Bottles broken, blood spilled at welcome-home celebration.

Sunshine 60 (pictured above) is a 60-story skyscraper in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district. Like a lot of high-rises in the city, it has a collection of restaurants on its upper floors with fabulous views of the surrounding area, making its eateries popular venues for special-occasion dinners.

For example, on Sunday evening Sunshine Cruise Cruise, a swanky French restaurant on Sunshine 60’s 58th floor, had a reservation from a single group of approximately 100 diners. Were they celebrating a grandparent’s birthday or a coworker’s retirement? Nope. There were having a party because one of them just got out of prison in August, as they were all members of the gang known as Chinese Dragon.

▼ Sunshine Cruise Cruise

The party got started at around 6 p.m., but it only took about half an hour for things to turn thuggish. At some point, a brawl broke out, with a group of about 10 men throwing fists at each other inside the posh establishment. The police were called, but by the time they arrived most of the members of the party had fled the scene, leaving overturned tables, smashed glasses and beer bottles, and a broken door behind. Only one person from the party who remained behind was hurt, a man in his 20s who’d suffered light injuries, but the presence of unaccounted-for bloodstains suggests some of those who’d made their escape before the cops showed hadn’t gone home unscathed.

▼ Police at the restaurant following the fight

Chinese Dragon was originally founded by descendants of Japanese nationals left in China after the end of World War II who eventually came to Japan. Originally forming in the late 1980s, the gang has managed to avoid being caught in many of the anti-organized crime ordinances that have reduced the size and influence of Japan’s yakuza syndicates since Chinese Dragon has not been officially classified as a boryokudan, or organized crime group, because of its looser hierarchal structure. As a result, the full anti-boryokudan regulations that restrict assembly and other activities by yakuza members can’t be applied to the gang, though its increased involvement in robberies, blackmail, extortion, bank transfer fraud, and drug dealing has resulted in them being designated as a quasi-boryokudan since 2013.

Ikebukuro isn’t an especially rough neighborhood, especially the east side of the station, where Sunshine 60 is located. If anything, the area is best known for its collection of shops and other businesses catering to female anime fans, making online commenters all the more surprised and exasperated at the incident.

“Going to jail because of what you did at a welcome-home-from-jail-party.”
“Beyond stupid.”
“So you go to a party for someone when he gets out of jail, and then he can come to your party when you get out!”
“I hope they throw the whole bunch of them in prison for life.”
“They really out to just go ahead and designate them as a boryokudan.”
“I’ve been to that restaurant. It’s a really nice place. You’ve gotta be kind of nuts to think of starting a brawl there.”
“And what kind of full-grown adults go around calling themselves ‘dragons?’ Like, are they a bunch of second-year junior high otaku or something?”

The police are still investigating what sparked the skyscraper brawl, but suspect that either infighting among members of the gang or a raid by members of a rival outfit was the cause.

Source: NHK, FNN Prime Online, Yomiuri Shimbun, YouTube/FNNプライムオンライン
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