Tokyo Underworld

by Robert Whiting

  Under Japanese law, pachinko was technically not gambling because the prizes were goods, not currency. But this being Japan, where there was always a dichotomy between surface appearance and reality, the winners could sell their bounty for cash at nearby back-alley exchange stores.

  Lansco made money by supplying prizes (goods obtained from friends at Army post exchanges) to a chain of pachinko shops in the Ginza area owned by a Korean yakuza and even supplied ball bearings, purchased at a discount from a military supplier. However, a bizarre series of events put Lansco out of business. A frail, stateless White Russian youth named Vladimir Boborov had joined the firm as executive assistant to Zappetti along with his fiancée, a young Russian woman named Nina, who became the Lansco bookkeeper. It was Vladimir and Nina’s plan to emigrate to the Soviet Union to join the Communist Party and have babies so they could donate them to the state. When Vladimir found himself unable to get a passport, however, he decided to sneak into the motherland and lay the groundwork.

  Boborov and a friend drove a 1953 red Dodge all the way from Tokyo up to the port of Wakkanai, the northernmost tip of Japan on the island of Hokkaido, not far from the Russian mainland. There they procured a rowboat and headed out across the Straits of Sakhalin. The currents, however, would not cooperate. They became lost in a thick fog and when it cleared they discovered they were back on the Hokkaido coastline. On reaching shore they were arrested by the Japanese police and interrogated by the US CIA on suspicion of being Communist infiltrators. The authorities had found the red Dodge and demanded to know who their accomplices were. Soon they were questioning Zappetti and the others on suspicion of being Communist sympathizers.

  It wasn’t long after that episode that ‘The Raid’ occurred. It happened one afternoon when Zappetti and the others were at their second-floor desks in the Lansco Building, toting up quarterly profits. They had pulled out three big green metal containers – one full of Japanese yen, one for military payment certificates (MPC), and one for US dollars – which they kept in a desk drawer and had counted out what amounted to over a million dollars in currency. Zappetti had just removed 3 million yen for pocket money and closed and locked the containers when in strode an American flashing an Army CID (Criminal Investigation Division) badge accompanied by several uniformed Japanese policemen.

  ‘This is a raid,’ said the CID man. ‘Don’t move. Don’t touch anything. And keep your mouths shut.’

  A Japanese policeman reached for the three metal containers, still on the desk, only to be stopped by the man from the CID.

  ‘Don’t touch those boxes,’ he barked.

  The policeman was momentarily stunned. Years of obeying GHQ orders had perhaps made him and his colleagues temporarily forget that the Occupation was over and the Americans were no longer in charge – ostensibly, at least. The CID man picked up all three containers and, declaring he was ‘confiscating’ them as ‘evidence’, took them away. The Japanese police stayed around to arrest the Australian for illegal possession of MPC.

  It never did become clear why Lansco was raided or what happened to the million dollars the CID had taken that day. Zappetti figured he had just been robbed by American Intelligence. At any rate, Lansco was now effectively out of business. One by one, the partners split up and disappeared. Vladimir was arrested again, this time for operating yet another incarnation of Lewin’s Mandarin casino – another bizarre detour on the road to his Marxist paradise – and he was kicked out of the country after the Soviet Union agreed to take him and the Japanese government decided to issue a passport. Leo Yuskoff, Vladimir’s associate at the Mandarin for a time, also emigrated to Moscow, where after being arrested by the KGB on suspicion of being an American spy he was allowed to join the party. Ray Dunston then started his English school in Tokyo, perhaps or perhaps not the only quasi-literate high-school dropout to do so. And Zappetti, not knowing who to bribe in the new order and reduced to running slot machines and the ‘onlies’ at the Hotel New York (the seedy bordello for GIs on R&R from Korea, where trade had also fallen off with the end of the Korean War), found himself drawn into the murky world of professional wrestling – yet another dubious area of US–Japan commercial intercourse – and then, in turn, into armed robbery.

  GORGEOUS MAC

  It is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which professional wrestling captured the imagination of the post-Occupation Japanese public. Suffice it to say that the sport, one of the very, very few where Americans routinely went down to defeat at the hands of smaller Japanese, electrified the nation as nothing else had in the postwar history of Japan. Not only did it single-handedly resuscitate the wounded Japanese national psyche, still smarting from defeat in war and stung by the ongoing unofficial occupation of their country by the Americans, but it also jump-started Japan’s fledgling television industry. Almost overnight, the phenomenon spawned dozens of books by serious historians and sociologists and clearly demonstrated for the first time since the war just how strongly the Japanese clung to their ideas of being Japanese.

  The puro-resu bumu, as it was called, officially began on the night of February 19, 1954, with an unprecedented and highly dramatic tag team match held in Tokyo, pitting two professional wrestlers from San Francisco – the Sharpe Brothers, Ben and Mike, against a twenty-nine-year-old retired sumo wrestler of some repute named Rikidozan and his partner, ten-time national amateur judo champion Masahiko Kimura.

  It wasn’t the first professional wrestling match held in Japan; there had been a handful of exhibitions before the war. But most Japanese had preferred their own ancient sport of sumo to the sort of gouge and bite practiced by the Westerners. Sumo was a sport that dated back to the fourth century in which wrestlers wearing topknots and clad only in loincloth-like garb tried to force their opponents out of a small dirt ring. Size, weight and strength were key factors (wrestlers were routinely expected to eat themselves into obesity), and the matches were filled with pomp and ritual tied to Shinto, Japan’s native religion of nature and ancestor worship. The combatants purified themselves in sacred pre-bout rites, which included tossing salt.

  This time, however, it was different. The Sharpe Brothers were the reigning world tag team champions. Ben at 6′6″, 240 pounds, and Mike at 6′6″, 250 pounds, had defended their joint title successfully for five years running and both, still in their twenties, were in their prime. They were bona fide world stars, and the fact that athletes of their magnitude had been persuaded to come to an impoverished country like Japan was considered a major coup – in those days, Japan ranked so low on the list of places to tour internationally that a visit by, say, the Belgian foreign vice minister made headlines in Tokyo. In the weeks leading up to the Sharpes’ arrival, newspapers were filled with stories about them. Tickets were sold out well in advance, and so were the rights to televise the bouts on Japan’s two fledgling TV networks – the quasi-national NHK and NTV, Japan’s first commercial station.

  Rikidozan was half a foot taller and some fifty pounds heavier than Kimura at 5′8″, 170 pounds, but when the capacity crowd of 12,000 people at Kokugikan sumo arena in Eastern Tokyo saw the four combatants together in the ring for the first time, they emitted a collective groan.

  ‘Those Americans are huge,’ said the ring announcer. ‘How can they possibly lose?’

  The symbolism was all too painfully clear, as one Japanese journalist wrote later of the event. ‘The difference in physical size, especially in Kimura’s case, triggered painful memories among the spectators of Japan’s devastating loss in the Pacific War. It was a reminder of the very deep complex Japanese felt toward the Americans.’

  But then the match began and something very surprising happened. Rikidozan flew into the ring and began pummeling Mike Sharpe with powerful karate chops. As the American gradually retreated under the furious onslaught and eventually gave way to his brother, the crowd erupted into an astonished cheer. When Ben Sharpe entered the ring, Rikidozan continued the frenzied attack and sent him reeling fro
m corner to corner too, until he finally collapsed in a daze. Rikidozan pounced on him for the count of three and the fans shot to their feet in mass hysteria, tossing seat cushions, hats and other objects into the air.

  The pandemonium in the arena, however, was as nothing compared to what was going on outside. At outdoor television sets installed around Japan as promotional devices, gigantic crowds had gathered to view the proceedings, among them the 20,000 onlookers who had crammed into the tiny West Exit Square of Shimbashi Station, staring up at a twenty-seven-inch dais-mounted ‘General’ and cheering wildly as Riki beat the Americans senseless. The mob was so large that it overflowed onto the main thoroughfare in front of the station, blocking traffic. Unable to move, taxi drivers simply parked their cabs in the middle of the street and joined the raucous throng.

  In Tokyo’s Ueno Park, what was described as a ‘black mountain’ of wrestling, enthusiasts had assembled on an incline in front of a truck-mounted TV set. Many had climbed trees, rocks and lampposts to get a better view, and several were so overcome with excitement at Rikidozan’s performance that they fell off their perches, incurring serious injury and causing ambulances to shuttle back and forth from the park to the nearest hospital for much of the evening.

  At other squares in Tokyo and across the archipelago, the story was the same: vast seas of delirious people weeping with joy at the extraordinary spectacle. It was estimated that between 10 million and 14 million people watched the match that night, and although it had actually ended in a one-all draw, the effect was that of a World Cup victory for the home team. It was the lead story in all the morning newspapers. Public enrapturement with the wrestler was summed up in the words of media magnate and NTV owner Matsutaro Shoriki: ‘Rikidozan, by his pro wrestling in which he sent the big white men flying, has restored pride to the Japanese and given them new courage.’

  It was a critical moment for Japan. Japan’s best boxer was a bantamweight, and their baseball players, to quote one sportswriter, ‘looked like pygmies when up against the touring US major leaguers’. But Rikidozan had stood on equal ground with the foreigner. It was as if the Pacific War had just been refought – and, this time, won. Overnight, Japan had a new national hero. The next evening, interest was even higher. Coffee shops and restaurants with TV sets sold overpriced admission tickets, while entire neighborhoods squeezed into the homes of those fortunate enough to own one of the new magic boxes. When the telecast of the match began, taxis virtually vanished from the city. It was estimated that there were 24 million viewers nationwide that night – more than one-third of the entire population. Prior to the opening gong, an NTV announcer took time to make this unusual announcement to the nation: ‘A word to those people watching on street corners and in front of train stations and department stores. Please don’t push. And will those people who have climbed up trees, telephone poles, and other high places, please come down before you hurt yourself?’

  The main event this time was a non-title sixty-one-minute exhibition between Rikidozan and Ben Sharpe, which proved to be even more pleasing. Riki bravely endured a quarter-hour’s worth of illegal blows and heinous fouls, then finally exploded in a raging flurry of karate chops to send his foe to the canvas, down for the count of three and the first fall. When the final gong sounded, Rikidozan had emerged victorious, two falls to one. For people who had had precious little else to cheer about, the ecstasy was almost unbearable.

  By March 1, when the Sharpes’ nationwide tour was over and Rikidozan had racked up several more victories, a full-blown national craze was under way, the economic and social consequences of which would be enormous. There was a mad rush to buy TV sets to watch Rikidozan starring in the hastily assembled program, Mitsubishi Faitoman Awa (Mitsubishi Fightman Hour), Japan’s version of the Friday night fights, and the rate of cuts, bruises and broken bones among primary-school children jumped dramatically as young boys around the country took to imitating Rikidozan wrestling. There were reports of viewers watching at home becoming so distraught when a foreign wrestler committed a foul that they smashed their own sets in anger. A number of viewers even died of heart attacks induced by the shock of watching the ferocious images. But in the span of less than two weeks, a decade of public sycophancy of the Americans had officially come to an end.

  If anyone noticed that the matches had been somewhat choreographed (which, in fact, they were) he or she was not saying, which was just fine with the promoters. The matches were in fact scripted, rehearsed and staged with the full cooperation of the Americans, who were extremely well compensated for their trouble. If the neophyte Japanese public as yet lacked a full recognition of that fact, then so be it. It was better to focus on the therapeutic benefits of a Japanese victory. For that was where the money lay.

  Competitive professional wrestling groups began springing up all over the place, along with pro wrestling magazines. Suddenly there was a great demand for gaijin foils. Not everyone could afford to bring over a high-profile performer like Primo Carnera, ‘The Walking Italian Alp’, or the ‘Mexican Giant’ Jesse Ortega. Thus, Japanese promoters looked to the most cost-effective available source, the 30,000 Westerners living in the city. There they picked up the 5′9″, 220-pound Nicola Zappetti with an offer of $500 a match – more than a year’s salary for a Japanese company worker (despite the fact that he knew all of four wrestling holds, which he had learned in the Marines) – and another ex-marine, John MacFarland III. MacFarland was a 6′4″, 250-pound war hero from Omaha, Nebraska, who had done stints in Tokyo with the Occupation forces and later as an employee of an American construction firm at Johnson Air Force Base. Unable to forget the good life in Japan, he had returned to Tokyo in September 1955 to seek his future and found it in pro wrestling, even though he knew next to nothing about it, either.

  The promoter handed Zappetti and MacFarland each a pair of trunks and a packet full of $100 bills and gave them a list of three basic rules to follow.

  1. Try to stay in the ring for 30–40 minutes.

  2. Don’t think of what you’re doing as a sport. Think of yourself as an actor.

  3. Don’t ever try to win.

  The Americans performed in what amounted to modern-day morality plays, playing a role the Japanese called inchiki gaijin resura (literally, cheating foreign wrestler). From the outset of each match, they would commit foul after foul using knuckle-dusters against their smaller, lighter Japanese opponents, who, of course, did not know the meaning of the word treachery. Finally, however, enough would be enough. In a climactic burst of righteous anger, Japanese fighting spirit would prevail and the morally inferior American heel would be vanquished.

  It was the pattern established for all pro wrestling matches in Japan involving Americans, and sociologists were quick to see analogies to other forms of entertainment. Wrote one Japanese university professor:

  To the viewing public, Japanese matches with the barbaric Americans resembled nothing so much as a battle between the cowboys and the Indians, battles which they had seen so much of in American westerns (like Stagecoach, immensely popular in Japan.)

  The Indians in Hollywood movies were invariably the bad guys while the cowboys – the white man – by contrast, were morally in the right, free of malice and ultimately emerged victorious. That was the appeal of such films to American moviegoers. It reinforced their perception of themselves as superior beings. And in reverse form, that was the appeal of professional wrestling to the Japanese.

  The Rikidozan disease affected every segment of society, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, educated and illiterate. The comments of Machiko Kondo, a United Nations officer, born and raised in Tokyo, about the ‘Riki effect’ on her father, were typical:

  My father was an engineer. He was highly intelligent and liked intellectual TV shows: professorial debates on NHK, lectures on science and so forth. He liked to discuss German philosophy: Goethe, Hegel, and others. He was very serious minded and looked down on things that weren’t intellectual.
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br />   But he became another person when professional wrestling came on, especially Japanese versus American. Something came over him. He would shoot his fist in the air, yell, jump up and down, get all excited. It was really strange. I could never understand why an intelligent person like him could watch Rikidozan so much.

  To him, I guess Riki was like Robin Hood.

  It soon became evident that what the public wanted to see was big, Godzilla-sized Americans cut down to size, the bigger and badder, the better. And thus economics dictated that Zappetti’s career sputter to a halt. MacFarland’s, on the other hand, went in the other direction. Adopting the moniker ‘Gorgeous Mac’, and billed also by his promoter as ‘The Wild Bull of Nebraska’, MacFarland was a great hit in defeat. He performed before large crowds on TV, appeared in magazine interviews and quickly became well known. In early January 1956, he called a press conference to announce that he was forming his own wrestling group to capitalize on his success and also to announce his engagement to the daughter of a major zaibatsu family, an ardent pro wrestling fan. This was not as unusual as it might sound, given the Alice-in-Wonderland existence gaijin in Japan led at the time.

  Although surveys consistently showed that two-thirds of the Japanese populace wanted nothing to do with foreigners, that still left a third who did, and they weren’t especially picky, given the relatively limited supply and the growing postwar need for Japan to become more familiar with the rest of the world. There were thousands of semiliterate Westerners making a living teaching English in language schools and universities, homely military wives able to parlay blonde hair and big breasts into careers as models and movie actresses in Tokyo and countless other examples of career success exceeding qualifications. Demand exceeded supply. And thus MacFarland, a man with no ring experience who had become well known in Japan simply because he was American, big and conveniently available to wrestle – and lose – on TV, was on the verge of marrying into one of the wealthiest families in the entire country. Western foreigners could do things like that in those days because the Japanese simply didn’t know any better.