Futaba town, where the whole town covered up radiation exposure and deaths of plant workers, so after 3/11 I couldn't really feel sorry for them.
Back in my countryside hometown, the mayor and local construction bosses have been in bed together for over a dozen years. They cut the budgets that should be going to education and welfare and just build useless concrete boxes instead. If you blow the whistle, since it's a tight-knit community, you get found out immediately and threatened by the construction bosses—who are basically yakuza. There's zero benefit to speaking up, so everyone just leaves it alone. They can do whatever they want.
Don't they lose elections?
They seem to secure their vote counts by rounding up voters and through collusion. Voter turnout in rural mayoral elections is low to begin with, so if you can gather up enough of your buddies, getting re-elected is apparently pretty easy.
Scary.
I wonder if vote counting is even handled fairly in local elections with severe corruption.
You often hear urban legends about sending campaign workers in to control how questionable invalid ballots are handled.
That ties into all that stuff about invalid votes for the governor of Yamanashi.
If even national lawmakers, who face intense public scrutiny, do whatever they want, there's no way local government officials are clean.
Speaking of the dark side of rural areas, the stuff going on in Tsushima was brutal. Ten percent of Tsushima's population was signed up with the exact same insurance agent, and the agent was raking in huge incentives. The entire island population was pulling off insurance fraud left and right. When it looked like they were going to get caught, one insurance agent committed suicide and the whole thing was wrapped up.
Newspaper reporters basically always get sent out to the countryside when they're rookies, so most of them hear about deeply dark cases. The stories about the Hirai and Anabuki families in Kagawa were insane.
Rather than Maruyama Gonzalez himself, I find it way more interesting when his friend Kunitomo occasionally talks about how "there used to be a Chinese hitman living in a building near that old shortcut alley in Kabukicho."
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