Tokyo Underworld

by Robert Whiting

  Public works have long been parceled out by a collusive bid-rigging system called dango, in which the contestants for a public works project decide in advance among themselves which company will get what contracts and even determine what the respective bids will be. It is a long-imbedded system designed, in part, to make sure everyone gets a piece of the pie, therefore maintaining harmony in the marketplace and avoiding the much-dreaded onset of ‘confusion’. If there is disagreement among the contenders, politicians and ministry officials make the final decision, for a ‘mediation’ fee, the arbiters not required by law to reveal their criteria for choosing the winner on any given bid.

  The results doubled and tripled costs for the taxpayer – and a market closed to outside competition. Angry US trade representatives, alarmed that Japanese construction companies rake in $100 million a year from US government projects, have officially deemed dango a trade barrier, a move that has done absolutely no good because LDP politicians are getting too much money under the table in kickbacks from contract bid winners. Better the Japanese demand that the US federal government get the Mafia out of New York.

  The bubble economy of the eighties, with its sudden jump in real estate prices, just made things worse, for it gave rise to a new mob activity called jiage – meaning the business of persuading recalcitrant owners to sell their property so that the mob could consolidate it and sell it for the construction of million-dollar office blocks. Popular techniques of persuasion included dead cats at the doorstop, midnight visits from mean-looking thugs, and bombs in the mailbox. By such tactics, Jiageya (specialists in the practice) helped create one of the toniest new addresses in the city, Ark Hills, a stone’s throw from the original site of Nicola’s. A high-gloss complex of high-rise red brick and marble buildings and outdoor pools, it showcased the All Nippon Airways Hotel, with its polished marble lobby, shimmering indoor waterfall, and glistening high-tech studios of Asahi Television. Its smooth, glamorous exterior was in sharp contrast to the brute force that had, at times, been necessary to create it.

  The bubble economy had its own impact on the affairs of Zappetti. Almost overnight, the cost of his rent doubled, as did the price of meat, vegetables, hot towels and other supplies he regularly bought. He found it difficult to raise his prices because so many of his regular customers were foreigners on dollar-based incomes, the value of which was rapidly eroding. Instead, he decided to go back into the farming business. And thus did he get yet another lesson in how things really worked under the surface in Japan.

  Allowed by the court to use his Hokkaido land while the lawsuit with his former general manager was being litigated, Zappetti decided to take up hog breeding. He would raise hogs to sell and make a profit and, at the same time, provide himself with a steady access to cheap pork and sausage for use in his restaurant.

  The pig farm had originally been the suggestion of a Hokkaido neighbor whom Nick had hired to look after his empty state-of-the-art barn. The man’s name was Kobayashi, but Nick dubbed him ‘Farmer Brown’ because Kobayashi bore a strong facial resemblance to Nick’s long-deceased cousin ‘Three-Finger Brown.’

  ‘Pigs are better than cows – or mink or rabbits,’ Farmer Brown had said. ‘See, you only have to keep them around for six months of the year and you can get your initial investment back fairly quickly. All you have to do is buy piglets, feed them, and sell them when they get big. Since the major pork producers overcharge, you can undersell them and still make a profit.’

  It seemed to make sense, given that pork was 2,300 yen a kilo (nearly $10 a pound) and rising. But Zappetti should have known better, given all that he had been through before. And, in fact, his friends tried to warn him.

  ‘What the hell do you know about pigs?’ chided his neighbor, the White Russian doctor Eugene Aksenoff, from behind his desk at Roppongi’s International Clinic. ‘What are you doing back up in Hokkaido anyway? Your place is in the restaurant. Put your chef’s hat back on. Stand by the door and greet everybody in your funny Japanese. The Japanese love that kind of thing. That’s where the money is. Forget this other stuff.’

  Aksenoff knew whereof he spoke. Born in Manchuria and educated in Japan, he had paid his way through medical school in Tokyo by playing the role of enemy Americans in wartime propaganda films. Venal, stupid enemy Americans, it went without saying.

  But Zappetti, a born enemy of common sense, refused to listen. Thus, in 1982, in his first official act as a Japanese citizen, he purchased thirty White Landraces and bred them over three generations, producing something called the F-1 pig, which he has been informed, was the most coveted type of pig in the marketplace. In the process, he made a number of interesting discoveries. One was that pigs were very delicate creatures. They had to be given all sorts of inoculations to prevent disease and they had to be handled very gently. Ushering his porcine charges into his barn one day, he whacked one of them with a stick and the startled swine collapsed and died of a heart attack on his mud-covered galoshes, the sudden coronary representing a loss of several hundred dollars.

  The biggest surprise of all was the trip to the slaughterhouse, where a price would be offered only after the pig was slaughtered. Workers would hoist the pig up on a chain, slit the throat, and cut the arteries to the heart. Then, they’d put it on a roller conveyor, cut off its feet, skin it, and cut it in half lengthwise. Only after that would the appraiser examine the meat and determine a price. If the seller thought it was too low, he couldn’t very well say he was going to take his pig home.

  There were also pages of rules to follow. The pig had to have a certain girth and a certain length. There were upper limits on fat content. Fines were imposed for each violation, which served to lower the final selling price. A pig that was too long, too short, too fat or too skinny was penalized. Since the appraisers also had quotas of fines they had to fill (another belated discovery), sooner or later they got Farmer Koizumi for some transgression or another. By the time they were finished, Nick’s profit margin had almost disappeared.

  It all became more understandable when Nick discovered that the slaughterhouse and its staff, including the appraiser, all belonged to Nippon Ham, Japan’s leading pork producer.

  For a time, Zappetti took to bringing gifts to the slaughterhouse officials, because, as he was frequently told, gift giving was the Japanese way. Gifts helped form human bonds. They were the grease that smoothed social and commercial intercourse, which was why twice a year, during the year-end and midsummer months, the Japanese went on a nationwide binge of giving gifts, sending bath soap, boxes of fruit, Scotch whiskey and such to everyone of social or professional importance in their lives. In fact, half the families in Japan never bought bath soap because they were given so much on those occasions.

  The custom of gift-giving demanded that certain forms be observed. One had to give to match the recipient’s status, which in Nick’s case meant buying from the most exclusive and expensive department stores in Sapporo, the gifts wrapped in paper that advertised their origins to everyone.

  Thus laden with Napoleon brandy and other presents did Zappetti go calling on the officials at their homes, hand-delivering his gifts to demonstrate even more ‘sincerity’. In turn, the officials began giving better prices on his pigs.

  The idea of it all irritated Zappetti, however. He got tired of having his arm so subtly twisted. One night during a drunken session with an appraiser, he lost his temper. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ he said. ‘You’re always on the take.’

  That was the end of the special deals.

  An independent breeder couldn’t win. If he bought baby pigs in the spring, they were ready for sale in October, which, not surprisingly, was when the price went down. If he kept the pigs longer and waited for the price to rise again, he had to pay more to feed them. In the end, it was difficult to make a profit.

  Nippon Ham knocked everyone out of business in one way or another. Nick was not surprised when Nippon Ham started its own pig farm in the area so
me years later. From that point on, the regional slaughterhouse, where he had been going, refused to take his pigs. He had to travel to Hakodate, several hours away, which was an even bigger expense than before. Finally, he had to quit. And he wasn’t the only one. Eighty percent of the hog raisers that existed in Hokkaido when Nick started up his farm eventually went out of business, even though the total number of hogs raised on the island increased during that same time span.

  ‘Americans had the wrong idea about Japan,’ Nick took to saying when it was all over. ‘The Japanese weren’t just vicious competitors in trade with the United States. They were even worse with each other.’

  KEIZAI YAKUZA

  The new economic might of Japan also gave birth to what became known as keizai yakuza (financial gangsters), bubble-era mobsters who distinguished themselves more in the area of white collar crimes. Among other things, they profiteered from insider trading on the ever rising Tokyo Stock Exchange, as they learned to translate brawn, connections, and cash into important investment tips. They also set up specialized finance companies called jusen to borrow money from the banks for the purchase and development of real estate. In the heated competition for business that marked the bubble era, bankers even began to approach them, offering cheap loans, while brokerages urged them to buy securities. As long as they had land, which was soaring in value, for collateral, the banks and brokerages would give them anything they wanted.

  The men from the local chapter of the Sumiyoshi, the gang that had seized control of the Roppongi-Akasaka area in the wake of the Tosei-kai’s decline and became regular customers at Nicola’s, were exemplars of the new breed of racketeer. They arrived to dine at Nicola’s in a convoy of black stretch Mercedes with opaque tinted windows, sporting double-breasted Italian suits and designer sunglasses and carrying cellular phones. Seated in groups of twenty to thirty, they would order pizza, filet mignon, and the best imported Chianti on the menu. Then, lighting up post-dinner cigars, they would lean back to discuss stock options, futures, and their overseas investments. This crime-on-the-half-shell modus operandi also described the men from the newly opened branch of the Inagawa-kai in Roppongi as well as a local branch of the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi, which also held periodic dinner parties at Nicola’s.

  All of them were tanned, from periodic visits to Hawaii, and remarkably healthy looking. It was quite a change from the days of pasty-faced, hollow-cheeked, noisy goons dressed in loud checked jackets and baggy pink pants with wads of 10,000-yen notes protruding from their shirt pockets. If the model had once been Marlon Brando in the 1955 movie Guys and Dolls, it was now more like Michael Douglas in Wall Street. There was even a marked absence of clipped pinkies, because a missing fingertip, it was now widely recognized, adversely affected one’s golf swing. To avoid the slice – in both instances – therefore, everyone was on his best behavior.

  One high-ranking captain named Tani could have passed for a Harvard graduate. He was fluent in French, English and Chinese. He was an expert calligrapher who ink-brushed his own name cards (which carried the title of ‘corporate vice president’) and was as knowledgeable about classical music as he was about rock and roll – his favorites being Claude Debussy and Mick Jagger.

  A tall, well-groomed man in his early forties, his hobbies included astronomy (a large telescope stood on the balcony of his $20,000-a-month red-brick Roppongi apartment) and collecting cars (a Karman Ghia, a Benz and a black stretch Cadillac were among his possessions). His specialty, the sokaiya business of corporate extortion, was seeking out companies that were breaking the law – either by evading taxes, excessively padding expense accounts, or making illegal stock transactions and under-the-table donations to politicians – and then shaking them down. He would trade his silence for large blocks of shares, which he would later sell. To this end, he assiduously studied commercial law and subscribed to all the major dailies and economic journals (which offered quite a contrast to the yakuza of old, whose reading material had usually consisted of comic books and the horse racing news). He hired himself out to the corporations he had just extorted – as an ‘honorary board member’ – and advised them how to protect themselves from future extortion by other yakuza like himself. The longer he stayed, of course, the more evidence he collected of his new partners’ misdeeds that could be used for further extortion purposes.

  ‘It’s the nature of human beings to be corrupt,’ he told Nick, explaining his philosophy of life. ‘If the companies didn’t have anything to hide, people like me wouldn’t be in business. The special weakness of the Japanese businessman is that he will do anything to help the company, even if it means breaking the law and risking going to prison. They do it out of loyalty. Or out of fear of being shunted aside. That’s a weakness you can take advantage of. The American businessman breaks the law to line his own pockets and is thus harder to catch. That’s a fundamental difference.’

  Another rising star was a man named Tomonao Miyashiro of the Kobayashi wing of the Sumiyoshi-kai. He was a slender, intense, articulate young man who had an MBA from a state college in California (along with an arrest record there that included charges of conspiracy, extortion, and assault with a deadly weapon – pleaded down to misdemeanors in exchange for Miyashiro’s departure from America’s shores). He had started Japan’s first skateboard company before moving on to bigger things. His title was technically hishokan, or ‘secretary’, to Kusuo Kobayashi, titular boss of the 300-member Kobayashi faction, but he wielded considerable influence, and some even viewed him as the de facto leader of the gang.

  Miyashiro eschewed the practice of wearing tattoos, as well as finger shortening, and preached the need for modern-day yakuza to keep up with new developments in the world by reading the papers and watching CNN. He even appeared in numerous media interviews, including the US TV programs Moneyline and 60 Minutes, where he was seen sporting a Mephistophelian goatee, expensive gold jewelry and suits out of GQ. He boasted of his friendships with Hollywood figures like Diana Ross and Frank Sinatra.

  Miyashiro’s boss, the man whose underlings had once tried, years ago, to shake down Nicola’s restaurant and had fought the Tosei-kai in hand-to-hand combat for control of Roppongi, had gone on to bigger things. In his sixties, wearing three-piece suits and designer sunglasses on a string, Kobayashi was a prime candidate for nationwide leadership of the massive 8,000-member Sumiyoshi crime syndicate and was nurturing ties to the highest levels of government. One of Yoshio Kodama’s ex-disciples, Kobayashi had helped elect Yasuhiro Nakasone prime minister in 1982 by throwing the support of a several-thousand-member rightist organization he controlled behind the LDP politician. (A 1985 police investigation uncovered over 100 instances of extortion by the Roppongi office of the Kobayashi-kai alone.)

  To Nick, the New Wave yakuza that appeared before him was all a bit perplexing.

  ‘What the hell is the point of being a yakuza’, he asked one well-tailored mobster, ‘if you act like everyone else? You guys use electronic calculators instead of swords. You talk about derivatives. Your name cards say corporate vice president instead of captain or elder brother. You’re trying too hard to be respectable.’

  The mobster gave Nick a strange look and said, ‘What about you?’

  Then he asked for the wine list.

  The old breed of mobster, slowly dying out, still existed in the form of an aging Sumiyoshi underboss who ran an office a few doors from Roppongi Nicola’s. He was none other than Katsushi Murata, better known as the man who killed Rikidozan.

  Murata had served seven years inside the high grim walls of Fuchu Correctional Facility for his infamous act, and in between return visits, made possible by other convictions for gambling and arms possession, he had risen high in the ranks of the Sumiyoshi. By the mid-1980s, at age fifty, he had ascended to the post of director in the Kobayashi gang and been awarded his own personal kumi, or sub-gang, of fifteen men – an honor not lightly bestowed and one which meant that Murata now had men providing him with a sh
are of their earnings as jonokin, or tribute.

  Murata, a familiar sight in his frizzy punch perm, was one of the most highly regarded yakuza in the city. There had been numerous media accounts of his exploits, especially the encounter with Rikidozan and its aftermath. After leaving the New Latin Quarter that blood-spilled evening, Murata had gone with his boss, Kusuo Kobayashi, and three other gang members to Riki Apartments in Akasaka – to apologize and negotiate some sort of monetary settlement, as was often the case in such instances, before turning himself into the police. Ordered by Kobayashi to wait in the downstairs parking lot and avoid violence at all costs while the matter was being discussed in Rikidozan’s penthouse apartment, Murata found himself confronted by an angry band of Tosei-kai soldiers loyal to the famous wrestler and, rather than disobey his boss’s order, he stoically allowed himself to be slashed several times in the face and chest with a butcher knife. It was only when his companions were attacked that Murata finally swung into action – making a foot-long gash in the abdomen of one opponent with the weapon he had used only hours earlier in the Latin Quarter men’s room – before police arrived to impose order.

  Murata was a gangster with an old-fashioned sense of honor in more ways than one. Whenever the anniversary of Rikidozan’s death came around, he never failed to pay his respects. On those occasions when he was incarcerated, he had the prison Buddhist priest come to his cell to light an offering of incense and say a prayer for the repose of Riki’s soul. When he was out among the general populace, Murata would visit Riki’s grave in the Ikegami Honmonji Cemetery in Eastern Tokyo, to bow and pray before the life-size bronze bust of the wrestler. He would always go on the day before the anniversary or the day after, so as to avoid meeting Riki’s family members.