Next month, my college moves into a new and bigger building than we’re in now, in part due to the fact that after getting Japan Ministry of Education recognition and the ability to grant student visas has increased our student numbers. (Another might be the fact that a second subway line is opening this summer just a few meters from our doors, and probably rents are going up too high).

One thing that we both will and will not miss (for very different reasons) is the drama going on in the streets around us. We are now located on an east-west avenue in northern east Shinjuku, not too far from Kabuki-cho. As I drove my scooter up to school today, I saw a tall guy standing in front of our building, looking intently down the sidewalk past me, talking on a cell phone. His look instantly prompted the reaction, “yakuza!” He was wearing a well-tailored pinstripe suit, and was tall, beefy and, well, rather yakuza-ish looking.

I pulled into our little side alley and parked, and a staff member who joined us not too long ago was observing from the alley way, noting surprise. He told me that someone had just chased a woman (who was at that time nowhere I could see), shouting at her. I replied, “well, maybe not too surprising considering the number of digits some gentlemen in this area have,” referring to the well-known yakuza habit of chopping off one’s pinky as a show of contrition or as punishment. And sure enough, when we looked at the hands of the men in front of our building (a guy in a jogging suit had joined the pinstripe guy), one of them was missing a pinky. Yow.

Actually, in recent days, the yakuza are not as prominent around these parts as they used to be. In the past, every few months we’d suddenly get about a half-dozen and more expensive sedans parking in the immediate area, each one guarded by a beefy yakuza-looking guy standing next to it. The cars would bring and then take away suited men also apparently of the yakuza persuasion. I heard second-hand that there was some incident a year ago, and the police cracked down on the area soon after that, maybe that’s why they moved their meetings somewhere else.

Not that any of this presents a risk to us or our students. In the ten years we’ve been in this location, I have never heard of a single instance of anyone in the student body or the faculty being harassed in any way by these guys; they seem to stick to their own business. Still, it adds a dash of adventure to the environment. Like I said, this is one reason to like the area–often some excitement happening without any real danger–but also is probably not a bad reason to be glad we’re moving to a new location.

New headline in the tech news today:

Another Trojan Targets Mac OS X

Yet another unscrupulous chunk of malicious software is being aimed at unsuspecting Mac users.

Security firms Sophos and Trend Micro are calling attention to a new Trojan application aimed at Apple Mac users. This Trojan, dubbed Imunizator, is similar to a previous attack called MacSweeper.

Wow! Yet another trojan for the Mac! This makes, what, three? With the first two being so incredibly lame that probably fewer than a dozen Mac users in the entire world have fallen for them? If even that many?

There are two monumental pieces of irony in this particular “malware” story. The first is: This … is … not … MALWARE. Calling it a “trojan” is, to say the least, an enormous stretch. Sophos actually calls it a “Trojan” in the “category” of “Viruses and Spyware,” which is completely ludicrous.

This is software that you have to actively locate, download, and then run. And then it does… nothing. It does not infect your system, does not inject any code into anything, gets past no security barriers, nothing. All it does is try to make you believe you have malware on your Mac, and prompts you to buy their software to get rid of it.

The second major irony here is that the Mac “security” vendors are warning people that this software “tries to scare Mac users into purchasing unnecessary software by claiming that privacy issues have been discovered on the computer.” The irony? That’s exactly what the Mac “security”vendors do all the time!!! I can see why they’d want to warn people away from this software–it’s trying to muscle in on their turf!