Tokyo Underworld

by Robert Whiting

  On the twenty-third day of his imprisonment a deal was offered by the prosecutor. If Zappetti would admit to procuring the gun, the robbery charges would be dropped. He would be released on bail, he would be fined $800 and sentenced to eight months in prison, which would be suspended for three years. And he would not be deported, which was a major, major concession on their part. But he had to admit to something, he was told by his Japanese lawyer. It was a matter of face because they had already arrested him.

  Thus did Zappetti agree and secure his release.

  MacFarland’s young accomplices received suspended sentences, but the Latin Quarter manager Shattuck was brought back from Manila to stand trial. He also refused to confess, adamantly denying he had ever taken the missing diamonds, but was tried and convicted purely on MacFarland’s say-so. Shattuck claimed that MacFarland had framed him, that MacFarland had hidden the jewels somewhere but had implicated Shattuck because of a personal dispute the two had had over an unpaid debt. However, the judge chose to believe MacFarland.

  Shattuck continued to protest his innocence from his prison cell, and it was left to his wife to provide the final wacky twist in the whole affair. Her name was Doris Lee, and she was a buxom blonde nightclub singer with a vague resemblance to Marilyn Monroe. She had wangled an audience with a noted Tokyo judge, a man destined for a spot on Japan’s Supreme Court. The judge listened to the details of the case and advised the curvaceous foreign lady what to do: Put on her best low-cut dress, buy a bouquet of roses, and pay a visit to the management of the hotel arcade to make a personal appeal for mercy.

  ‘Tell them you bought the diamonds from MacFarland and sold them,’ said the judge. ‘Even if you didn’t do that. Tell them you didn’t know they were stolen and that otherwise you never would have become involved. Then offer to make restitution. Most Japanese never have a chance to talk to a girl like you in their entire lives. When they see this big, beautiful American blonde girl coming at them with flowers and bowing in contrition … there’s no way they won’t refuse to drop the charges.’

  Mrs Shattuck took the judge’s advice and did as he suggested. And indeed, just as predicted, the charges were dropped and Mr Shattuck was released, proving yet again that where foreign blondes were concerned, the normal rules did not always apply.

  MacFarland spent six years behind the high grim walls of Fuchu Prison on the plains west of Tokyo. And no one ever saw the missing stones again.

  The Imperial Hotel Diamond Incident, as it came to be known in the Japanese press, sent a message to the general public about American civilians in the post-Occupation era – that despite their big houses, cars, and suave image conveyed by screen stars like Gregory Peck, they could be just as uncouth and stupid as anyone else and that even guests at a hotel as vaunted as the Imperial were not to be trusted. The incident helped popularize a phrase, furyo gaijin (delinquent foreigner), and gave the Japanese media an opportunity to criticize the authorities for their lax attitude toward foreigners.

  Sociologists wrote of a decline in public and private morals because of the gaijin, citing the odious influence of Western-style music such as that of Perez Prado, whose smash hits ‘Patricia’ and ‘Mambo Jambo’ were causing young Japanese men to parade shamelessly about in gaudy black pants and the women in short parachute skirts. It was no coincidence, opinion makers noted, that the teenaged youth involved in the Imperial Hotel robbery was wearing a ‘mambo suit’ when arrested.

  The Sunday Mainichi called for more sweeps and roundups of ‘suspicious aliens’ and added a dark warning, one heard often over the next forty years: ‘Japanese in general are foolish with regard to foreigners. But this trend has become stronger since the war. If this sort of behavior continues, then more incidents like the Imperial Hotel caper will occur. And you know what will happen to Tokyo then.’

  The intellectual Japanese magazine Jinbutsu Orai ran the following biting unequivocal editorial, entitled ‘Tokyo Sokai’ (Tokyo Colony):

  ‘Tokyo Sokai.’

  What a terrible expression.

  The smell of bloody crime is everywhere, wafting through the air.

  The incident at the Imperial Hotel makes you realize it.

  It was like something out of a gang movie.

  The underground world of the gaijin fostered the crime and who knows what roots it is laying for other dark crimes in the future.

  According to the Metropolitan Police Department, there are about 30,000 Westerners in Tokyo. About 10 percent of them are ‘hoodlum foreigners.’

  These foreigners come from various countries. Some of them have police records. Some are connected to the underworld. Some are GIs who cannot forget the easy, lenient, spoiled treatment they received during the Occupation.

  Tokyo is a miserable colonial city where these hoodlum gaijin exist and the closer you go to the center, the more rotten it is. Black market dollars, gambling, illegal drug trafficking, and what not.

  Underground Tokyo is a swamp of hell.

  Gaijin crime has been increasing since the days of the Occupation. Just look at last year, 1955, alone. 1,760 cases of theft, 76 cases of robbery, 10 murder incidents, 20 cases of rape, 415 cases of assault, and 53 cases of narcotics sales. And these, these cases reported, represent only the tip of the iceberg. In reality, one can estimate that the figure is several times higher.

  Tokyo presents a sad figure. It is taken for either a colonial city or an occupied city. As such, it cannot help but become a breeding ground for crimes by foreigners.

  The newest incident of all, the robbery of the Imperial Hotel diamonds, was so stupid, and so willful, that what are we to make of it? What does it tell us when the method used was so simple and the motive so ridiculous?

  Missing from the media diatribe, justifiable as it may have been, was any mention of the 300,000 thefts, robberies, kidnappings, assaults and other mayhem that the people who invented the tea ceremony perpetrated on each other every year in Tokyo alone.

  Nor was there much discussion of the major shipbuilding scandal a year before, in which Japanese companies were bribing the government for contracts and subsidies and in which two future prime ministers in the Yoshida cabinet were implicated but escaped indictment.

  It was a scenario that would continue to be repeated in various forms, tainting a dozen prime ministers in the process, and cause many observers to call Japanese politics the most corrupt in the world. A special term, kozo oshoku (structural corruption), would even be coined to describe the system.

  The fact of the matter was that the ‘Orai’ and the others had it wrong. The city was already quite sufficiently corrupt without any outside help. The smell of the swamp, of crime, shady dealing, and corruption, was everywhere. It was precisely this that had attracted the ‘delinquent’ foreigners in the first place.

  But all this was a reality Tokyoites preferred not to dwell on. For them, the Rikidozan myth, with all its stirring reassurances, exerted a much greater appeal.

  3. Success Story

  There were 400 registered foreign firms in Japan in the mid-1950s, trying to get a foothold in a market that was open to them only in joint venture form. About one-fourth were multinationals like Du Pont, Cargill and Merck. The rest were trading companies or small special interest businesses like Western Ammunition and Colt, which rearmed the Japanese police with Colt revolvers. Most of them operated at a loss in anticipation of big returns down the road when the Japanese government began easing the barriers and restrictions it had erected to protect the country’s nascent industries. There were also the 30,000-odd individual Americans, British, Canadians, and others, many of whom were trying with limited success to make it on their own.

  Not many would have predicted that former jailbird and deportee Nicola Zappetti would end up striking it rich and in the process create a famous landmark. But then he had help from some highly unconventional sources.

  Zappetti had emerged from jail in February 1956 to find himself evicted from the Hotel New York
and all his belongings missing. To conserve his remaining funds, he had been forced to take up temporary residence in an abandoned Turkish bath where the electricity and water had been cut off. It was clear he needed some other immediate means of making a living besides crime, and opening a restaurant was one idea that had come to him in jail. Unable to stomach the constant prison diet of fish, rice and misoshiru soup, he would sit there and hungrily fantasize about his favorite foods: spaghetti with clam sauce, veal parmigiana, lasagna and pizza – a dish it was impossible to get anywhere in Tokyo.

  There were very few Western-style eateries in the city. Among them were two good German restaurants on the Ginza, Lohmeyers and Ketel’s, which were run by longtime Tokyo residents from the Fatherland, Irene’s in nearby Kanda, which served Russian food, a steakhouse in the Ginza run by an expatriate American, and the main dining room in the Imperial Hotel, which specialized in French cuisine. But there were enough Westerners in the city unable to gain access to the clubs and PX cafeterias on the US military bases – and enough curious Japanese – to make a new restaurant work, or so Zappetti believed.

  The fact that he knew absolutely nothing about the restaurant business did not deter him in the least from plunging in headfirst. He knew what good Italian food tasted like, he told himself. There was no guarantee of success, but he could not think of anything else to do that was legal. Thus, with no power in the abandoned bathhouse, he began reading books on Italian cooking during the evening, squinting in the candlelight like some medieval abbot, while in the daytime he tried to raise operating capital. He calculated that he needed 800,000 yen and offered 15 percent a year interest, guaranteed, to anyone who was interested – although he had no idea if or when he would ever really be able to repay the money.

  He made the rounds of the legitimate American business community trying to lure investors, starting with the American Club and the American Chamber of Commerce. By Zappetti’s own estimate, nine of every ten doors he knocked on were shut in his face.

  ‘Why don’t you get out of the country?’ said one man. ‘You’re giving Americans a bad reputation.’

  ‘We don’t deal with criminals and diamond robbers,’ said another.

  ‘You’re an embarrassment to us all,’ said a third.

  He could not remember all the insults, he heard so many.

  Eventually, however, Zappetti picked up the money. He found ten different financiers – foreign entrepreneurs living in Tokyo who, for one reason or another, decided to help him. One of them said that he was so starved for a good pizza that it was worth the risk of loaning money to open a restaurant that served one. Another thought it exotic to go into business with a famous jewel thief. Still another came up with the final 100,000 after Nick, tired of begging, threatened to introduce one of his Mafia relatives.

  Then he went looking for a site.

  Roppongi was an old residential quarter in Minato Ward in the southwestern part of the city – marked by a half-mile-long stretch of road extending from the Nogi shrine and US Army Hardy Barracks at its northern end to the Russian Embassy and the American Club on its southern tip. The strip was lined with low, glass-fronted stores – sobaya (noodle shops), kissaten (tea rooms), and a florist – behind which hid rows of dark brown, tile-roofed, Western-style houses, occupied mostly by foreign businessmen and diplomats and their families. The tallest building in sight was only three stories high, and there was little indication of the teeming internationally renowned nocturnal playground the area would eventually become. Roppongi Crossing, destined to be one of the busiest intersections in the world, was then occupied only by a police box, a small bookstore and two vacant lots. At night, the surrounding side streets were so deserted that residents spoke of seeing ghosts.

  Most of the activity in Roppongi took place in the neighborhood of Hardy Barracks, a gated compound of gray, flat-topped buildings that was once a center for Japanese Imperial Army infantry regiments but now served as headquarters to the US 1st Cavalry and the military daily newspaper Pacific Stars and Stripes. Approximately 150 streetwalkers patrolled the thoroughfare in front of the barracks’ main east gate, working the constant flow of uniformed GIs entering and exiting the compound. Army jeeps and trolleys chugged to and fro past a sign that said, ‘Let’s Prevent Noise by Ourselves.’

  In the immediate vicinity were the usual establishments catering to the then comparatively cash-rich GI – tailor shops, antique stores (selling centuries-old Muromachi paintings, expensive family heirlooms and other valuable collectibles at bargain basement prices) and a rich assortment of cheaply constructed bars with names like ‘The Silk Hat’, ‘The Green Spot’ and ‘The Cherry’. The bars, identified by signboards that further expanded the scope of the English language (e.g., ‘We have nice girl for your enjoy’) were rowdy, dark vestiges of the Occupation where GI brawls were a nightly event, often involving Russians from the embassy down the street, who would come around preaching Communism to the bar girls.

  From behind Hardy Barracks to the west, it was only a short hike down the hill to the notorious Akasaka nightclub Latin Quarter, the nearby Sanno Hotel, a watering hole for US Army officers, and a number of unobtrusive high-walled back street geisha houses where silk-kimonoed young women strummed shamisen and poured sake for the city’s elite Japanese clientele. However, the entire area remained devoid of any place that served accessible and edible Western cuisine, unless one counted the Hamburger Inn, a greasy spoon diner of aluminum stools and Formica tables located on a corner near the American Club. Roppongi, with its heavy international population, seemed the ideal place for a restaurant, and it was there that Zappetti decided to set up shop.

  He found a site on a busy corner at the southern end of the strip, a block from the Russian Embassy. It was a two-story wooden building occupied by the Wu tailor shop, whose proprietor, Sam Wu, a refugee from Shanghai, also owned the building. The fledgling restaurateur made the Chinese tailor a proposition. If Mr Wu would move all his business upstairs to allow a restaurant to open downstairs, Zappetti promised to double Wu’s business.

  ‘I notice you ain’t got no American clientele,’ he said. ‘What I’ll do is bring all the Americans in Tokyo to my restaurant and introduce them to you. They can have a pizza, and when they’re finished, they can walk upstairs and have a suit made. Pizza and suits. Don’t you think that’s a great idea?’

  Wu was not exactly convinced, but nevertheless he entered into an agreement whereby Zappetti would move in and, if everything went as promised, could eventually buy the whole building at the price of 40,000 yen per tsubo – a tsubo being a unit of real estate in Japan equivalent to thirty-six square feet. Wu would then relocate elsewhere.

  Zappetti set about redecorating. He painted the interior completely black so the cracks in the cheaply constructed wall would not show. He squeezed in eight booths with tables covered by red-and-white checkered cloths and lit only by Chianti bottles with burning candles stuck in them. He set up a bar on one side and on the other a Wurlitzer jukebox loaded with all the latest hits, like ‘Too Young’, ‘Written on the Wind’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. It was the quintessential East Village grotto.

  He hired a young Japanese lady from a Tokyo business school to be his cashier, recruited a Japanese waiter from a coffee shop on the Ginza, and ensconced himself in the tiny kitchen to do the cooking, turning out pizzas, lasagna, spaghetti, and big thick steaks served with glasses of wine and large drafts of beer. He also did the dishwashing, the accounting and the shopping. After closing, he would clean up and move two tables together for a makeshift bed. In the morning, he would go to the nearby public bath for 13 yen, enduring the stares of fellow Japanese bathers who hardly ever saw a naked white foreigner.

  In the beginning, he was forced to pay his rent each day in advance before the Chinese tailor would give him the key to the front door. But he grossed 75,000 yen his first month and doubled that the next. Nicola’s, as he called his restaurant, quickly became a second home for Sta
rs and Stripes personnel, after a famous Stripes entertainment columnist named Al Ricketts announced in print it served the best meal in town, and it also became a favorite gathering spot of the diplomatic crowd.

  In short order, it was time to expand. Using his restaurant as collateral, Zappetti secured a bank loan to buy the building from Wu. But when Zappetti tried to give him the money, Wu promptly increased his price from the original 40,000 yen a tsubo to 80,000 yen.

  ‘You promise pizza and suits, remember?’ said the tailor. ‘You going to double my business, remember? Well, not one American customer came up to second floor.’

  ‘Really?’ replied Zappetti, feigning surprise. ‘Well, I can’t help it if Americans prefer to shop in the PX.’

  ‘You liar,’ said Wu. ‘Big liar. I want 80,000 yen for one tsubo.’

  Zappetti had to pony up the extra money, but soon he owned the building and had doubled his business.

  By the end of the decade, Nicola’s was, improbably, the talk of the town. Japan’s economy was gathering a full head of steam, and with more and more Tokyoites eating out, the strange new Italian restaurant in Roppongi was where they often chose to go, attracted by its bizarre ambience and culinary peculiarities. Few Japanese had ever eaten dinner in such a dimly lit place or drunk draft beer with a meal, and the American-style pizza Nicola’s served was such a totally new experience that some customers could be seen wrapping slices in paper napkins to take home. The sight of some stiffly conventional corporate department head depositing a wedge of pizza in his briefcase was strange enough to merit the restaurant mention in the press, and as the word spread, a line of illegally parked automobiles began to form outside, eventually curling around the block.