Sherlock Holmes he’s not. Fortunately Sumida was engaged in a mock investigation, part of an intensive one-week course offered by a Tokyo detective school. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other equally unprepossessing salarymen are putting on gumshoes as well. In Osaka, the only prefecture that requires detective agencies to register, the number of Japanese private eyes has doubled in the past five years to more than 2,000. Thousands of agencies now advertise on the Internet and in telephone books. At Ability Office, the Tokyo agency and school that Sumida attends, 50 students apply every month, five times more than three years ago. “There has been a P.I.-school boom in the past few years,” says Yoshikazu Nagai, author of a Japanese history of private eyes.
As Japan continues to wallow in recession, thousands of businessmen are having to fend for themselves for the first time in years. Many are using the opportunity to branch out of their traditional gray professions. Former executives have become cabdrivers. Salarymen are now selling beauty products and opening matchmaking services. The number of businessmen who are taking exams for various licenses–from accountant to insurance specialist–in hopes of starting new careers is rising dramatically. “Many salarymen have come to realize they have to protect themselves because their employers don’t,” says Kotaro Anjo, president of Anjo International, a school that prepares candidates for such exams.
Private-eye schools promise burned-out salarymen an exotic profession that can be entered with just a little money and the training and connections the schools provide. Aspiring dicks don’t need a license (a major reason that the industry has traditionally been seen as somewhat sleazy). Business Chance, a monthly magazine for would-be entrepreneurs, lists several detective agencies that offer franchise schemes. “Your brain is basically all you need for this business,” says 23-year-old Yuki Kawakami, one of Sumida’s classmates.
Graduates–who pay about $2,000 for a two-month course–can look forward to plenty of work, too. Changes in Japanese society have spurred demand as well as supply: an increasing number of stalking victims, frustrated by police reluctance to get involved, are beginning to turn to private eyes. Corporate clients enlist sleuths to find excuses to fire redundant employees, or to look into records of their debtors to determine their ability to pay back. Prospective suitors hire them to check out potential dates met online. Former cop Shinichi Kiyabu, founder of Tokyo’s Ability Office, estimates that 2.5 million Japanese approach private investigators every year, and yet only a third of them find some kind of solution to their problems. “We hardly have enough well-trained investigators,” he says. If the Japanese economy continues to tank, that may soon be less of a problem.
