The Monster with 21 Faces

I've been obsessed with a particular anime series right now: Ghost In the Shell Stand Alone Complex, and more specifically, the subplot which involves something called the Laughing Man Incident. (If the non-sensical naming makes you cringe, then you probably can't get down with imported Japanese culture much.)

The series is set in 2024, and is a pretty excellent extrapolation of a potential future in which, among other things, certain humans are "cyberized". Sometimes the augmentations are believable, sometimes they're cartoonish. But it's a possibility we can't ignore, and GItS deals with how this would affect our everyday reality. The parts that interest me the most are the depictions of a very active and fleshed out Web that these augmented humans (ie, cyborgs) can jack into, yes yes, there are jacks in the backs of their necks that allow them to surf while, say, driving a car. Hey, if there's a metaverse like Gibson or Stephenson or GItS describe, I'd think about getting a jack installed in the top of my spine so I could...well, anyways. Maybe I should start with Lazik first...

What was I talking about? Oh, right. The Laughing Man Incident. The Wiki entry on it is pretty good. I don't have time to recap the whole thing for you but let's just say the recent events in Boston (in my mind anyways) were prefigured by The Laughing Man Incident.

As I dug a little deeper to write this pathetic little post, I learned that there was more to this than I had suspected. The Laughing Man Incident took as its inspiration an event that occurred in Japan in 1984, an event which was a watershed moment in Japanese society because it shattered the myth of a well-behaved crimeless society, much like the Lindbergh kidnapping in America.

(*) The Glico-Morinaga Case - On March 18, 1984, two masked men with a cap on carrying a gun and a rifle stormed into the house of Katsuhisa Ezaki, president of the giant food maker Glico Corporation. The two men held Ezaki for ransom of 1 billion yen. Ezaki escaped three days later, but this was only the beginning. In May, blackmailing started with letters sent to the newspapers telling that they had laced some Glico products in the Nagoya-Okayama region with potassium cyanide. The letter was signed by "The Monster With 21 Faces", after the villain in Edogawa Ranpo's popular detective novels. Glico products disappeared from the stores, with a loss of more than 5 billion yen. In June, Japanese newspapers received a new letter from the group: "We forgive Glico." But then The Monster With 21 Faces shifted the target from Glico to other food companies, Marudai Ham, Morinaga and House. However, after one last message, dated February 27, 1985, nobody heard from The Monster With 21 Faces ever again. The identikit of thttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifhe "fox-eyed man" as the police called the prime suspect of the Glico-Morinaga Case, was on all papers and TV channels, becoming one of Japanese crime history icons. In March 1994, the statute of limitation ran out for the abduction of Ezaki, leaving the case unsolved and without explanation. The Glico-Morinaga Case, or Case 114 as it is officially designated, has been the highest on the Japanese Police priority list for 10 years.

-- Footnote in an interview with Kenji Kamiyama, director of Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex