Tokyo Underworld

by Robert Whiting

  Moreover, every Japanese who entered was given the singularly unusual treat of being welcomed personally at the first-floor bar by the dark-haired Italian proprietor who, now having assigned cooking duties to someone else, appeared nightly, wearing expensive silk suits and a trim new mustache. (A Tokyo reporter, in writing an article about the popular restaurant, described the owner as a ‘smooth-talking American mobster’ and declared a visit to Nicola’s in general, with its eclectic mix of people, as an ‘exotic adventure … like going to a game park’.)

  Before anyone realized what had happened, Nicola’s had become the Toot’s Shor of the Far East, attracting a remarkably diverse cross-section of well known people, domestic and foreign, whom one did not ordinarily see out in public, much less in each other’s company. Visiting Hollywood movie stars, for example, quickly discovered Nicola’s was the only bistro in the entire city that served real American pizza. Thus Elizabeth Taylor, Mike Todd and David Niven, in town promoting Around the World in 80 Days, came for dinner more than once, as did John Wayne, in Japan filming The Barbarian and the Geisha (and downing twenty-four straight whiskeys in one memorable sitting), and Connie Francis, who had come to plug her hit song, ‘Kawaii Bay-bee’, a Japanese rendition of her chart-topping ‘Pretty Baby’. The list of pizza-munching celebrities seen on the premises at different times included Harry Belafonte, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Kaye, William Holden, Xavier Cugat and Rick Jason – a matinee idol in Tokyo by virtue of his popular TV series Combat.

  Another famous diner was Crown Prince Akihito, the future emperor of Japan, who came with his popular bride-to-be, an attractive commoner named Michiko Shoda from a wealthy industrial family. Akihito was somewhat more urbane than his father Hirohito, and had been demoted from Shinto Sun God to mere mortal and had traded in his military regalia and favorite white horse for a three-piece suit and a botanist’s microscope. Akihito was a seasoned world traveler. He spoke several foreign languages. He was something of a wine connoisseur and more important, at least as far as the future of Nick Zappetti was concerned, had developed a taste for Italian-American food. He had met his fiancée on a tennis court in the posh summer resort town of Karuizawa, and he launched a modern, Western-style courtship that was highlighted by the frequent pizza-eating excursions to Tokyo’s trendy new trattoria.

  The Crown Prince and his betrothed arrived for periodic afternoon visits that required extraordinary security measures: a cadre of plainclothes bodyguards would systematically occupy every table and empty the restaurant of all other diners before the imperial party entered for the honorable mixed pizza and beer. When word got around that such an exalted personage had given Nicola’s his stamp of approval, the failed jewel thief had it made, and the autos parked outside grew so numerous they began to block the normal flow of traffic.

  Still another famous guest was one Rikidozan, the wrestling champion and national hero and unquestionably the foremost cultural icon of his time. As already seen, his wrestling show, Mitsubishi Faitoman Awa (The Mitsubishi Fightman Hour), was so popular it had single-handedly launched the TV era in Japan; sales of TV sets had skyrocketed from the 1954 plateau of 17,000 to more than 4,500,000 by 1959. One of his matches – a draw with NWA champion Lou Thesz before 27,000 fans at Tokyo’s outdoor Korakuen Stadium in 1956 – had attracted the largest crowd ever to watch a wrestling event in Japan and had earned a Japanese Nielsen rating of 87 percent, a domestic record that would be surpassed only by the carriage-drawn wedding procession of the Crown Prince and Princess through the heart of Tokyo. The master of a vast business empire that included a seven-story wrestling arena, one of Japan’s first bowling alleys, a large Western-style apartment complex (‘Riki Apartments’ in Akasaka, located behind Hardy Barracks), and a nearby nightclub where the top jazz musicians in the country played, Rikidozan came with a wide range of acquaintances. These ranged from government bigwigs who served on the board of the Japan Professional Wrestling Association to famous novelists like the young Shintaro Ishihara (a future parliamentarian who, perhaps inspired by Rikidozan, would later become Japan’s leading American basher, verbally body slamming the United States in a best-selling 1990 book called The Japan That Can Say No) and exotic wrestlers like the bearded 600-pound Haystack Calhoun, who needed a flatbed truck to transport him around Tokyo. An avatar of Japanese virtue before the kleig lights, Rikidozan was far less restrained in private. He would stand at the bar downing double shots of bourbon and practicing out loud the insults he had picked up from American friends in his heavily accented English: kokusakka, sonnabeechi, kommi basutado, and so forth. He liked to grab well-wishers by the genitalia, convulsing in merriment at the ensuing yelps of pain. On occasion, he would be so overcome by his own exuberance that he would start doing a sumo wrestler’s thrusting drill, slamming the pillars that supported the second-floor dining area so violently with his hands that the entire restaurant shook, causing plaster to fall from the ceiling.

  Also on the scene and especially hard to miss among the free diners was a notorious Tokyo gang boss named Hisayuki Machii, a mean-looking, 6′2″, 200 pounder, who was always in the company of his bodyguard – a mere 110-pound taekwando expert (one of the few bodyguards in town half the size of his employer) who conducted his own preliminary security check, one as thorough as that ever done by the Crown Prince’s Palace Guard, before allowing the boss to enter. Outside a dozen armed men would stand watch.

  Machii’s gang, the Tosei-kai, a 1500-member postwar band of mostly Korean thugs, had just won a ruthless war with the pure-blooded Sumiyoshi-kai, a prewar gambling gang that dated back to the Meiji era, for control of the booming West Ginza and its dense thicket of bars, cabarets and pachinko shops. They ran protection rackets and loan collection services and even ‘leased’ operating rights to a Korean pickpocket group. As it turned out, the Tosei-kai also promoted many of Rikidozan’s matches.

  Although Machii was generally the picture of propriety – he invariably handed out 10,000-yen tips, the equivalent of a month’s wages, to waiters – his men were not. Any rival gangster who walked through the West Ginza without paying his respects was literally taking his life in his hands. A Tosei-kai foot soldier once slashed the face of a gang boss from Shibuya from ear to chin merely for refusing to bow his head as he passed by.

  The Tosei-kai was symbolic of what had happened to the Tokyo organized crime scene. The old tekiya had fallen by the wayside as the street stalls gradually disappeared, and a new type of gangster had assumed control, drawn from the vast pool of jobless and homeless young men who filled the streets in the aftermath of the war. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they had formed new groups and moved heavily into the methamphetamine trade and prostitution (both of which had become illegal after the war). They carved out their own protection and gambling rings (taking several millions of dollars a day in bets on professional baseball games alone) and invented new moneymaking schemes like corporate extortion in the form of gang-sponsored magazines. ‘Reporters’ for the mob-run magazine Ginza Nippo, for example, dug up embarrassing information on the private lives of company presidents, then solicited money for ‘advertising space’ from their subjects not to publish it in their journal.

  They kept offices, open twenty-four hours a day, in which they conducted their more legitimate activities, like debt collecting, wore gang badges openly on their lapels, and carried name cards showing titles or ranks such as ‘captain’ or ‘elder brother’ or ‘young associate’. They also drove big American cars and aped the dress and manner of characters in American gangster movies. Instead of samurai long swords, they used guns obtained from American GIs.

  Not surprisingly, the retired bosses of the postwar outdoor markets looked disapprovingly on the new generation, referring to them by the contemptuous term gurentai (a loose equivalent of ‘juvenile delinquents’). When the first American-style ‘hit’, or shooting for hire, took place in Japan – the attack in 1958 on an infamous greenmailer (financial corporate takeover artist) named
Hideki Yokoi as he sat in his downtown office – they, and the public at large, were overwhelmingly critical of the method employed.

  ‘Wearing American gangster clothes is one thing,’ fumed one aging mobster in the Shukan Tokyo (Weekly Tokyo) magazine, in an article entitled ‘The Fire-Spitting Colt’, ‘but adopting the American custom of using professional hit men? How low can the Japanese gangster fall?’ (The honorable way to settle a dispute, as everyone knew, was to grab a sword, purify it by spitting sake on it, and face the enemy man to man, not sneak up on him with a gun from some dingy back stairwell.)

  Such criticisms did absolutely no good, however. The New Breed was there to stay and arcane distinctions such as tekiya and bakuto were fading away; the word ‘yakuza’ was being applied to all gangsters, and the term boryokudan, which literally means ‘violence group’, was used for the gangs themselves.

  A Tosei-kai captain named Matsubara was perhaps the quintessential Tokyo yakuza. A thickset, powerfully built man with a face that looked as though it had been hit by a truck, he invariably made his entrance wearing dark sunglasses, a fedora pulled down over his eyes, and a trench coat – one or more gun handles protruding from the pockets.

  One night as the well-equipped TSK captain was ordering a drink at the bar, Zappetti asked, ‘Matsubara, how many guns you actually got on you?’

  Matsubara pulled out four revolvers – two .32s and two .38s – and laid them on the counter one by one, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  These then were but a few of the diverse people who met nightly at the crossroads of East and West that was Nicola’s – people who would write some of the more colorful, and dramatic and darker, chapters of the city’s history.

  UNDERGROUND EMPIRE

  The underground economy denounced by Kades in 1947 was alive and growing, and many of its key players could be found at Nicola’s. Foremost among them was a squat, bristle-headed, humorless man named Yoshio Kodama, often escorted by Machii or Rikidozan in his capacity as the president of the JPWA. Kodama was a powerful wealthy ultranationalist and behind-the-scenes fixer (who was also the point of entry for America’s participation in this sphere).

  Described by one historian as a master at channeling ‘unregistered’ funds from big business and the underworld to politicians, Kodama was one of the many larger-than-life right-wingers who appeared on the scene in Japan after the restoration of the Emperor to the throne – a devotee of the Black Dragon Society, a secret rightist organization that cut a wide assassination swath through Asia in support of Japanese military and industrial expansionism.

  Dubbed ‘Little Napoleon’ by his enemies, Kodama originally made his mark in the 1930s as a government procurement agent in China, pillaging the countryside with a regiment of soldiers that included yakuza bosses he had personally recruited from Tokyo. (A favorite Kodama modus operandi in China, postwar testimony revealed, was to enter a village and have the mayor immediately shot to ensure everyone’s full cooperation in donating supplies.) Kodama’s success in providing the Japanese Army and Navy with the minerals, weapons, and other materials they needed eventually earned him a post in the wartime Tojo cabinet.

  Kodama also made a considerable personal profit from the sale of opium in China. By war’s end, he had amassed a personal fortune of precious jewels, gold, silver, platinum and radium, which he secretly had smuggled back to Japan. One plane he had commissioned in Shanghai was so heavily laden with plunder that the wheels collapsed on the airport runway.

  Upon his return to Tokyo, Kodama was arrested by the Allies on suspicion of committing atrocities. He spent three years in a Sugamo prison as a class A war criminal suspect but was released in 1949, along with Nobusuke Kishi, Tojo’s industrial minister and architect of Japan’s wartime economy, on the day that Tojo and six others convicted were hanged. Occupation authorities claimed there was not enough evidence to try him, but there was widespread belief that Kodama had bought his freedom with a portion of his secret treasure and that he had supplied information about wartime government figures wanted by the GHQ, convincing the Americans in the process of his potential future value to them. In fact, despite bitter complaints in private about life under the ‘rule of the white man’, he soon went to work for G-2, where officials found his old network of agents, ex-military friends and underworld associates indeed useful in countering the growing leftist movement in Japan. While infiltrating domestic Communist groups, Kodama found time to become Ted Lewin’s partner in the infamous Latin Quarter and used his vast fortune to foster close relationships with postwar political leaders. He provided the funds that started the conservative Liberal Party and donated even more in 1955, when it merged with the Democratic Party to form the American-backed Jiyu-Minshu-To, the party of the zaibatsu, which went on to rule Japan for the next thirty-eight years and over which Kodama exerted great influence.

  In 1958, Kodama went to work for the CIA, maintaining a professional relationship of considerable intensity that included helping to funnel agency money clandestinely to associates in the LDP and anti-Communist groups. One of Kodama’s assignments was to cozy up to Indonesian President Sukarno and assess for the agency the potential for the popular nationalist leader of turning Communist. (While Kodama was doing this, his business associates in a firm called Tonichi Trading Company were laying plans for business ventures in Djakarta, in part by supplying female companionship to the Indonesian president, a known womanizer, on his trips to Tokyo, continuing a tradition begun by previous Japanese business partners of Sukarno. Tonichi would eventually be rewarded with lucrative equipment and construction contacts.)

  While working for G-2 intelligence, Kodama had come in contact with another operative, the aforementioned Machii. The son of a Korean factory owner from Seoul and a Japanese mother, Machii had first made his name in the postwar black market running a band of young thugs. Nicknamed ‘Fanso’ (Violent Bull) as a youth, he had won several barroom brawls versus larger American GIs, including one encounter with a US Marine colonel, a karate black belt, whom Machii knocked out cold with one punch. He was famous for once having snapped a set of handcuffs in a fury over being arrested. After emerging victorious in several turf scuffles with pro-North Korean groups in Tokyo as the Korean peninsula headed toward civil war, he began to call his gang, euphemistically, ‘an armed force for the self-defense of South Koreans’.

  His exploits won him the attention of the Occupation’s G-2 intelligence wing, who put him on their payroll as an anti-Communist fighter and strikebreaker, and he went on to take part in several street battles against leftist protesters, often fighting side by side with pistol-toting members of the CIA.

  As unlikely as it may have seemed, the combination of Machii’s G-2 contacts and his knowledge of the Korean underworld on both sides of the Japan Sea (he had spent much of his youth in Seoul) earned him a spot with Kodama on an inspection tour of the Korean DMZ led by John Foster Dulles’s party in June 1950, shortly before the outbreak of the Korean War.

  By the mid-1950s his curriculum vitae included two arrests for manslaughter with his bare hands and several others for extortion and assault. Yet Machii never went to prison, thanks to his American connections in high places. He was either released on bail, acquitted or placed on probation. The Tokyo chief prosecutor, who was known for his constant pursuit of the gang chieftain, was once quoted as saying, ‘Every time we tried to get him, we were always pulled back. We’d bring him in, but each time there was pressure from above and he’d wind up being released.’

  The older Kodama took him under his wing and became an ‘adviser’ to the Tosei-kai, helping Machii to become a naturalized Japanese citizen. Kodama and Machii joined forces in many enterprises, among them the professional wrestling promotion business, investing heavily in Rikidozan, whom Kodama saw as a symbol of a rejuvenated Japan and poster boy for the conservative right. While the TSK men helped stage many matches in the Tokyo area, handled the concessions and provided security, Kodama boug
ht and ran the evening daily Tokyo Sports, which he turned into the bible of pro wrestling, devoting the bulk of the coverage to Rikidozan and creating an emotion-filled vehicle for unifying emerging Japanese nationalism, which of course was necessary to the effort to fight Communism.

  The matches continued to follow the same highly successful pattern, one in which pure-hearted Japanese heroics defeated American villainy, thereby pumping up the national psyche. Among the willing and well-paid participants in the charade were wrestlers like the ‘bloodsucking demon’ Freddie Blassie, who helped inaugurate the color TV era by slashing Riki with a hidden fingernail file and biting him in the forehead – a display of bloodletting that caused five elderly men and three elderly women watching at home around the country to die from the shock. At the same time, however, as it was later revealed, a large percentage of the profits from pro wrestling and related businesses were secretly donated to the conservative pro-American LDP, an irony that appeared to bother none of the parties involved. Another irony that bothered absolutely no one was that in order to circumvent tight currency exchange laws, foreign wrestlers had to be paid in black market dollars.

  The governing body of professional wrestling was the Japan Professional Wrestling Association, and its organizational chart was a revealing microcosm of the power structure in Japan, above and below the surface. Kodama was the president. The commissioner of the JPWA was the vice-premier of the LDP, Bamboku Ono, who called his appointment to the post an ‘honor impossible to refuse’. Several JPWA commission members were high-ranking Parliament members, including a future prime minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, who even maintained an office in one of Rikidozan’s Tokyo buildings, free of charge. Others included the CEO of Matsushita, one of the richest men in Japan, who bought television airtime for the matches, the head of NTV, which broadcast them, and the head of Daiei Film Studios, which made movies about them, while a retired police detective sat on the board of the advertising wing. The auditor of the JPWA was ‘Ginza Machii’, who was also a ‘bodyguard’ to Bamboku Ono and had secretly inducted Rikidozan into his gang in a ceremony at the Club Riki, thereby completing the unholy circle.