Tokyo Underworld

by Robert Whiting

  The sokaiya at the center of it all, a smiling, keizai yakuza with designer glasses and fashionably long hair named Ryuichi Koike, was yet another by-product of the environment created by US–Japan ‘cooperation’ that allowed organized crime and the government to join forces and flourish. He had been able to get close to the companies involved because of links to the infamous Yoshio Kodama Sokaiya group, still going strong despite the master’s demise.

  Koike, arrested and accused of receiving nearly 700 million yen in illegal payments from the securities houses and 12 billion in illegal loans from a Dai-Ichi Kangyo subsidiary, was released on 40 million yen bail – not even 1 percent of his total take. The harshest penalty was given to Nomura, a five-month suspension this time. Two more officials subsequently committed suicide.

  In October of that year a politician in the ruling party, sitting for a magazine interview, openly expressed his view that cutting the links between the world of the gangs and conservative politics was impossible given the close ties that bound certain underworld and political bosses. He even boasted that he did not have to engage in vote buying because he could rely on the Yamaguchi-gumi to get the vote out for him. As he offered these remarks, a nationwide shoot-out involving rival factions of the nation’s largest gang was going on.

  It was an admission that surprised no one, save perhaps the US government, which had been loudly complaining about ‘discriminatory’ port charges imposed by the Japan Harbor Transportation Association and had leveled retaliatory fines against Japanese vessels using American harbor facilities. The effort was, of course, doomed to failure since the United States was taking on a formidable featherbedding source of post-retirement positions for government officials – and an organization tied to organized crime in Japan. It was as if MITI had decided to take on the New York City Harbor Dockworkers Association.

  In March 1997, the Tokyo District Court sentenced Ken Mizuno to eleven years in prison and a fine of nearly 70 million dollars. This came some eighteen months after the US Customs Service auctioned off Mizuno’s Los Angeles mansion (used in the movie Beverly Hills Cop II). It was the last of Mizuno’s US assets, including properties in California, Hawaii and Las Vegas, auctioned as part of a plea bargain with US Federal authorities in which Mizuno’s firm plead guilty to fraud and money laundering. The money was to go to the US Treasury Asset Forfeiture Fund, to be divided between the fraud victims and Mizuno’s creditors. US law enforcement officers said they had obtained unprecedented cooperation from the notoriously secretive Japanese police in their investigation of Mizuno’s money laundering and that Japan’s Finance Ministry had identified some $250 million in fraudulent funds he transferred to US banks.

  However, the FBI and Japanese police would continue to have their hands full. The last two years before the millennium, as Japan began implementing a program of deregulation known as the biggu ban (big bang), were witness to the unusual spectacle of US financial companies buying up substantial amounts of bad Japanese real estate-backed loan portfolios (in January 1998, the Ministry of Finance had pegged the size of bad loans at well over $600 billion, larger than the US S&L crisis), thus putting themselves on a collision course with the keizai yakuza, who owed much of the debt in question and who, in some cases, were occupying property facing foreclosure in the wake of the deals with the Americans. Amid media cries and rightist protests that Japan was ‘selling out’ to the United States, the head of the Sumiyoshi was standing by to offer his assistance to any American firm that had difficulty collecting its money – for a commission of only 40 percent. Back in Los Angeles, an investigator associated with the LAPD, long familiar with the scene in Japan, was shaking his head in disbelief at the risks being taken.

  ‘One would think’, he said, ‘that these American financiers would have more sense.’

  Then again, one never knew. Perhaps they knew more than they were letting on.

  Thomas Blakemore died in 1996 in Seattle, where he had moved to be treated for the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. He was seventy-seven. But he left behind a legacy that is not likely to be matched by any American in Japan. In addition to ably representing the fortunes of many US firms for forty years, including GE (a company that remained the largest single investor in Japan, with 13 percent of Toshiba’s stock), he was decorated by the Emperor – receiving the ‘Third Order of the Sacred Treasure’, in 1989 – for legal services Blakemore had contributed to the Japanese Supreme Court over the years.

  Blakemore had been a perpetual goodwill machine. He and his wife Frances set up an experimental farming project on five acres of agricultural land outside Tokyo where they introduced short hybrid fruit trees, a series of miniature orchards that grew apples, loganberries, raspberries, blueberries and cherries, among other fruit. (‘The Japanese people know what starvation is,’ he said, ‘and this is one hedge against it.’)

  Moreover, he also identified two species of Iriomote Wild Cat from the Ryukyus and a species of bear from Hokkaido, passing on his discoveries to the Museum of Natural History of New York. He sponsored adventurer Naomi Uemura for membership into the New York Explorer’s Club. (His wife, in addition to introducing many young artists in her Okura gallery, authored several books on Japanese prints.) Before moving back to the States to battle his illness, Blakemore used much of his wealth to set up a foundation in his name to provide scholarships for aspiring students of Japan.

  If Blakemore was the symbol of one side of the US–Japan dynamic, Nicola Zappetti was certainly the symbol of the other. Although he had never been in danger of receiving an imperial decoration, he had indeed left his own unique legacy: Roppongi. When he first opened his tiny eight-table bistro, Roppongi was little more than a military camp. By the end of the century, it stood in the same league as the Champs Elysée, the Via Veneto and other famous international playgrounds. Many longtime observers of the Tokyo scene gave Nicola’s much of the credit for that happening; his restaurant became such a lodestone for Tokyo night owls that it caused the creation of other nightspots in the area. By the time Tokyo Tower had gone up in the neighborhood, in 1959, with a big television studio opening up a year later, Roppongi had come to stand for the exotic and the advanced. As Tokyo Rising author Edward Seidenstecker would write about the area – ‘young people went to ogle and to imitate, and to dance and eat pizza.’

  By the late 1990s, there were enough restaurants serving ethnic delicacies in the quarter to please even the most serious gourmets, and there were perhaps more places per square kilometer to sit down and eat Italian food than any other area of the world – even New York City and Rome. At the same time, Roppongi had also became a magnet for Southeast Asian drug dealers, prostitutes, illegal workers, and foreign college girls seeking work as lap dancers to earn their tuition. Notable in the new landscape was One-Eyed Jack, a casino club that had opened in the early 1990s. Outside stood a tall white American doorman dressed in a tasseled greatcoat and cap who greeted one and all in flawless Japanese: ‘Irrashai. Irrashai. Wanu-aido-zyaku e dozo.’ Inside, operating roulette and blackjack tables, where customers could gamble for ostensibly worthless chips, were attractive Caucasian female card dealers and croupiers – who plied their trade in perfect Japanese, to a clientele that was almost exclusively young and well-heeled Nipponese male. In an adjoining room was a large circular bar surrounded by a number of private booths occupied by some seventy-five imported gaijin women – Americans, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, British and Russian – clad in miniskirts, fishnet stockings and low-cut silk blouses. A seminude revue of Las Vegas dancers helped liven up the proceedings every half-hour, while gangsta rap played in the background. It was the largest assemblage of Caucasian hostesses in the history of Tokyo – not to mention Japanese-speaking Caucasian hostesses – and was a stunning example of the power of the yen, even with the long recession.

  The club, managed by an American, occupied the former site of the fabled Caravansary and was so successful that several sister clubs popped up i
n the vicinity, all of them in buildings owned outright by the TSK or TSK affiliates. One of the operations, The Pharoah, was closed down in 1997 for illegal gambling. A casual observer might think Toa Sogo Kigyo was making something of a comeback.

  The TSK still owned a number of cabarets and hotels in Seoul, a resort in the Philippines, interests in Okinawa, casinos in the Marshall Islands and, of course, the Toa Yuai Jigyo Kumiai (East Asia Friendship Enterprises Association), as the criminal wing was now formally known, had made it into the US congressional record, having been cited in a 1993 US Senate report as being behind most of the crystal methamphetamine business in Hawaii. It was quite an achievement for a group that did not even constitute 1 percent of all boryokudan members. A representative of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Organized Crime Intelligence Division told the Mainichi Shimbun in 1994 that he had a strong suspicion that the Santa Monica-based Machii-Ross operation was now a money-laundering cover for the yakuza, something which the company’s spokespeople strenuously denied. (Ross, now involved in gold mining in Liberia, had always firmly denied any wrongdoing and had expressed his belief that his partner’s criminal activities were a thing of the past – something which had occurred well before their company was ever formed.) The 500-some active Tosei-kai yazuka operating as the Toa Yuai Jigyo Kumiai (East Friendship Enterprises Association) were showing renewed signs of life on the homefront as well as abroad. In 1994, a forty-four-year-old TSK captain named Hiroji Tashiro stormed into the Tokyo headquarters of the Mainichi Shimbun and fired three .38 bullets into the ceiling. Tashiro was upset with an article published by the Mainichi weekly magazine that described the Tosei-kai as ‘over the hill’. The article concerned a new skirmish between the Tosei-kai and the Sumiyoshi-kai in Shinjuku, which was ignited when a TSK soldier was stabbed to death for kicking a Sumiyoshi car that had honked at him. The offending article quoted a police detective as saying that the TSK of the nineties was nothing compared to the much larger Sumiyoshi, which had just signed a ‘gangster’s constitution’, or peace treaty, with the three other big gangs of Japan, the Inagawa-kai, the Yamaguchi-gumi, and the Kyoto-based Aizukotetsu, to peacefully divide up territory around the four main islands. The author of the Mainichi piece added sarcastically that perhaps even the new Chinese gangs in the city were scarier than the TSK, which caused Tashiro to shave his head and launch his one-man assault on the nation’s third largest newspaper.

  Then, in March 1995, a high-ranking member of the Toa Yuai Gang, Kenji Jojima, was shot in the back four times in front of a Roppongi pachinko parlor by a man police identified as a member of a gang affiliated with the Sumiyoshi.

  It was just like old times.

  The year 1995 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war and the occasion inspired a wave of nostalgia in Tokyo for the past. For a time, in the mid-1990s, the popular Roppongi Crossing bookstore was filled with memorial tomes about Rikidozan. The respected publishing house Bungei Shunju produced and telemarketed a retrospective four-hour video package on the most important figures of the postwar era, devoting one complete tape to Rikidozan.

  ‘No one’, said the narrator in a glowing summation, ‘had ever had as great an impact on the Japanese in such a short time as the great Rikidozan.’

  (Not once in the entire sixty minutes was a reference made to Rikidozan’s Korean background. A study published that same year showed that roughly 80 percent of Korean youths living in Japan used Japanese names.)

  It was fitting perhaps that 1995 was also the year that an athlete from Japan finally appeared who could be termed Rikidozan’s equal. Hideo Nomo, pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers, became the first Japanese to star in the US major leagues. He won the Rookie of the Year award and led the National League in strikeouts (then followed that in 1966 by winning seventeen games and pitching a no-hitter).

  Nomo’s success ignited a wave of nationalistic pride the likes of which had not been seen since Riki’s heyday. Every game Nomo pitched was telecast nationwide twice in the same day on NHK. Huge Hi-Vision screens around Tokyo had replaced the gaito telebi of Riki’s era, but the crowds were just as rapt. During the All-Star Game break, some fans even camped out in tents to catch the big-screen early morning telecasts relayed back to Japan. One radio station broadcast every game Nomo pitched, but only those half-innings Nomo was out on the mound. The rest of the time, when Nomo was on the bench and his teammates were batting, normal programming was resumed. It was a display of single-mindedness matched only by the TV station that ran an eleven-hour special on Japan’s new national idol.

  In the years since his death, Rikidozan had also become a full-fledged North Korean hero and tool of the state. Celebrating in its own way the fiftieth anniversary of the end of Japanese rule, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea issued a Rikidozan ‘autobiography’ entitled I Am a Korean, which topped the charts in Pyonyang; an English version went on sale in the Pyongyang Airport departure lounge, alongside a popular liquor for foreign consumption, ‘Rikidozan Drink’.

  In 1995, Riki’s one-time ‘disciple’ Kanji ‘Antonio’ Inoki, who was now, improbably, a member of the Japanese Upper House, representing the ‘Sports-Peace Party’, visited Pyongyang on a public relations pilgrimage to participate in the festivities celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. At the behest of the Pyongyang government, Inoki traveled to Rikidozan’s boyhood home accompanied by Riki’s daughter.

  While in Pyongyang, Inoki took part in a highly touted East vs West wrestling exhibition. He propelled an outdoor audience of 100,000 North Koreans – supposed bitter enemies of Japan – into fits of confetti-scattering delirium when he handily dispatched an aging, pot-bellied, blond American wrestler.

  That too was just like old times.

  Aficionados of Roppongi history noted with interest the reopening on November 16, 1995, of the newly remodeled Nihon Kotsu Nicola’s, which had been closed for three years. The original plan had been to raze the building to make way for the construction of a new complex to rival Ark Hills – another grand jiageya plan from the bubble era. But somehow in the yakuza jusen recession that had not been possible. And so after being closed and standing silent and empty for three years, Nicola’s was renovated.

  It boasted a sparkling new entrance, a six-car parking lot, a sign proclaiming it as the oldest pizza restaurant in Japan – ‘in business since 1954 [sic]’, and advertisements assuring customers of a ‘bright, airy interior’.

  The main dining room would have made Zappetti’s widow proud; it was well lit and decorated with thin beige strips of chiffon suspended from the ceiling. The tablecloths were so white they almost hurt the eyes. On the second floor was a party room complete with karaoke equipment, for ‘group or corporate rental’. Outside in the parking lot were plastic round white picnic-style tables for dining al fresco – the latest Tokyo rage. The menu promised ‘light, sweet cuisine’, including a wide variety of different colorful mixed pizzas (olive oil on the side) and a diminutive thirty-dollar steak.

  It was impossible to miss the huge painting of a bulbous-nosed black-mustachioed Italian chef holding a tall stack of pizzas that adorned one whole side of the two-story building, accompanied by a huge encircled ‘R’ informing everyone that the logo was duly ‘registered’. It was also downright impossible to ignore the complete absence of foreign diners inside, a phenomenon perhaps caused by the fact that the pizza was nearly inedible to the Western palate – even the ones that weren’t topped with tuna and squid – or that a medium-sized pizza, a ‘Nicola’s Classico’ as it appeared on the menu, was three times the cost of a pizza in America and approximately one-third the size.

  The new Nicola’s proved so popular with Japanese businessmen in the area that the sushi bar down the street suffered a precipitous drop in business.

  Lamented the shop’s proprietor, ‘It’s hard to compete with foreigners in Roppongi.’

  Guide maps were handed out to all customers introducing them to the seven o
ther Nicola branches Nihon Kotsu was running, which, added to the Yokota and Chuo Rinkan branches, made for a total of ten Nicola’s restaurants in the Tokyo area.

  In 1994, a half-block from the former site of Nicola’s Roppongi Crossing branch on the main drag, a cavernous new pizza joint with street-side seating and 1960s pop decor opened for business. It offered a smorgasbord of brawny pizza, all-you-can-drink sangria, and a rack of comic books for diners to peruse at their leisure. A year later, on the second floor of Nicola’s former building, the Il Cardinale, specializing in Italian cuisine de la mare made its debut, while around the corner above the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, Gino’s seafood Italian opened its doors. Then near the southwest corner of the Crossing a young American named Brenden Murphy opened up a tiny second-floor pizzeria with flowered tablecloths and a giant pizza oven imported from Canada where he mixed five different kinds of flour to get a unique pizza crust. At Pizza-la, a new pizza chain in competition with Domino’s, it was possible to buy a bacon–lettuce–tomato pizza. S-barro’s, another new addition to the pantheon of Roppongi pizza houses, became an instant gathering spot for hungry night club hostesses working in the area. And finally, just past the Crossing to the north, appeared the Zia pizzeria, in front of which stood a sketch of the ‘proprietor’, a balding, mustachioed Italian man, drawn with hands out in a gesture of welcome. He looked just like Nick Zappetti.

  Acknowledgments

  My first real exposure to the Tokyo underworld came in 1969 when I was living in Higashi Nakano, just outside of Shinjuku, in the western part of the city. I had just graduated from Tokyo’s Sophia University and had gone to work in the editorial department of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Japan. Each evening on my way home to my tiny box-like apartment, I would stop at a neighborhood snack bar for a drink; there I made the acquaintance of a short, muscular, mean-looking young man with a crew cut and scarred eyebrows. His name was ‘Jiro’, and, as I discovered from the membership badge he wore underneath the lapel of his suede leather jacket, he belonged to the Sumiyoshi-Rengo kai, the huge Tokyo-based criminal syndicate.