Tokyo Underworld

by Robert Whiting

  Robert Whiting is the author of You Gotta Have Wa and is one of the very few Westerners to write a regular column in the Japanese press. He has appeared as a commentator in documentaries about Japan and on such shows as Larry King Live and The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. He has also written for the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian, Newsweek, US News and World Report and Time, among other publications. He lives in Tokyo.

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Sqaure

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the US by Pantheon Books,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, 1999

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2012

  Copyright © Robert Whiting 1999

  The right of Robert Whiting to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Author’s note: the translations of articles presented here are mine. I alone bear responsibility for any errors.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78033-067-9 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-78033-517-9 (ebook)

  Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  In memory of the late, great Kitty

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1. The First Black Market

  2. Occupation Hangover

  3. Success Story

  4. Post-Olympic Underground Economy

  5. Miss Hokkaido

  6. Behind the Shoji

  7. The Great Transfer of Wealth

  8. Black Rider

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes and Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  Prologue

  America’s relationship with Japan began in 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry and his squadron of Black Ships forcibly ended centuries of self-imposed isolation and opened up the nation to the rest of the world. For years afterward, however, the number of expatriate Americans who actually lived in that country at any one time was measured in the low hundreds. Those silk traders, oil merchants, teachers, missionaries, military attachés, and so forth, were almost totally segregated, socially and geographically, from the general population.

  The war in the Pacific helped change all that. When it was over, Japan suddenly found itself playing unwilling host to over half a million occupying soldiers and civilians. Historians called it the biggest meeting between two cultures since Rome took Carthage.

  The libraries are filled with historical tomes, doctoral theses and personal memoirs recording the vast changes that resulted: the creation by starry-eyed New Deal ‘Japan experts’ of a new constitution; the semi-successful attempt to introduce democracy; Japan’s slow, painful metamorphosis from shattered nation to global economic power. The alliance also produced a considerable number of institutes, foundations, goodwill associations, academic departments, think tanks, libraries, endowments, trade agreements, treaties, sister cities and thousands of reassurances of the two parties’ essentially friendly and cooperative pursuit of peace, prosperity and human happiness.

  But there is another side to the US–Japan equation that is far less known if inextricably bound up in the whole. It is an alternate, separate layer of reality, a shadowy universe of characters – gangsters, corrupt entrepreneurs, courtesans, seedy sports promoters, streetwise opportunists, intelligence agents, political fixers and financial manipulators – who perhaps have done as much in their own right to influence US–Japan affairs as their more refined and respected peers. Significantly, it has not always been easy to distinguish the latter from the former.

  Japanese authors have written much about what they call variously the Underground Economy, the Invisible Empire, the Shadow Government and the Yami Shakai (Dark Society), among other things – and have dealt at length with American’s participation in it. However, the history of this chaotic orb and the efforts of Americans and Japanese to exploit, use and abuse each other within it has largely remained untold in the West.

  Among the more notable by-products of this dynamic subculture, for example, has been a postwar black market perhaps unprecedented in character; a secret Wall Street cabal that subverted official US policy in Japan; an extraordinary, jingoistic professional wrestling boom enthusiastically promoted by a tandem of political leaders and underworld bosses and led by a national sporting icon with a hidden past; a ruthless Korean gang lord vying for control of the city involved in a secret connection with the US government and the CIA; a professional wrestler and Tokyo jewel thief named ‘Gorgeous Mac’; nightclub hostesses trained in the art of international industrial espionage; Lockheed, the granddaddy of all aircraft scandals; financial gangsters; an underworld stock market manipulator who nearly made it to the portals of the White House; assorted con artists, gold smugglers and an American ‘Mafia Boss of Tokyo’ from New York who founded one of the world’s great nightspots – where many of these characters congregated.

  This book tells the story of that bizarre demimonde. It is a parable of greed, arrogance, duplicity and revenge that spans fifty years and bares many hidden layers in the US–Japan relationship. The tale it tells parallels the great shift of wealth from America to Japan and more recent shifts back the other way. It reveals as much about the baser emotions that have united Japanese and Americans in the fashioning of the postwar era as it does the vast cultural differences that habitually separate them.

  1. The First Black Market

  Urgent notice to enterprises, factories and those manufacturers in the process of shifting from wartime production to peacetime production. Your product will be bought in large quantities at a suitable price. Those who wish to sell should come with samples and estimates of production cost to the following address:

  Shinjuku Market, 1-854, Tsunohazu,

  Yodobashiku, Shinjuku Tokyo.

  Kanto Ozu Gumi, August 18, 1945

  It was surely some kind of record for speed. Three days after the end of the war – and a full ten before the first American soldier set foot in Japan – the above newspaper advertisement appeared for what would be the nation’s first postwar black market. One of the very few paid announcements in print at the time, it was a call to commerce hardly anyone expected so quickly, given the wretched, bomb-ravaged condition of Tokyo.

  Once a teeming castle town of wood and paper houses, Japan’s capital was now mostly cinder, the ground one massive flat layer of residue from the terrible B-29 Superfortress incendiary attacks. The heavily populated lowlands to the east by Tokyo Bay where the merchant and artisan classes had lived and worked had all but been obliterated, as had vast sections of the neighboring industrial city of Kawasaki and the port of Yokohama, further to the south. Drivers of what few cars there were frequently got lost because it was so difficult to distinguish the road from the rubble of shattered roof tiles and burned-out homes. All that was left standing were several marble and stone buildings in the commercial business centers of the capital, Marunouchi, Ginza, and Nihonbashi, which the Occupation authorities were planning to use for themselves.

  For most of Tokyo’s inhabitants existence was a living hell. The homele
ss, numbering in the millions, lived in jerry-built huts of chicken wire, rocks and cardboard, occupied subway stations and air raid shelters, or camped out in large bomb craters in the street. There was so little available food that people would travel hours to the countryside to trade expensive heirlooms for a tiny share of a farmer’s crop. Yet, by August 20, only five days after Japan had officially conceded defeat, the Ozu open-air market was ready to roll. Located at the main entrance of the western commuter hub Shinjuku Station – or what was left of it – it boasted a startling array of goods. Displayed on wooden crates were pots, pans, kettles, plates, silverware, cooking oil, tea, rice, leather, electrical goods and geta (wooden clogs), along with vast quantities of military equipment and clothing. Most of the wares for the market, which bore the romantic-sounding name Hikari Wa Shinjuku Yori (The Light Shines Forth from Shin-juku), had been stolen from a secret supply of provisions for a ghost army of 4 million men that was to have been mobilized in the event of an American invasion of the mainland.

  The Potsdam Declaration had decreed that the Japanese government would have to surrender all such materials. However, with Japan in a weird post-surrender netherworld where no one was really in charge, looters appropriated an estimated 70 percent of all supplies held in military depots throughout the country, providing the Ozu market with its windfall inventory.

  The Kanto Ozu gumi (Kanto Ozu gang) was the largest crime syndicate in Western Tokyo at the time. They were tekiya (itinerant peddlers, racketeers), a type of gangster in Japan that for centuries had monopolized the festival vending stalls at temples and shrines. They contrasted with the bakuto (gamblers), who also dated back to feudal times, and with the latter-day stevedores, rickshaw drivers and day laborers under control of the slum labor bosses, who had also formed underworld gangs.

  Despite involvement in protection, narcotics, strong-arm debt collecting, strikebreaking and blackmail, among other nefarious activities, all of them professed to be a cut above mobsters in other lands. They claimed to live by a strict code of chivalry, based on the samurai warrior’s bushido ethic, which emphasized humility, duty and loyalty to one’s lord. They placed great value on the stoic endurance of pain, hunger and imprisonment and saw honor in dying a violent death. (An old gangster credo went: ‘Strong men don’t die on the tatami.’)

  Over the years, they aligned themselves with right-wing causes, developing a reputation as patriots in times of foreign conflict, as well as defenders of oppressed people in times of civil strife. Legend tells of the Edo-era outlaw Chuji Kunisada wielding his sword on behalf of farmers and peasants who were being treated cruelly by feudal lords; he became famous for the line, ‘I would like to die so that people can mourn my death.’ A tekiya chieftain was one of the heroes of the 1905 war with Russia. At the same time, however, the gang bosses and the Japanese civil authorities had also cultivated a mutually beneficial relationship in which certain mob activities were tolerated without interference from the law as long as they were accompanied by campaign donations.

  During World War II, gangster-owned construction firms under government contract built and repaired airfields, dug tunnels and constructed subterranean factories, earning a nice profit while kicking back a healthy percentage to their contractors. As the strain of a losing war intensified, gangsters helped run the POW camps and supervised imported Korean slave labor in domestic coal mines. The Tokyo Assembly even allowed tekiya bosses to take over as municipal tax agents, granting them legal authority to control pricing and distribution as well as the power to punish disobedience. The Metropolitan Police Board, getting into the spirit of the times, forced all stall keepers to join a tradesmen’s union that was run by the mob.

  At war’s end, millions of demobilized soldiers, war widows and other displaced persons began to make their way back into the cities and, as virtually all moral and government restraints subsequently collapsed, the mob strengthened its grip on the municipal economy. Open-air marts sprang into operation at every commuter line train station almost before the arriving Americans had a chance to unpack their duffel bags. The largest were at the major hubs on the Yamate Line that circled the city – Ueno, Tokyo, Shimbashi, Shibuya and Shinjuku. Within weeks, there would be an astonishing 45,000 stalls in the city, many of them under the control of the leathery-faced Ozu-gumi boss Kinosuke Ozu, and they provided jobs for half a million people.

  The outdoor black markets were, incidentally, Japan’s first experiment in democracy. Japanese society had for hundreds of years been divided into castes, socially and legally. The nobility and landed aristocracy were at the top; below them, the samurai warriors, farmers, townsmen, and eta (outcasts), in descending order. Status was rigidly fixed and every Japanese knew his proper rank and position in the community at large.

  Centuries of feudal serfdom and national isolation under the Tokugawa Shogunate were followed by the domineering rule of military, bureaucratic and financial cliques, starting in 1868 with the Meiji Revolution, which restored the emperor to the throne. In all, it had served to create a highly restrictive society where the arrogance of superiors was as ingrained as their subordinates’ fawning obeisance.

  In the Ozu and other markets, however, social rank no longer mattered. No questions were asked of applicants about their status, family origin, educational background or nationality. Everyone was welcome, from high-ranking military officers to lowly privates, landed nobles to tenant farmers, college professors to unemployed gamblers. They all started out equally, spreading a mat on the street or setting up shop on top of a box to sell their goods. They all wore the same ragged clothes, lived in similar jury-rigged barracks of corrugated tin, and bathed out of the same oil drums. As journalist Kenji Ino later wrote, ‘For a feudal country like Japan which had a long history of class and ethnic discrimination, this was indeed an unprecedented event.’

  The American Occupation officially began on September 2 with the signing of surrender documents aboard the USS Missouri in Yokohama Harbor. Its General Headquarters (GHQ) was located in the fortress-like Dai-Ichi building facing the Imperial Palace grounds and operated under the authority of the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP), run by the dictatorial General Douglas MacArthur, who hardly ever consulted the Allies on anything he did. Although the occupiers were ostensibly in control (behind a shadow government of veteran Japanese bureaucrats), the black market bosses continued to operate as before. The Tokyo municipal authorities quietly continued to let them function as official tax collectors, allowing them to keep half the proceeds as payment. In addition, the mob ran the fire departments, the street-cleaning services, and all public transportation on behalf of the metropolitan government. Since the gangs also controlled the construction crews, the stevedore unions and the operators of the newly emerging bars and noodle shops being slapped together with two-by-fours, they were, in effect, running the city.

  GHQ had been assigned the massive and difficult task of democratizing a militaristic Japan – to write a new war-renouncing constitution, to abolish the Imperial Military Headquarters, to arrest war criminals, and to lift restrictions on political, religious, and civil freedoms. However, it was in other areas where the Americans would have a more immediate impact – like the underground economy.

  MacArthur had made it clear he would tolerate no cruelty, no barbarism, no individual acts of revenge; thus the 600,000 Americans in the initial Occupation force were made up by design not of combat-hardened soldiers who had fought in the jungles of the Pacific and were therefore burning with hatred for the Japanese but of mostly fresh-faced teenagers who had seen little battlefield action and who viewed occupying Japan as their first big adventure in life. These youthful occupiers proved to be prodigious suppliers of heavily rationed commodities like cigarettes, sugar, salt, chocolate, soap, rubber and beer, not to mention the more easily obtained C-rations and powdered milk. According to one informal survey, some 90 percent of the residents at the ‘Nomura Hotel’, a former office building in Shimbashi housin
g several hundred Americans in ‘rooms’ partitioned by blankets, were out daily in their off-duty hours dealing liquor and other items from the hotel military exchange. The statistic was considered typical of the Occupation as a whole.

  The primary distribution system for American plenty to make its way to the black market gangs comprised thousands of young ladies who had been readied by a Japanese governmental group called the Recreation and Amusement Association to sleep with the Americans. The RAA had been established immediately after the cessation of fighting to sate the much anticipated and much-dreaded Yankee libido while sparing the virginal flower of young Japanese femalehood (most of whose ranks had, in any event, been dispatched into hiding).

  The association had called upon operators of bombed-out clubs, bars, geisha and quasi-geisha establishments, as well as outright houses of prostitution, to mobilize all their available female talent in the cause of patriotism. And mobilize they did, with remarkable speed and efficiency.

  An advance party of fifty men from the Marine Air Group 44, dispatched from Okinawa in early September to help secure the local air base at Omura in North Kyushu, was welcomed by a delegation of kimonoed women who invited them to move into an off-base ‘geisha house’. The men spent the next few weeks there drinking beer, eating hibachi-grilled fish and cavorting with the young ladies in residence – obligingly reimbursing their hostesses from a footlocker full of confiscated yen. (When a naval patrol happened by in late September to find some of the men lying about in the sun on a nearby beach, bearded and wearing cut-off fatigues, the officer in charge initially thought he had stumbled on a prisoner-of-war camp.) The first US Army ground reconnaissance patrol to enter Tokyo, on September 2, was intercepted by an RAA truck filled with prostitutes, bedecked in their best finery; a spokesman explained that the women were ‘volunteers’ to satisfy the lust of the Occupation forces. By October, the RAA had opened what may have been the largest brothel of its type in the world: a long open-bay barracks divided into cubicles by sheets hanging from the ceiling and with futons on the floor serving as beds. Nicknamed the International Palace and located in Funabashi in Eastern Tokyo, it processed hundreds of priapic GIs a day. It was an assembly-line operation so smooth that a soldier would leave his shoes at one end when he came in and pick them up, cleaned and shined, at the other end when he left.