Tag: Crime & Accidents

FUKUOKA — “It gave me a fresh sensation, and I could not stop laughing just by making eye contact with another person,” the man recalls of the first time he smoked marijuana when he was 13, as he had just started junior high school. Now 20 years old, he still can’t let go of his cannabis use.

This Mainichi Shimbun reporter met the man in the summer of 2022. I had asked a nonprofit organization in the city of Fukuoka supporting young delinquents for cooperation to look into a surge of cannabis use among youths. The group introduced the man to me and I interviewed him.

Born in a city in the Kyushu region, he was raised by his mother who worked as a hostess at a bar. There was no father in the picture. The man said he was abused by his mother, and he would repeatedly run away from home. He would then be taken in by a child consultation center.

After starting junior high school, he would go out night after night with his friends. One night, he was approached by an adult man at a convenience store parking lot. “Let’s exchange a cigarette with this. Smell this,” the older man told him. What he sniffed out of curiosity that night was marijuana.

When he got out of a juvenile reformatory for the second time at age 16 after committing assault at a welfare home for…

SAITAMA — A joint Saitama and Gunma prefectural police task force sent documents on a Brazilian national facing trial to prosecutors on March 8, accusing him of additional offenses including violating the Cannabis Control Act by allegedly trafficking marijuana at his home, using different colored lights on his porch to signal customers.

The defendant, Mateus Kenji de Souza Hashimoto, an unemployed resident of the city of Ota, Gunma Prefecture, was reported to prosecutors for allegedly selling marijuana and other drugs to five male customers at his home from May to November 2022. The move by police brings their investigation into the case to a close, the joint task force said.

The 28-year-old man reportedly admitted to the allegations and told investigators, “It’s all true.”

According to police, the light on his front porch was lit blue when he was available for trafficking, and red when he wasn’t.

Saitama Prefectural Police’s drug and firearms division said he contacted customers in advance via social media and then handed over drugs at his doorstep. It is believed that he made tens of millions of yen in sales, at a conservative estimate, through trafficking, which he used to purchase brand-name goods and cars.

Approximately 86 grams of stimulants with a street value of 5.09 million…