There was also a half-mile strip of real estate stretching west from the Imperial Palace moat abutting the GHQ building to the Nomura Hotel, which quickly became known as Hooker Alley, in tribute to the several hundred young damsels patrolling the area. For a pack of Old Golds, the ladies would willingly cater to patrons in jeeps, in building stairwells, or in the cheerless Quonset hut complex nearby where lower-ranking men stayed – not really caring who watched. The moat around the Imperial Palace was so clogged with used condoms it had to be cleaned out once a week with a big wire scoop.
As winter set in, there were many deaths from exposure and starvation. Groups of people huddled around bonfires, covering themselves with burlap rags, shivering through the night, much too cold to sleep. Gangs of vagrants roamed through the back alleys of buildings where Americans stayed, rummaging through the trash and garbage for food. Yet thousands of well-coiffed ‘comfort girls’ could be found at special rec centers ready to play billiards and cards with servicemen and otherwise entertain them. Several cabarets, including one six stories high, had opened up in the Ginza. In February 1946, the Mimatsu Cabaret started business next to the Ginza Mitsukoshi Department Store. All of these enterprises featured floor shows and Japanese dance bands that played Western music.
As conqueror and conqueree got to know each other better, illicit commerce grew in scope and dimension. A band of enlisted men at the Yokosuka naval base began making midnight speedboat runs across Tokyo Bay carrying loads of PX contraband to gangs on the far shore of Chiba. An NCO club manager in Sugamo took to selling sugar in hundred-pound lots to the Ozu market. A civilian American trader with the Tokyo Metals Association was stunned when an Army lieutenant came to see him, first soliciting advice on how to sell several tons of manganese he had acquired and then asking, ‘Do you know where I can find a buyer for a shipment of mattresses? That’s the next item on my list.’
By mid-1946, members of the armed forces had remitted back to America approximately $8 million a month, a sum exceeding the entire military monthly payroll. Army finance officers attributed this phenomenon directly to profit from black marketeering, and although SCAP subsequently declared it illegal to reconvert yen to dollars, the dealing continued unabated anyway, as did other forms of corruption.
By 1947, the New York Herald Tribune and New York Times were publishing accounts of American officials misusing their positions to grow rich – for example, by extorting stock and real estate from Japanese businessmen in exchange for their ‘cooperation’. The International News Service was describing illicit links between the 8th Army Procurement Office (which controlled reconstruction expenditures) and a triumvirate of Japanese politicians, subcontractors, and gangs, while the Associated Press, for its part, was reporting on an urbane prewar bakuto boss named Akira Ando who had won several lucrative GHQ transportation contracts for his fleet of taxis, trucks and private cars by bribing GHQ officials. Ando, who had grown rich during the war doing construction for the Tojo government, openly bragged that one high-ranking general was his protector. He had a black book that reportedly contained the names of hundreds of Occupation officers he had befriended whom he could frequently be seen entertaining at one of the several Ginza nightclubs and Asakusa bordellos he owned. To AP correspondent Mark Gayn, Ando’s activities were part of a well-organized and well-financed campaign to corrupt the US Army. But, as many cynical observers liked to point out, it was not a very difficult campaign to wage successfully.
In later years, Japanese gangsters liked to boast that they were the ones who, with their postwar markets, had saved Japan from starvation. However, while it may be true that the open-air stalls did help get the economy going again to some degree and feed some of the hungry masses (government rationing being so inadequate that a Tokyo District Court judge who refused to eat anything purchased illegally died of malnutrition), the men who ran them were anything but altruistic. They charged criminally high prices for their wares – the equivalent of a day’s wages, say, for a stale bun or a handful of surplus cornmeal originally donated by the US State Department – and also demanded outrageous fees from those who participated in their wondrous democratic experiment. To operate in the Ozu market, for instance, a seller had to pay a tribute of half of his daily profits, among other charges. Ozu himself personally ripped down the stalls of anyone who objected to such extortion, which may be why an Occupation authority would later term him the ‘worst criminal in Japan’.
It was perhaps understandable that a self-descriptive word that bakuto used for a losing hand at cards, ya-ku-za (8-9-3), a term occasionally used to refer to Japanese mobsters in general – alluding to what some believed to be the uselessness of gang members to proper society – would gain currency as the years passed. (So would gokudo, meaning ‘scoundrel, villain, rogue’.)
Attempts by honest officials in the GHQ to control crime and corruption during the Occupation were not overly successful. A four-year campaign to crack down on lawbreakers was launched in late 1947 when Colonel Charles Kades, sub-head of the GHQ Government Section, formally declared war on what he called Japan’s ‘Underground Government’. In a much heralded press conference, he announced that the real rulers of Japan were not the duly elected representatives of the people, as the GHQ had intended, but the ‘bosses, hoodlums, and racketeers who were in league with the political fixers, the ex-militarists and the industrialists, as well as the legal authorities from the judges and police chiefs on down’. This, of course, was something most Japanese already knew.
Several police raids ensued, in which fully half of the known 50,000 underworld figures in the country were arrested. However, only 2 percent of them ever wound up doing any time. The rest were released, benefiting from the unwillingness of witnesses to testify, missing evidence, and pressure on the courts from corrupt politicians, including several dozen Diet members who would later admit to having taken illegal donations during the first Occupation-sponsored parliamentary elections in 1946. Black market godfather Ozu was among those tried and convicted, but the police, the public prosecutor and other judicial officials involved in his case certified that he was too sick to be jailed. Attesting to his ‘high moral character’, they recommended release instead, and much to the chagrin of Kades’ crime fighters, Ozu walked out of jail a free man. That the intelligence wing of the GHQ was hiring Japanese gangsters at the very same time to fight Communist insurgents and break labor strikes did not further the overall effort to serve justice.
One rather unexpected result of the crackdown was the resignation of the prime minister and his entire cabinet, and the indictment of forty-three individuals, when it became known that executives of Showa Denko, a big fertilizer producer, had been bribing Japanese government officials for low-interest loans from a reconstruction financing agency. When the GHQ campaign against crime had run its course, however, the annual total of embezzlements, forgeries and fraudulent conversions had actually increased, as had the number of known underworld gangsters, as counted by the Japanese government’s Crime Prevention Bureau.
The problem was not just the chaotic times or the possible incompetence of Americans directing the prosecution, whose unfamiliarity with local language and custom no doubt put them at a disadvantage. The problem was also that the culture of corruption was too deeply rooted in Japan to be cleaned up overnight. Despite laws long on the books that banned bribery and Confucian ethics that deemed it immoral, handouts had existed as long as there had been village politics and village bosses to dispense patronage. In the Tokugawa Shogunate era, public servants had regularly supplemented their monthly stipends with ‘gifts’, the custom becoming so ingrained that the line between proper etiquette and downright bribery was often impossible to distinguish. The blurring of this distinction gave rise to cozy alliances of convenience among public leaders and private interests, which evolved further in the mid-nineteenth century when the parliamentarian system of government was adopted. Political parties, which controlled the lower house of Pa
rliament and hence the national budget, grew so dependent on funds from the big financial combines for elections (as well as money and other help from the underworld) that corruption was all but inevitable.
Thus, periodic public scandals have been the rule, not the exception. In 1914, a massive bribery scandal involving Navy officials, the great trading house Mitsui Bussan, and two foreign companies – the German electrical giant Siemens and the British weapons manufacturer Vickers – brought down the government. Attempts by the authorities to suppress evidence (which included the use of hired thugs to threaten witnesses) in regard to ‘gratuities’ paid under the table to a vice-admiral in charge of naval security to secure a contract to build a new cruiser, were undermined when an ex-Siemens employee, on trial in Germany for an unrelated matter, revealed his knowledge of the bribes in open court testimony. Following that were scandals involving Yawata Steel (1918), Teijin (1934) and the Showa Denko firm (1948), which set the stage for even more dramatic eruptions to come, including the Lockheed Aircraft payoffs of 1976 and the stock brokerage-related graft of the 1990s.
The GHQ’s ill-fated assault on the underground government was accompanied by a crackdown on crime committed by its own personnel that was only slightly more fruitful. It produced a number of dishonorable discharges, including that of an Army colonel court-martialed for selling nine dollars’ worth of cigarettes. But those responsible for the disappearance of large stores of diamonds – transferred to the custody of the US Army from the Bank of Japan and other venues – were never found; nor were those who had made off with the entire armory of the disarmed Tokyo police force sometime between 1945, when the GHQ disarmed the Metropolitan Police Department and placed the weapons in securely locked storage crates in a military warehouse in Yokohama, and 1946, when the crates were opened and the contents were discovered to be missing. Throughout it all, an assortment of small-time smugglers continued their operations from a downtown office building right next to the Provost Marshal’s office.
By the time the exercise was over, it had become increasingly clear that the new era of democracy and bilateral friendship being forged had a powerful, resilient underside. A pattern of illicit collusion had been established through an extraordinary mix of desperation and opportunism, and it was not about to go away.
BANK OF TEXAS
Of the many black market ventures during the Occupation involving Japanese and Americans, perhaps none was quite as successful as a company known as Lansco, a bizarre Ginza-based ‘general store’ that was engaged in everything from illegal banking to gumball sales. Its founder was an ex-Marine sergeant from New York named Nick Zappetti, a thickset, swaggering Italian who, it might be argued, was as representative of his era as the kindhearted, chocolate-giving, children-loving GI of popular lore. Lansco was one of a series of memorable Zappetti ventures, of both the legal and illegal variety, that would highlight a long and quixotic career in the Far East.
Like many others in the Occupation netherworld, Zappetti came from a Depression-era background of poverty – in his case, the northern Manhattan Italian ghetto of East Harlem. He belonged to a family of eleven children who grew up in a cramped cold water tenement. Their father, an immigrant rough carpenter from Calebresia, made barely enough to feed everyone and pay the rent.
Zappetti was no stranger to crime, thanks to the Mafioso who controlled his neighborhood. Gaetano Luchese, better known as ‘Three-Finger Brown’, was a second cousin. Family acquaintances included Joe Rao, who was the ‘Boss of Booze’, ‘Trigger’ Mike Coppola, aka ‘King of the Artichokes’, and Joe Stretch, a mobster who had his own chain of restaurants. The doctor across the street sold bootleg whiskey, and the next-door neighbor was a professional hit man – as young Nick discovered one afternoon in 1935 at age fourteen when he attended the man’s funeral. The corpse had been laid out in an open casket in the adjoining flat and its face was burned a deep red.
‘What happened?’ he had asked his father. ‘Did he lie out in the sun too long?’
‘No,’ came the reply. ‘He died at Sing Sing last night in the electric chair. He was executed for murder.’
That was the kind of environment Zappetti had come from, a place where it was the cops who were regarded as the enemy and the robbers the role models in life. He believed that World War II was the best thing that ever happened, given the somewhat limited opportunities for advancement at home, for it got him into the military and all the way to Japan, where the choices for someone with brains and a larcenous heart were far more numerous.
Zappetti had arrived in Northern Kyushu in late August 1945 as a twenty-two-year-old first sergeant in charge of the aforementioned MAG-44 party assigned to commandeer the Omura Air Field near Nagasaki, where he had made the decision to occupy the geisha house instead of the abandoned base while awaiting reinforcements. In February 1946, when his Marine Corps hitch ended, he took a local discharge and assumed one of the 6,000 US government jobs available in the GHQ – which, ironically enough, was a post as an investigator for the Civil Property Custodian Section, a department created to oversee the return of property looted by Japan in other Asian countries to its rightful owners. In early 1947 he made a trip back to the United States and returned with a Ford convertible, inside of which he had concealed several sacks of lighter flints, a highly prized commodity in Japan. There were 20,000 flints in each sack, and he sold them on the Ginza black market for more money than the car had cost.
In August of the same year, he took time out to marry a Japanese woman. The event was such a rarity that film footage of him and his bride, an English-speaking dentist, was shown on the Pathé movie news – the announcer pointedly noting the existence of something called the Oriental Exclusion Act, which prevented Americans from taking such war brides home. By March 1948, however, he was back in full swing running an extremely lucrative black market beer operation in partnership with a predacious lieutenant colonel in charge of ration tickets in the Occupation Finance Office and a fellow investigator in the CPC, a nisei who spoke fluent Japanese and could communicate directly with the city’s gang bosses. Once or twice a week they would take the ration coupons out to an Occupation-approved brewery, a rusting metal structure on the Sumida River in the eastern part of Tokyo where, for a fee paid under the table, a compliant Japanese clerk would quietly fill the order, in violation of GHQ rationing laws prohibiting individuals from making such large purchases. They would fill up a large military truck with hundreds of cases of beer and sell their goods to buyers at secluded warehouses and bombed-out factories around town for a profit of 40 cents a bottle. The next day, their beer would be displayed in the open-air markets.
Profits from such activities made it possible for him to buy a plot of land in the suburb of Fujisawa and build a large American-style house, where he ensconced his wife and two infant children. He had also acquired a fancy new car, a wardrobe of new clothes, and several mistresses, whom he would entertain at the Dai-Ichi Hotel, a Western-style establishment in Shimbashi built for the canceled 1940 Tokyo Olympics. One of his young lady friends was a law student, destined to become a successful attorney, who paid her law school tuition by providing Zappetti and his friends with oral sex on demand. There are those who vividly remember the sight of Zappetti being driven around downtown Tokyo in the backseat of an open convertible in broad daylight, drinking Champagne, and enjoying the X-rated ministrations of a semi-clothed female companion.
In early 1950, the beer operation was infiltrated by a zealous undercover detective from the MPD, which resulted in Zappetti’s arrest by the MPs and deportation. But it didn’t take long for the enterprising young New Yorker to make it back to Japan. Although his passport had been seized on his arrival in the United States and he had been subsequently booted out of his local congressman’s office when he had gone to ask for it back, he simply went to pay his respects to the local Mafia Office on 116th Street, between 1st and 2nd avenues. The bosses who ran the neighborhood were more than willing to help one
of their own.
‘Don’t worry,’ said one of the men, a distant relative of the family. ‘We can take care of the situation.’
And they did. Shortly thereafter, the relative told him to fill out an application for a new US passport as well as one for a commercial entrant visa for Japan and to deliver the documents to a certain someone in the mayor’s office downtown. A few weeks later, Zappetti’s passport came in the mail, with a visa stamped inside.
Also helpful was a ‘business associate’ in the GHQ, a cryptographer from Brooklyn named Bob, with whom Zappetti had made preparatory inquiries before leaving.
‘You see the way it’s happening now,’ Bob had said at the time. ‘They got something called a Form 26. That’s a list of all commercial entrant visa holders who want to enter Japan. If there are any traitors or criminals on it, which means people like you, then the GHQ puts a check mark by it, meaning entry not allowed.’
‘Shit,’ Zappetti had said. ‘I’ll never get approved.’
‘Fortunately,’ Bob continued, ‘the list goes through my hands. If your name is checked off, all I have to do is switch it with someone else’s. That way you get in and some other poor slob gets his application rejected. Just call me when you get ready to come back and we’ll work something out.’
Zappetti placed his call and in June 1950 boarded a Northwest Airlines flight in New York City. Sixty hours later he landed at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport and passed through immigration without incident. After a brief unproductive visit with his wife, who had wearied of his philandering and his criminal ways, he moved into a small house in the southwestern part of Tokyo. Then he began cobbling together the venture that would take its own unique place in Tokyo underworld history.
Tokyo Underworld Page 2
