Article published on November 25th, 1984.
By Anthony Barbieri Jr.
c.1984 The Baltimore Sun
Tokyo - They stand on street corners or near the entrances to busy subway stops, a little too well dressed in their dark blue business suits to look entirely comfortable hawking the brightly colored bags of candies and sweets stacked up beside them.
"Irasshai" (welcome), they shout to passers-by, and those who stop to purchase one of the 1000 yen bags usually offer an encouraging word..
"It doesn't matter which one of them you taste first," one of the candy hawkers tells a couple eyeing one of the bags, "It's perfectly safe.”
The remark is one that, in the midst of Japan's most widely publicized criminal investigation, hardly needs explaining.
The men are all executives of Morinaga & Co., one of Japan's largest confectioners, and they are out on the streets hawking candy in a fight to save their company from the ravages of a shadowy gang known as the Monster with 21 Faces, which has been lacing Morinaga candies with poison in the most spectacular extortion case in Japanese history.
"The street sales are not for making money, but to demonstrate that we will not give in," said Yukio Kitano, a spokesman for Morinaga.
Although police maintain they are making steady progress in the case, their efforts have won them nothing but scorn from the gang, which has been taunting its adversaries in a series of scornful letters mailed to Japanese newspapers.
The police appear to be losing face, along with their much-cherished reputation of efficiency and invincibility in a society where crime rates are low and social cohesion high.
"Half a year has passed since the group committed it's first crime. We do not recall a case in which criminals have made such fools of the police," the Yomiuri Shimbun complained in a recent editorial.
If so, it has not been for a lack of police effort. In the past four weekends, police sent 40,000 men - nearly one of every five Japanese policemen - to inspect supermarket shelves for poisoned candy.
