Because it's real easy to make one up that cannot be recognized as such, just give people the indication of a reasonable good profit, say 7-10 percent and not something outrageous, add a little environmental awareness or something like that. Come up with the suggestion that you invest in something tangible and volia, you're set. This is what happened with the Teak Plantation investment schemes in Europe. It took the even the financial authorities quite a while to find out that most of these schemes were actual pozzi/pyramid schemes.

But (military) firesquads usually aim for the heart, don't they? Aiming for the head will be pretty messy I guess. Not too nice a job to be in the firing squad then. Then again it probably never is.

Japan wasn't in an internal crisis, neither sociologically, economically or environmentally speaking. It was the USA who forced the japanese to open their economy to 'open' trade (only with the US though). Before that point Japan had, for example, issues an environmental reforesting campaign, that was highly successful (85 percent of Japan is covered with forest). After the US 'opening up' Japan developed - partly out of feelings of frustration and humiliation brought on by the US - into an aggressive bully in the region culminating into invading mainland China and declaring war on the US. Nobody knows how the Japanese would have developed, would they've been left alone in the 1850s, but at least it's fair to state that the US did wrong big time back then.