A Conversation Between Office Ladies in Hokkaido
“It’s true! I swear, I was there! Back when they started one of those— What do you call ’em? Color gangs? It was called the Dollars in Ikebukuro.”
“Now you’re just being weird. You said you’ve never been outside of Hokkaido, much less to Tokyo, aside from your school field trip. Why would you be in Ikebukuro?”
“Yeah, I know I said that. But that doesn’t matter. You see, I got into this weird, obscure chat room online by claiming I was in middle school. They started talking about gangs at one point, and somebody just straight up said, ‘Let’s start our own color gang for fun.’ I swear to God.”
“And then?”
“At first it only existed online: You’d see the kids posting on message boards for those kinds of groups or on big Tokyo-centric boards, like, ‘I saw this gang!’ Or ‘I’m a member of this one!’ It was just a big inside joke. But then, after a while…stories started popping up about the Dollars in places that had nothing to do with any of us! I swear!”
Five minutes later…
“So you got scared and quit the chat room, Chako? That sounds fun; you should have stuck around longer. I mean, it’s all in Tokyo, right?”
“Yeah, that was my decision at first…but then I got scared.”
“What, that you’d get arrested? Wait, I get it—you were scared that if this gang turned real and actually did something or killed someone, you might be held responsible in some way?”
“No. It wasn’t like that… What I got scared of was someone in that chat room.”
“?”
“He was, like, so pure…so dedicated… It was really creepy. Basically, there was one guy who was, like, desperate to protect that gang. I started to feel like…we were being lured into some cult or something. He was one of those people who seemed totally normal at first.”
“Ohhh yeah, I get that. Like those blogs that are completely ordinary, but then once in a while, you see a post that makes you think, Oh, this guy’s actually crazy.”
“Yes! Exactly! I have no idea what he was like in real life, but I swear he’s still around online.”
“Um… He used this really mundane name, like…Ichirou Yamada or Tarou Tanaka or something like that.”
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