ura hello work chapter 8 – 示談屋
8- OUT-OF-COURT SETTLEMENT NEGOTIATOR (示談屋 JIDANYA)
RISK:***
SALARY:***
HARD LABOR:***
ILLEGALITY:***
Imagine it, if you will: You’re driving along, minding your own business, when someone runs in front of your car, and suddenly – BOOM, he’s down on the ground. You don’t know if he’s dead or alive. You take your hands from the steering wheel, and jump out of the car, hoping your victim is still breathing. A mob gathers around you, pointing fingers. The ambulance and a police car come screeching to the scene. I am getting paid by the word. As the sirens echo, you call your danisha (ed. Note: 代理者: an insurance agent who is appointed by the insurance company to act as the insured person’s proxy or legal representative if an accident happens. I am not sure if the dairisha is working for the insurance company or if they are independent contractors.) But, just like you thought, the dairisha won’t answer your calls. ‘Leave a message at the tone.’ Your panic grows and grows! What will become of you? Jail? Just then, you’re approached by a mild-mannered, skinny little guy, who hands you his business card. It says, “out-of-court settlement negotiator” on it. “Looks like you’re in trouble, sir,” he says. You nod. And that’s how, in the course of time, you become a client of Mr. Townup (45, not his real name), the negotiator.
JIDANYA ARRESTED FOR INTIMIDATION
Mr. Townup is wearing a very classy suit, looking like a very proper salary-man from a trendy corporation. It’s a very re-assuring first impression. But if you talk to him for any length of time, you’ll notice he never smiles. Maybe his mouth smiles, but it never quite reaches his eyes.
“Although we jidanya do have the power of attourney to settle disputes,” he says, “we’re subject to Article 72 of the Lawyer Laws.” (ed. Note: Article 72 states that people who are not full-on lawyers can not take on accident cases purely for the commission money. In other words, they are working with the hope that their client will pay them a donation. This is to prevent ambulance-chasing. However, this system often results in jidanya forcing their clients to pay ‘donations’. In 2004, a former pro boxer was arrested under article 72)
“But, that law doesn’t really have teeth. Most of the time a negotiator gets busted, it’s for intimidation or fraud. Our clients are at the center of a vortex of trouble, and we hurl ourselves in headfirst. So a certain amount of intimidation is necessary to bring about a settlement,” he continued, in a very casual voice, as if he wasn’t shady at all.
“An acquaintance of mine got busted for intimiation, but the way he did business was pretty outrageous to begin with. He even made the news, I think! After he settled out of court, he demanded the client pay him $20,000 – the same exact price the client would have paid to the victim in the first place!! The client was a real piece of work, too though – he was complaining to everyone around him, and I guess one of his friends put it in his head that he had no obligation to the jidanya at all! So he said, “I’m not paying!” and stopped talking to my friend. Now in this kind of situation, (because of the ‘not for profit’ clause of article 72), the negotiator is supposed to do the honorable thing and throw up his hands in defeat. Not my friend, though! He tailed the client until the client walked down a dark street, no people around. Then he kidnapped him and took him to a warehouse! “You’re not getting out of here until you pay up!” And that’s how he got arrested. He’s an idiot, but I can understand his anger. We jidanya have to work like dogs to grind out a settlement, and then the client who was begging us to please save him, he can turn around and say, ‘Who are you?’ and walk away without paying? It can certainly make a man angry!”
Mr. Townup has never been arrested, but he’s come within a hair’s-breadth of it!
“I’ll tell you this much: If the insurance and the dairisha (proxy agents) did their job properly in the first place, guys like me would not exist. But they get greedy, they cut corners. They work really hard to get new customers, but when the customers get in an accident, the insurance man pretends he’s never met the customer! ‘It’s got nothing to do with me! I never heard about this so-called ‘accident’!’ If the insured person is driving, and it looks like the company might have to pay the accident victim, you can bet their phoney-baloney investigation team will ‘discover’ that somehow the insured person was not at fault, and therefore they should not have to pay. But – on the other hand – if the insurance customer is the victim, and the OTHER guy has deep-pocket insurance. . . the insurance agent will tell the customer, ‘Act like you’re injured bad!’ (‘But it doesn’t hurt at all.’) “Just do it, please!” (In this case, usually I get hired to negotiate for the OTHER party!)
“If the insured person was in a car crash, they’ll tell him, ‘You’re not covered for medical treatment.’ Of course, legally, the insured person is entitled to kenkiri (ケンキリ means, to retroactively change the policy to cover car crashes). He’s entitled to it, but unless he’s a lawyer, he doesn’t KNOW that, and they damn sure won’t tell him. In fact doing ケンキリ is really easy to do, but the hospital makes more money if the patient doesn’t use insurance. You’d think that the insurance would take the side of the patient over the side of the hospital, and give good advice, but that is not how they do things. And THAT’S why guys like me are necessary! WE are the ones who tell the client his real options.”
SETTLING OUT OF COURT WITH THE MOB
If there’s an especially ‘complicated’ accident, the insurance companies are even more eager than usual to tuck their tails between their legs and run away from the insured person. Mr. Townup discusses one of his most memorable ‘complicated’ cases:
“Yakuza are scary, no question. Big black Mercedes Benzes rolling around. You have to be careful with them. If their Mercedes has even the tiniest scratch, they’ll demand you pay for a full-body re-painting. In that case, the wisest thing to do is cry and give up. But for some reason, seeing that kind of bullying gives me an inner strength, and makes me stand up to them. One time I really got into it with an authentic wiseguy.
At the time he took the contract, he didn’t realize that the claimant was a yakuza. Sure, the claimant was demanding $10,000 in damages and full-body repainting, but lots of regular people like to make extravagant demands. Townup set up a meeting with the claimant. He went there with his client, only to discover that, inside an ordinary-looking office building, was an official Mob office!
“I stopped and psyched myself up to deal with them. But first I told my client to go home – now was definitely not the time for him to meet them. Clearly, by choosing their official mob office as the meeting place, they were trying to kyoukatsu (恐喝:intimidate him). I didn’t know who was waiting for us inside, but I had no choice but to go in. In this business it’s essential to never show weakness. You have to make the other party feel like are obliged to you.
“We stood in front of the door while I thought. The client was scared, it seemed he wanted me to take care of everything – Well, if it’s on like that, then it’s on! As I decided, I felt my nerves calm. I guess my decision was odd, but I’d lost to Yakuza before, but instead of making me hopeless, it made me more determined to win this time. I guess it’s my personality! “
Mr. Townup sent his client to a nearby convenience store to “get me some hot ramen noodles.” He himself went directly in front of the building and called the claimant on his cellphone.
“’XXX Industries,’ a gruff voice answered. That’s how I knew for sure they were Yakuza. I gave my name and announced that I was outside. ‘Then get your ass in here!’ they replied. I kept refusing, and then the line went dead. Shortly thereafter, three big dudes came out of the building, heading right for me. Normally when you mess with gangsters like I did, you’d think that you’d get hurt. And you’d be right. They tried to drag me inside. I pretended that I was calm, but it was frightening – I thought I was going to piss my pants. I was thinking, ‘Go ahead, hit me!’ Normally Yakuza in the countryside care about their reputation with the locals, so they don’t beat people up right outside their office. And that’s when they hit me!
“To them, it might have felt like they were just flicking their fingers, but I got hit two or three times in the abdomen. All the while, I was telling them, ‘The client couldn’t come today, but we’ll be back another time.’ When they realized that they weren’t getting anywhere with me, they told me, ‘Come back tomorrow at two, both of you!’ and went back inside.
”I borrowed a camera from my client and took pictures of my injuries. Looking at them, anyone could clearly see that I’d been attacked. We had them enlarged, printed, and attached them to a large sandwitch-board, like someone advertising stuff on the street. Armed with this injury sandwitch-board, we returned to the Yakuza office the following day. The Yakuza went crazy! They were so mad. At that time, I was puzzled that I’d even taken the beef that far. In retrospect, it’s puzzling that we didn’t get beat up even worse!
“In the end, they ordered us to go to a nearby coffee shop, where we negotiated. We wound up paying more than in a normal case, but still only a third of what they’d originally asked. “
At first, the gangsters were looking at him like they’d as soon kill him, but in the end they had to admit he had some guts, they told him later.
“But, when they told me that, in the back of my mind, I shuddered. The Yakuza continued: ‘If you had continued to stand there another hour, we were debating whether to stab you or not.’ I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not, but looking at his face, there was no way to think he was entirely joking.”
ALL-NIGHT FUNERAL VIGILS ARE THE MOST DIFFICULT PART
After that hair-raising tale, Mr. Townup began abruptly to talk about funerals.
“If the insured person dies in a crash, neither the insurance company nor the dairisha comes to the funeral. But a jidanya like me, who has entered into a legal contract with them, sometimes gets asked, ‘Please come to the tsuya（通夜: all-night funeral vigil!’ That’s definitely the most difficult part of this job.
“If you look at it from the point of view of the bereaved family . . . It’s not like they can get a cash settlement and then, boom, it’s over. It’s not that simple for them. It’s never over! Especially bad is when a child dies. It’s impossible to calculate the suffering of the parents: Their child walked out the front door in the morning, all cheerful, and came back that night, a lifeless cold corpse. I can’t even imagine their state of mind.
“We can’t do anything but lower our heads and look away. One time, I went to a tsuya for a six year old girl. My client (who had killed her in a car accident) had been invited to the tsuya by the victims’ family, and he asked me to go with him. He warned me in advance, “No matter what happens, don’t stop praying.” Sure enough, at the tsuya, the girl’s mother goes half-mad with grief and starts spinning around. The client also gets up, waving incense sticks around and shaking his hair. Suddenly the girl’s mother grabs my client, and throws him to the ground. Then she unleashes a flurry of punches. The rest of the victims’ family sits there, praying. As you might expect, we could not have our negotiation meeting that day. It wasn’t until fourty-nine days later that the victims’ family had calmed down enough to call me and set one up.
“When I think of incidents like that, I start feeling like mine is an unlucky occupation. But, we are vital to settling cases. I’m not going to say we’re a perfect bunch, but we help more people than the insurance companies. And there’s a lot of cases where the insurance companies are so neglectful that the matter might actually have come to a trial, had we not mediated. (ed. Note: In Japan, lawsuits are a worst-case scenario, not the first-case scenario like in America) There’s other cases so complex that only we have the ‘know how’ to bring about a settlement. Of course, some jidanya are nothing but Yakuza, and there’s groups of people calling themselves jidanya who have never been certified, but some of us are really good, honest people. If you’re in an accident, you should call your insurance company and your dairisha first. But if they are useless, there’s another way: call your ‘negotiator.’ A skilled jidanya can get you a much better settlement than an unskilled lawyer can!”
4 comments Tags: crime, ura hello work, yakuza —
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I really enjoy reading these interviews. Thank you for putting your time into so many unique articles. Your years of service to the online community are a great resource that provide rare information to the masses.
“I am getting paid by the word.”
Hehe. Easter egg!
This chapter is my favorite so far…
Same feeling here, best article yet. Probably because it’s the shadiest so far!
Thx for your time and efforts.
"I am getting paid by the word"
WTF? Is the writer cracking a joke in the middle of a serious account? How serious is he about his work? Padding out with words is fine by me, but i hope he didn't sacrifice truth for bulk.