I met Makoto Matsuo, leader of the group mat cuts down its rivals with steel pipes in tea parlors and that rampages, with staves and rocks, among innocent train passengers, in a tiny cubicle of a room on the ground floor of a three-story business office building that would normally have no trouble blending into the gray alikeness of a hundred nondescript neighborhoods of Tokyo.

The room was tightly if crudely sealed off from the rest of the building, its walls a patchwork of odd-shaped cardboard pieces and old blankets with patterns you were likely to find in the tourist shop of a Navajo reservation. We entered from the street, ducking our heads under a steel shutter that had been raised part way to let us in and that was then quickly lowered to seal us off from the outside.