From this blog:

This comes from the masterful accounting of postwar Japan, Inventing Japan, by former Washington Post Tokyo Bureau Chief William Chapman:

"Tokyo endured [the] winter [of 1945-1946] on the workings of an illegal economy. The black market encompassed thousands of sellers and millions of buyers dealing in every commodity of daily life. It was also a vast jungle of lawlessness that began with thefts and led to gang killings, turf wars, and casual murders, becoming at last a criminal demimonde of immense proportions. It embraced all classes and kinds of people. When the war ended, sake, bread, clothing, shoes, sugar and blankets had disappeared from military depots all over the country, pilfered wholesale by officers and enlisted men alike. Small thefts were the routine of daily existence. A bicycle snatched at Ueno's railway station turned up repainted and for sale two hours later at the station in Shimbashi. Koreans and Chinese, forced-labor immigrants during the war, prospered with goods smuggled from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and by the Occupation's ruling, they could not be arrested by Japanese police.

It was the beginning for many mobster organizations, some of whose descendants still operate today. In Tokyo there were eight major syndicates, each with its own piece of turf around the major train stations...They fought amongst themselves and against other gangs, the Japanese mobs battling constantly for territory against the Koreans and Chinese. Guns were plentiful, another result of looted army depots. Unable or unwilling to intervene, police let gangs have at one another, and the shootouts continued for several years into the Occupation. One day in April 1948, two gangs - one Japanese, one Korean - fought it out with pistols in the Hamamatsu district. The next day, about one hundred Japanese returned to the attack on the Koreans' black market there and killed or wounded more than 15 men."

The rest of his comments are worth reading as well.

My biggest fear right now is that the Bush administration is going to be panicked by the constant barrage against it into doing something rash, like trying to dive out of Iraq too soon.

It is a capital mistake to assume the only reason we are being attacked by guerillas is because Iraq as a nation doesn't want us there. It's because the guerillas are Baathist murdering thugs and Islamists who want to take Iraq back into totalitarianism again, and if there was not one single American in the nation, the bombings would go on until they won. It would just be democratic Iraqis on the receiving end.