The Dark Past Of Tokyo's Lovable Little People

This petite princess actually had a very cute face.  

              

  Although midgets are now quite popular in Japan,  they weren't always. In the mid 1800's they were well know as corpse robbers,  usually stereotyped as common criminals and usually barred entry into many shops and restaurants.    

 In the 1800's Japanese medical schools had a severe shortage of cadavers, the only source of them was executed criminals or non Japanese Asians that died in Japan and either couldn't afford a cremation or had no one claim their corpse.    

Unlike the west, in Japan 100% of bodies are cremated. A handful of very wealthy Westerners are buried here, and only in a few Western style cemeteries around Japan. While in Europe,  fresh grave robbing was a fairly common way of supplying cadavers to medical schools, Japan had almost no graves to rob.            

 

Now well compensated for her meaningless office job and ability to bring her company good luck, her ancestors had it rough.                   


This is where the midgets got the bad rap. From 1840 to 1864 a crime ring of 6-8 midgets routinely robbed crematoriums of the dead in Japan. The funeral business / crematoriums, as in the west , are usually operated by some level of organized crime. Several death related businesses where connected to supplying the little gang of creepy midgets.    
          

The group of diminutive, sausage fingered thugs supplied medical schools, private researchers and fetishists all over Japan with corpses for years. The families of the dead assumed the ashes they got back were their loved ones but if you went to one of the funeral homes connected with the cunning runts, chances are you got just regular or animal ashes back.  As if stealing bodies wasn't bad enough, the little creeps were also charged with stealing jewelery and extracting the teeth of the corpses and supplying dentists with the teeth so they could fashion morbid, realistic dentures for Japan's upper class.      
   

This bite-sized businessman make be cursed with short stature, but he is blessed with a plush head of hair that would make JFK Jr. jealous.

           

The wee Japanese of Tokyo were nothing but common thugs in those days. Their motive, simple greed. But what of the buyers? Who were the upstanding members of society who would commission the theft and mutilation of someone's dead mother? It was the deans and management of the corrupt, new industry of  for -profit medical schools!  “He must mangle the living if he has not operated on the dead” is an old saying that is a mantra for medical students worldwide, Japan was no different.   
     
        

These two creeps really hate midgets, almost as much as they hate women, they wouldn't give up their seat to the little lady- despite being in the women only car.               


 The only reason they were ever found out was more greed and bad timing. The gang of drunken midgets showed up at a Yokohama medical college in front of about 25 students and their parents at a ceremony with a cadaver at their little feet. They loudly demanded a big payment for the body and got it- with all the witnesses watching. They told the students that the cadaver's relatives had sold them the body- though this was and still is, given the Japanese public's abhorrence of dissection , a very unlikely scenario.   

 The heavily bruised, well dressed, toothless corpse, it turns out, had been a lodger at a  sleazy boarding house run by one of the dwarfs who died from unknown reasons.    The man died in one of his small rooms and was unable to come up with the money for the nights he stayed. The undersized landlord was not one to forgive debt and came up with what he and his gang thought was a fair solution. Thus giving the unlucky lodger the opportunity in death to pay off what he neglected in life.  

        

 Probably off to meet his much taller date, he hustles though Shinjuku Station like a bat out of hell.   Tokyo's midgets always seem to be in a rush.

          

The students and their parents, being from good stock , sensed foul play and alerted the authorities. After a 2 week investigation, the midgets where all arrested and  publically hanged within a month. The crimes and punishment were one of the biggest domestic stories of the year and gave all of the little people of Japan a bad name for the rest of the century.  

            

Since then, all of Japan's cadavers come from China, where life is cheap and some grubby fingered midget over there is making a  profit.  

                           Fuck these little piece of shit delinquents, I got a mint sushi platter to feed my much taller than average frame.