Putting on the Gumshoes.(Japan)(Brief Article)

Yasuo Sumida is hot on a suspect's trail. His target--a middle-aged man in a dark suit--enters a department store in central Tokyo and heads for the furniture section, where he spends the next half-hour idly perusing tables, chairs and sofas. Sumida makes sure that there are only two exits from the building, positions himself behind a tall chest and watches the man, feeling the sweat bead on his forehead. Suddenly the target turns to look directly at him, and Sumida, in a panic, sprints up to the next floor. "I don't know why I did that," says the embarrassed Sumida, 45, a mild-mannered former real-estate salesman from Osaka. "I lost my cool."

Sherlock Holmes he's not. Fortunately Sumida was engaged in a mock investigation, part of an intensive one-week course offered by a Tokyo detective school. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other equally unprepossessing salarymen are putting on gumshoes as well. In Osaka, the only prefecture that requires detective agencies to register, the number of Japanese private eyes has doubled in the past five years to more than 2,000. Thousands of agencies now advertise on the Internet and in telephone books. At Ability Office, the Tokyo agency and school that Sumida attends, 50 students apply every month, five times more than three years ago. "There has been a P.I.-school boom in the past few years," says Yoshikazu Nagai, author of a Japanese history of private eyes.

As Japan continues to wallow in recession, thousands of businessmen are having to fend for themselves for the first time in years. Many are using the opportunity to branch out of their traditional gray professions. Former executives have become cabdrivers. Salarymen are now selling beauty products and opening matchmaking services. The number of businessmen who are ...