Moreover, there were times he seemed to take the American-bashing role he had perfected in the ring far too seriously. He once lacerated the face of a noisy American diner in Irene’s restaurant in Tokyo with a broken beer bottle. On another occasion, he threw an argumentative Swedish pilot out of the window of a second-story hotel bar in Osaka, mistaking him for an argumentative American.
Ex-Stars and Stripes reporter Corky Alexander was present the night Rikidozan sat in the Hamburger Inn, the all-night greasy spoon at the southern foot of the Roppongi strip favored by Americans. ‘Riki was there with three women at a back table,’ Alexander recalled. ‘He was drunk. He unzipped his fly and started masturbating. That was Rikidozan’s way of saying “Fuck you” to the foreigner.’
But now addiction to drugs and alcohol was making him even worse, as difficult to imagine as that may have been. He was taking stimulants to gear himself up for matches, tranquilizers to bring himself down afterward, and sleeping pills at bedtime, preceded by copious quantities of liquor. Appearing in 200 matches a year, this made for a lot of wear and tear on the body – chemical and otherwise. In the mornings, Riki would awake in a stupor, but in the afternoon, at the practice gym as the drugs wore off, he would fly into uncontrollable rages, to the great misfortune of those around him. There had been a midnight drinking session with Zappetti in which he had exploded in anger at a young woman who had apparently chosen to spend the night with the American instead of him. After nearly breaking her jaw with a karate chop, he had picked her up and thrown her completely over the roof of a parked car.
Thus, when Rikidozan was mortally wounded in a knife attack at an Akasaka nightclub on December 8, 1963, and died ten days later, it came as no surprise to many people. The story of what happened on that fateful night is as well known in Japan as the facts about the gunfight at the OK Corral are in the United States and bear some retelling here. The knifing had taken place at the New Latin Quarter, which had been built after the old Latin Quarter had burned down – or, as some cynical reporters put it, had been burned down, given the vast sum of insurance money that was later paid out. It was located in the basement of the recently opened Hotel New Japan, one of the many showpiece hotels popping up around Tokyo in preparation for the upcoming 1964 Olympics. The NLQ was, everyone agreed, far more luxurious than its predecessor. It had a hundred of the city’s most beautiful hostesses, eighty dimly lit tables, spectacular floor shows from the States, and a staff of forty men and women. It also boasted deluxe marble-floored American-style rest rooms, with attendants inside, a first for Tokyo – as was the tipping basket in each facility. It was a favorite hangout of the international intelligence community, agents from the KGB, CIA, and MI6 often vying with each other for the same hostess.
Rikidozan had come in that night with his coterie of attendants in a seriously florid state. Now, seated at a table near the NLQ stage, Riki started throwing coasters at the band – a group on tour from the United States – shouting drunkenly at its black members, ‘Neeguro go homu. Sonnabeech.’
He danced with a hostess for a few numbers, and when the music stopped playing he walked with her arm in arm to the rest room area. At about the same time, a twenty-four-year-old member of the Sumiyoshi-kai named Katsushi Murata got up to visit the men’s room, too. The young gangster belonged to the Ginza wing of the Sumiyoshi, a company called Dai-Nippon Kogyo, which supplied bandsmen, musicians and singers to clubs around Tokyo, as well as ice, hand towels, food and drink – usually at inflated prices and it was said, at swordpoint, if necessary. The company had also, until recently, supplied similar services at some Rikidozan professional wrestling matches, until Yoshio Kodama struck a deal uniting the Tosei-kai, the 7,000-member Inagawa-kai, and the 10,000-member Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi in dividing up exclusive nationwide rights to professional wrestling – the deal leaving young Murata’s organization out in the cold.
As the short but solidly built Murata was later to tell the story, Rikidozan was standing in the doorway to the men’s room, talking to the hostess, when Murata tried to squeeze by and in the process accidentally made body contact. Words were exchanged, he said, and Riki uncorked a right hand that sent him flying several feet into the men’s room, landing with an awful thud on the marble floor. As he lay flat on his back dazed, Rikidozan then leapt atop him and, crazy with anger and alcohol, began raining blows onto his face. Murata said he grabbed for the six-inch hunting knife he kept fixed to his belt and thrust the blade into his attacker’s belly. As Riki rolled over in pain, Murata clambered to his feet and fled.
Holding his side, Riki got up and slowly made his way back to his table. He stood in front of his drinking companions, watching the blood gradually stain his clothes. Then, abruptly, he climbed up on the stage and grabbed the microphone from a singer who had been holding forth. Ordering the band to play ‘Mack the Knife’, he began talking in a confused mixture of English and Japanese.
‘There is a killer in this club,’ he was heard to say, a bit too nonchalantly some people thought for a man in his condition. ‘Look at what he did to me.’ Than he opened wide his jacket to display the growing swatch of red on his abdomen to the crowd.
There were several screams. Some customers fainted. Others started running out of the club, climbing over tables and chairs.
‘You’d better be careful,’ Riki said, wagging his finger at them. ‘You’d better go home.’
Some observers thought that Riki actually seemed to be enjoying himself.
Riki went to a nearby clinic for emergency first aid, then home. The wound would not stop bleeding, however, and in the morning he was taken to a local hospital for surgery. In a few days, he was up and about, telling everyone what he was going to do to Murata, who, in any event, had already been located and nearly sliced to death by a group of Tosei-kai gangsters before the police caught up with him. Accounts vary as to what happened next. Some reports say that Riki drank water from a bedside flower vase and developed peritonitis. Other reports had him ripping out his IV and his oxygen tube and downing a beer smuggled into the hospital. Still others said it was the milk and apples he had consumed – both forbidden, given the kind of wound he had. Whatever the cause, he was forced to undergo a sudden second operation, by a team from the American hospital St Lukes, and four hours later he was dead. At the inquest, doctors later testified that Rikidozan had died from the shock of the anesthetic; because Riki was so much bigger than ordinary Japanese, he required a large dosage, but there had been a miscalculation and he had been given an overdose.
Almost no one thought the original fight with Murata had been unintentional, and the Japanese weeklies had a feast of lurid speculation over the incident. Some journalists, aware of the North Korean connection, believed Rikidozan was the victim of a US CIA plot, that the CIA, under orders from the White House, no doubt, had hired a gangster to do the hit. It was more than a coincidence, conspiracy theorists noted, that Riki’s stabbing occurred at a known CIA hangout and that doctors from an American hospital had been involved in the anesthetic overdose.
The theory was believable enough to many knowledgeable Japanese, given the CIA’s involvement in the LDP and the fact that the last thing the conservative leadership would want was Japan’s national hero revealed as a North Korean and Communist sympathizer. The clincher to some was the fact that the knifing had occurred on the twenty-second anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as the Japanese counted time: That was the US’s answer to those Japanese who had cheered Rikidozan’s humiliation of the Americans in the ring.
However, there was no hard evidence that any of this was true. Skeptics pointed to the fact that in June 1963, Rikidozan had married the daughter of a police chief in Chigasaki and was investing in the development of a leisure country club, hardly the actions of a man who intended to defect.
Japanese prosecutors, for their part, had concluded that Riki had been killed as part of the ongoing underworld turf war between the Sumiyoshi and the Tosei-ka
i. They charged Murata with murder, and although Murata insisted it had all been an accident, a misunderstanding, that he’d only been acting in self-defense, a court found him guilty of manslaughter and sentenced him to prison for seven years.
After a funeral attended by hundreds of prominent people, including LDP cabinet ministers, as well as tens of thousands of mourners, Riki was buried in the cemetery at Ikegami Honmonji temple in Ota Ward Tokyo, in view of a five-story Buddhist pagoda. His tombstone featured a life-size bronze bust, underneath which was his adopted Japanese name of Momota Mitsuhiro. Nowhere was there any mention of Kim Sin Rak, or of Korea – North or South.
His grave stood as a lasting reminder of the layers of deception that were helping to build the foundation for the ‘new Japan’.
4. Post-Olympic Underground Economy
The Tokyo Olympics were a watershed event, one that transformed the psyche of Japan as well as its physical image. All the world had been watching and, by universal agreement, the country had put on a flawless performance. Critics said they were the best-organized Games ever and that the structures built specifically for the extravaganza, seen on global television by millions, were among the most aesthetically impressive in the history of Olympic architecture. Kenzo Tange’s National Yoyogi Sport Center, with its sweeping curved rooflines of tensile steel, suggesting some hi-tech Buddhist temple, won the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 1967 – all of which served to greatly enhance the self-esteem of the Japanese people.
At the same time, the explosion of construction that accompanied the affair also altered the face of the nation’s capital, almost beyond recognition. Nearly all of the city’s canals were filled in with concrete and the shacks and mobile stalls of an earlier era turned into firewood. In their place were scores of new hotels (including the futuristic seventeen-story Hotel New Otani, showcased in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice), a network of modern roads and elevated freeways with protective steel-siding sound barriers, as well as gleaming new subway lines, a monorail, and a terminal for the world’s first high-speed railway. So much of Tokyo, in particular the southwestern areas of Akasaka, Roppongi, Shibuya and Aoyama, had been rendered unrecognizable from a decade before that a Tokyo gang boss, released from prison after seven years and reeling from confusion at what greeted him, was moved to say, ‘I feel as though I am returning to a completely different city.’
This modern, post-Olympic, new Tokyo could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called an attractive place. Away from the breathtaking Olympic sites, it was for the most part an amorphous assemblage of gray, box-like office buildings of cheap reinforced concrete, utilitarian storefronts, and soulless ‘rabbit hutch’ apartment blocks. The terrain was flat, the low-rise skyline monotonous, and the city’s hubs, featuring as they did ubiquitous station-front pachinko parlors, ‘stand bars’, and fruit shops, were boring in their uniformity. (Even the city’s rebuilt shrines and temples were, in general, indistinguishable from one another.)
But the energy was palpable, especially during the morning Tokyo rush hour when the millions of determined commuters made long treks on unspeakably crowded trains to begin the twelve-hour workday. The so-called Izanagi Boom, which started in 1965 and was fueled by exports in motorcycles, transistor radios, television set, and other manufactured products, lasted fifty-seven months. It was the longest continued economic expansion in the nation’s history and turned Japan into the world’s third largest economy, doubling worker incomes in the process. By the end of the decade, nearly every family owned a color TV, an air conditioner and a washing machine, and Tokyo’s main boulevards were one massive traffic jam from the explosion of privately owned cars – Japanese cars like the Datsun Bluebird and the Toyota Publica. Automobile pollution was so bad that in some areas street corner police boxes provided oxygen on demand to pedestrians overcome by exhaust fumes. A big electronic board erected on the Ginza displayed minute-by-minute PPM levels – alongside decibel levels of noise from traffic and the omnipresent construction machinery.
At night, Tokyo’s new wealth was visible in another way, when the neon signs were turned on – in a phantasmagoric explosion of Chinese characters, Japanese kana and Roman letters – and the city’s 25,000 bars and nightclubs came to life. Many of them could be found in the booming Roppongi-Akasaka area, which, with its international flavor, was becoming Tokyo’s major nighttime center.
Roppongi’s dusty main avenue was simultaneously gutted with new construction and lined with pricey modern restaurants – among them the elegant two-story Seryna, where kimonoed waitresses served grilled steaks on heated stone, the Ile de France, which served quintessential French provincial cuisine on Japanese cedarwood tables, and the Crazy Horse club, with its flashy Parisian ambience and live bands direct from Manila. In place of the streetcar was the recently completed Hibya subway line, shuttling in a fresh generation of youth, the first since the war with pocket money, who were anxious to experience the cosmopolitan atmosphere of this thriving hip area.
Nicola’s was still the attraction. It now occupied an entire newly constructed three-story concrete building with forty large tables, two blocks away from its original location and a stone’s throw from the opulent new Hotel Okura, modeled after an ancient Kyoto palace and adjudged to be the finest hotel in the world. The restaurant had made Roppongi synonymous with pizza. Although Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko had subsequently curtailed their pizza-eating excursions to concentrate on the task of producing an heir to the throne, Nicola’s remained a Who’s Who of Tokyo and international society. On any given night, celebrities in full view might include: Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark and Cary Grant, who all filmed movies in Japan; Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr, Billy Eckstein and Xavier Cugat on concert tour; and even Ava Gardner, who came to town promoting 55 Days in Peking (announcing that as long as she was in Tokyo she was going to sleep only with Japanese men).
It was neighboring Akasaka, however, with its bevy of expensive new hostess clubs that had sprung up around the New Latin Quarter, that offered one of the more interesting views of emerging ‘Japan Inc.’. Akasaka was where Japanese corporate executives took their prospective foreign clients, to soften them up with what amounted to a modern-day version of the old RAA (now retired with honors), one now applied to global commerce instead of domestic peacekeeping. Among Akasaka’s popular establishments was the pagoda-like Mikado, the world’s largest cabaret. Featuring splashy, Las Vegas-style shows in which scantily clad girls in feathers were transported overhead in pint-sized cable cars, the Mikado boasted 1,000 comely hostesses bearing numbered electronic pagers in their bras.
Said one American importer who was frequently taken to the Mikado by his Japanese associates on buying trips to Tokyo, ‘It was like a giant warehouse of sex. Your eyes would get tired from staring so much. You’d be out dancing with #832 and her beeper would go off and she’d leave you for another customer. But you didn’t care, because the next one would be even better. It added a whole new dimension to doing business in Japan. I can’t tell you how many contracts were signed because of that place.’
Japan spent (and still does) 1.5 percent of its annual gross national product on declared ‘business entertaining’, which is more than the country ever allotted per annum during the postwar era to the national defense budget; most corporate executives were given generous expense accounts for that purpose. The high figure was a measure of the special Japanese need to develop a relationship with their clients and partners in commerce that goes beyond the mere exchange of goods and services – in the interests of the long-term success of the alliance. It was a need that the Japanese government recognized, incidentally, by condoning tax laws that allow most entertainment to be written off as operating expenses (a policy that, in turn, helped keep the city’s myriad watering holes in the black). Entertainment was said to be the adhesive that bound together Japan’s so-called Iron Triangle of business, politics and bureaucracy, and there was, naturally, often
more going on than mere fun, games and male bonding, as anyone familiar with the Akasaka Copacabana could attest.
The Copacabana was the most exclusive and expensive club in the city, by far the most impressive place a Japanese could take a VIP from abroad. It was a successful attempt to create a Western-style ryotei – the name given to the old-style high-class restaurants of polished bamboo where silk-robed geisha traditionally entertained Japanese politicians and captains of industry – and from where, it was said, Japan was really governed. Located on an Akasaka back street near the New Latin Quarter, the Copa offered an elite corps of beautiful bilingual young women, flawlessly groomed and garbed in Givenchy gowns and white enamel shoes. They poured drinks, hand-fed gourmet snacks, flattered, caressed and otherwise pampered clients in an intimate setting of dimly lit tables and red velvet booths, while noted performers from abroad like Nat King Cole and Dean Martin entertained on a small stage. (The Copa’s owner, a former dance hall hostess and prewar Shanghai dancer known as ‘Mama Cherry’, was famous for her discreet but eagle-eyed surveillance of her hostesses to see that the service was perfect. When technology later allowed, she even enlisted the aid of strategically placed TV cameras.)
Each night a steady stream of sleek black limousines glided to a halt in front of the Copa’s distinctive arched entranceway to disgorge the rich and the famous. Private citizen Richard Nixon was taken there whenever he came to Tokyo to discuss business with the great trading house Mitsui Bussan, whose American affiliate he represented. So was King Faisal and Indonesian President Sukarno, among others. And it was a hotbed of espionage.
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