crime

Talent management agency Avilla receives threatening letter, ammo cartridge

11 Comments

Talent management agency Avilla received a package containing a threatening letter and what police believe to be an ammunition cartridge, police sources said Tuesday. The agency received the parcel in February, when it was involved in legal wrangling over its contract with popular actress Kaori Manabe, 31.

According to police, the package, sent by standard mail, contained a metallic ammo cartridge and a letter warning the agency to stop bothering Manabe.

According to the Sankei newspaper, the disputes between Manabe and Avilla began in 2009 when Manabe's former agency, also run by Avilla company president Masaya Makino, 43, was formally accused of tax evasion. Manabe filed a lawsuit seeking dissolution of her contract, but was then countersued by Avilla. Manabe was subsequently sued by Makino for defamation of character after Manabe's lawyers presented documents in the Avilla case, stating that some of his clients had quit the agency due to his alleged shady conduct.

Makino was accused of sexual harassment and forcing female clients to have an abortion if they became pregnant, Sankei reported. Makino has denied the allegations, and claimed that the evidence was based on hearsay and untruths.

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11 Comments
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Ok! Typical yakuza at work??????

0 ( +0 / -0 )

A bullet is a projectile which is made to exit a gun. A cartridge is also known as a round and is a bullet, casing and powder together and ready to be fired. The bullet separtes from the casing when fired and exits the gun. A magazine is a box which holds ammunition and can be inserted into a gun to act as a loader for the ammunition it holds. They often use a spring to put the cartridges into postion.

I stand by what I said. Making a phoney ammo cartridge would be hard. This is because its hard to make a hollow casing of thin hard metal like brass complete with tiny lettering like you usually find on the back of the casing. Making a lead bullet would not be too hard, but to make it fit the casing, or the casing fit it, that would take some skill to do it in a way that anyone would be fooled for two seconds.

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Oracle

See, I think you think "ammunition cartridge" is an ammo magazine, and I'm sure many other readers do as well.

I think it means "bullet".

Technically, a bullet is one component of an ammo cartridge, along with the powder and the casing. An ammo cartridge just one single unit of ammunition. Colloquially however, in American English, we would just say "bullet" to mean the whole thing. I'm not sure about other countries...

But I suspect these Japan Today articles are often just literal translations of Japanese newswires. It's the literal translation that results in them conveying confusing or wrong information, and just plain sounding weird.

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Makino was accused of sexual harassment and forcing female clients to have an abortion if they became pregnant

Given all the other things that go on, it certainly sounds possible and not at all an outrageous accusation.

More information about that would be nice. I can't quite figure out how its tied to the rest of the article.

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theriveriswideAug. 17, 2011 - 01:28PM JST

Indeed, making a phoney bullet is no hard task. Making a phoney ammo cartridge on the other hand...

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Is "ammunition cartridge" only weird-sounding to Americans? Why not just say "bullet"? I realize the technical difference between the two, but when you want to threaten someone, do you send them a "bullet" in the mail or an "ammo cartridge"?

Also- "what police believe to be an ammunition cartridge"? If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...

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The agency received the parcel in February,

Boy this is really being reported in a timely fashion NOT! LOL!

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Have any Japanese "talent" agencies ever actually succeeded in finding any talent? I've never seen or heard any...

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now one to Johnnys please

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Sounds like a monster, you just don't make those kind of things up. Talent agencies are yakuza run so their allegations can't be far from the truth.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

From what I hear and know of the way agencies treat their "stable" here, I doubt any of this was based on hearsay and untruths.

1 ( +3 / -2 )

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