Tokyo Swindlers – Season 1 Episode 5 Recap & Review

Episode 5

Our ‘Tokyo Swindlers’ episode 5 recap and review begins with Tatsu’s funeral, where Kuramochi expresses her suspicions of foul play regarding his death to her superior, who’s been trying to get her off the case since he’s working with Harrison. Elsewhere, Takeshita aggressively pursues 3 million yen, believing he’s doing more than others. Orochi has begun working on the temple premises as a gardener to swap the gate lock. The team discusses how to go about showing Aoyagi and his team the temple grounds.

Elsewhere, Aoyagi pushes for internal approval and disregards one of his co-workers’ warnings that the entire project looks suspicious, especially because of Natsumi’s unavailability. Later, since Aoyagi belongs to the President’s faction, the President helps him get approval from the directors with the help of a memo written with a pencil that says the President has viewed the property to bypass the company’s regulations. After all the directors sign the approval, the President erases the memo and signs the document himself.

Meanwhile, under Takumi and Orochi’s threat, Kaede successfully persuades Natsumi to go on a trip with him on the day the scammers need to show the property to Aoyagi and his team.

Tatsu’s wife gives Kuramochi the contact of a person Tatsu had told her to contact in case he died investigating a case, while asking Kuramochi to be wary of her superior. She meets with a man who was a freelance journalist before getting kidnapped and almost killed by the yakuza. He’s been helping Tatsu, who saved him, by keeping tabs on the underworld. He decides to help Kuramochi.

While talking to Takumi over wine, Harrison expresses his wish to know why Takumi joined to become a land swindler someday. Later that night, Takumi thinks about the upcoming death anniversary of his family. Aoyagi and his team get the approval they’ve been wanting, and the swindler team rejoices about it as well.

Meanwhile, Kuramochi has begun her stakeout outside Abiru Holdings, just as Tatsu did. She meets with the freelance journalist, who sheds further light on Takumi’s past by showing her how the man who swindled Takumi’s family has been living in the Philippines because someone tried to kill him. Later, she comes across Takumi while he’s visiting his family’s grave and confronts him.

The Episode Review

After Tatsu’s death, Kuramochi, who always wanted to be a crime detective, finally gets to do what she desired. She’s been working quietly without the police knowing, of course. With the scene where Aoyagi is warned about the deal being suspicious, the show successfully wraps up any loopholes in the plot.

Aoyagi’s reasoning behind not acting upon the advice is quite solid – firstly, the co-worker belongs to the chairman’s faction and is visibly in a political war with him over a promotion; secondly, he later takes the advice into account when cross-questioning the swindlers. So, everything is quite tightly connected with the overall plot.

Harrison, in this episode, ironically talks about how humans have been fighting for land since the beginning of history. “The most foolish thing of all is that we’re obsessed with possession of land. Land, by nature, doesn’t belong to anyone.

Nevertheless, the concept of possession of land was invented in the human mind, and it led us to never-ending wars, killing, and struggles for power,” he tells Takumi, which is quite fitting for how Takumi’s world was destroyed by land, but highly ironic coming from Harrison, who’s been partaking in the “never-ending wars, killing, and struggle for power” over land.

But at the same time, all his monologues have been quite philosophically rich and poetic, where here he’s giving us an existentialist perspective on how humans are responsible for creating the bloodlust for natural resources, adding that “put simply, human history is just a history of scrambling for land. And land drives people mad. Would that mean that land perhaps has the instinct to annihilate all that is human?”

And with this, our ‘Tokyo Swindlers’ episode 5 recap and review comes to an end. We’ll meet you in the next one!