Confessions of a Yakuza (13 page)

The welcoming committee, outside Sugamo jail

The first thing I did after that was go to the boss’s home in Asakusa and pay my respects to him properly.

“I’m glad you came through all right,” he said. “Good work.”

Boss Momose looked in, too. “I was worried,” he said, looking pleased with himself, “seeing I’d recommended you to the Dewaya myself. But it’s turned out OK.”

Muramatsu added his formal thanks, then handed me an envelope with more than two hundred yen in it. “This is what you made while you were on the job,” he said.

You might wonder what “on the job” meant, but in our world, you see, serving time in jail is considered a kind of work. So they make a point of putting your money by for you while you’re inside, and handing it over when you get out.

After that, on a different day, there was a “coming-out party” for me. I was obviously pretty junior in rank, so they could hardly have had it in too classy a restaurant, but it was on the second floor of a sushi shop right by the Asakusa temple; and, as the main guest, they put me at the top of the table close to the boss, with the other heads of the gang on our right and left. There were some quite high-up members sitting down there near the bottom of the table, which made me feel uncomfortable. And the food! I mean, one of the dishes laid out for me was a great sea bream a good foot long, on a fancy plate.

Before we dug in, I went up to the boss, bowed down with my forehead on the tatami, and “reported for duty,” so to speak. Then I did the same thing with each of the older men in turn, who thanked me again. After a while, the boss called me over.

“You’ve had a rough time,” he said, “so take it easy for a while—don’t try to do too much. You’ve got to think of your health. Why don’t you go to a hot spring or somewhere and rest up for a bit?”

He took a big paper packet out of the front of his kimono.

“They all chipped in to give you this present. And here’s a list of people who contributed; make sure you take care of it.

“Listen,” he went on. “You’re going to find yourself relying on these people one way or another all your life from now on. Mind you don’t forget your obligations, because it would let
me
down if you didn’t....”

In our line of business, this sense of obligation to the people you were connected with was incredibly strong, I’m not exaggerating. I took the list of names, and always kept it by me from then on. As for the money I got from the boss, though, I’m afraid it all went on gambling and visits to the red-light district long before I got around to going to any hot spring.

So I enjoyed myself for a while; but there’s an end to all good things, they say, and one day without warning I got a letter that gave me a nasty shock. Believe it or not, it was from my father’s place in Utsunomiya.

When I opened it I got another shock: it said a notice had come for me to go and have an army physical, and I was to go home immediately. I’d assumed the old man had washed his hands of me long ago, so it put me on the spot, having a letter suddenly turn up like that. Even so, I could hardly ignore it, so I went and talked to the boss. The boss took a hard look at me.

“I see...,” he said, taking things in his stride. “You
look
grown-up too—I’d assumed you were about twenty-five or -six. Thought you were past the call-up age.”

“What should I do about it, then?” I said.

“There’s only one thing you can do,” he answered. “Go straight home and put your father’s mind at rest. You’re lucky to have both your parents alive. The best thing would be for you to follow in the family business. After all, you don’t
have
to be a gambler, do you? So get off home and do your duty by your family!”

And without any more ado he arranged a farewell party for me. So I said goodbye to the older men and went back to Utsunomiya.

I found that both my grandparents had died some while back. My mother cried when she saw me.

They did the physical at the town hall. There was quite a crowd of other guys there taking it too, but what surprised me was that only three out of all the men examined in the Utsunomiya district were given a grade A, myself included. That would never have happened later, as the Pacific War got closer. You see, it was 1926 when I went for my checkup, at a time when people were still feeling fed up with war. The First World War had started in 1914 and gone on for four years, and everybody felt tired of fighting and everything to do with it. There’d been a lot of disarmament conferences, and the trend was for big cuts in battleships and weapons and troops.

My father felt a bit better about things when he heard his son was one of the few people in all Utsunomiya to make the A grade. Some of the neighbors actually sent around a box of “red rice” to congratulate the family like they used to. That was as far as the good things went, though; not two weeks after I’d passed the test, along came my call-up papers. I was to report for duty with the 75th Infantry Regiment on such-and-such a day in December. The 75th was one of the units policing the northern part of Korea, so things didn’t look too promising.

There was no Manchukuo yet in those days, which meant that Sakhalien and northern Korea were as out-of-the-way as you could get in Japan. Korea of course had been annexed about twenty years earlier and was Japanese territory.

Anyway, that was the place I was supposed to go and guard. The time for me to leave wasn’t far off when an invitation came from the Veterans’ Association—which meant, mostly, retired army officers living in the Utsunomiya area—saying they were holding a send-off party for us and would I be kind enough to attend. And, sure enough, they put on quite a show, with a crowd of old men in beards and uniforms with lots of decorations dangling on their chests, all of them there specially for us. Seemed we were to go in a bunch to visit the local shrine. A lot of ordinary townsfolk came along with us, and what with the banners they carried and the rising sun flags, you’d almost have thought it was some big festival. Anyway, off we went in fine style to pray at the shrine in the center of town, like we were
heroes
or something....

Leaving for service overseas

When we actually left to join up—now, that was a real send-off. The whole station was crammed with people. We weren’t wearing uniforms, though, but kimonos: all three of us in cheap everyday kimonos with capes over them and wooden clogs on our feet. We didn’t have any belongings with us—no cases, no bags, nothing but a bit of cash and a cotton towel tucked away in the front of our kimonos. The army had told us they’d supply us with everything we needed when we got there, so we set off in the clothes we stood up in.

We got to Osaka sometime after noon the next day, and the day after that left harbor in a six-thousand-ton freighter bound for Korea. There were hundreds—maybe thousands—of conscripts on that boat. Meals consisted of riceballs and pickles, that was all. A temporary john had been set up on deck; the other ones below decks couldn’t keep up with the demand, so they built this big boarded affair up top. You had your crap, and it slid off straight down into the deep blue sea....

We arrived in Korea, and some of the new recruits left the ship at Wonsan. The ship couldn’t be brought alongside the cliffs there, so the troops went ashore by lighter. The rest of us stayed on board and went on to a place called Unggi, in what’s North Korea nowadays. It was the harbor closest to the Soviet Union, with Vladivostock, the biggest Soviet naval base in the Far East, not so far away. It was a fishing port, a desolate kind of place, population three thousand at the most, I’d say. I could only see a few people dotted about here and there. The wind off the sea was bitterly cold—it was December, after all. There must have been about a thousand of us who’d come on this far.

Well, they got us all neatly lined up, and an officer strutted out like a toy soldier to give us a pep talk.

“This here is the northernmost outpost of the Japanese Empire,” he said. “You men, as soldiers, have been entrusted with the great responsibility of guarding one of the nation’s frontiers. I want you all to bear this in mind, and carry out your duties to the very best of your ability....” And so on, lots more of the same stuff, his moustache bristling all the time.

None of us recruits had been abroad before of course, so we were completely lost. We just knew we’d been brought to a pretty godawful dump, and we felt jittery, though we tried not to show it. On top of it all, it was hellish cold.

The speechifying went on and on, and people were beginning to mutter that they’d freeze to death if they were kept standing there much longer, but it came to an end at last, and everyone was issued with special overcoats against the cold—great loose-fitting things made of fur, cut big so you could put all kinds of things on underneath without making them tight. They were really warm, and everybody sort of came to life again and cheered up.

We were also given fur hats. I think they were made of dog fur, anyway they were all stiff, and they covered you up leaving just your face peering out. We looked at each other when we’d put them on, and laughed and fooled around like a bunch of kids. But then a train arrived, and we were ordered on board.

I say train, but it was more like a toy railway, huffing and puffing along through the hills with smoke pouring from a tall smokestack. Wherever you looked there were mountains—bleak-looking mountains, with the rock all bare. They went rolling on, those bare mountainsides, up and down, up and down forever, with nothing but the odd shrub growing here and there. The grass was flattened down all over. There’d be mountains and a valley, more mountains and another valley, getting gradually higher all the time. Not a house to be seen. We went on through this for hours. “God, what a place,” we sat there saying to each other in low voices. “You wouldn’t even catch bandits living in a hole like this!”

Eventually, the transport officer came around again and said, “We’ll soon be arriving in Komusan. But you lot are going on further, so make sure you don’t get off the train.”

It was getting dark outside. Komusan was a miserable spot, enough to send chills up and down your spine. The recruits who’d got off there were each handed a rifle and ammunition. Then they all formed up again, an order was given, and they marched off the platform and out into the dark.

Being raw recruits, of course, they didn’t actually have any idea how to fire a gun. Only a few days before, they’d been farmboys or shop assistants, and this was the first time they’d so much as laid hands on a rifle. But off they marched, these troops in their baggy coats over their kimonos, with their ammunition bound around their waists, and rifles on their shoulders. A long line of them, straggling on, then disappearing into the darkness....

We started off again, but it was night now and you couldn’t see anything. There was just the sound of the train—clickety-clack, clickety-clack. The seats were wooden, and the backs too, so there was no question of sleeping. Right there in the middle of the coach a stove was going, glowing red-hot. In those days, any amount of coal was to be had in the mountains in the north of Korea, so they weren’t mean with it. A soldier was shoveling the stuff up and stoking the fire, making a steady clanging noise.

I was tired out and kept trying to get some sleep, but I was too keyed up, and the seat hurt my butt, so I stayed half-awake, half-asleep all night. The faces of the soldiers sleeping around me looked like children’s. But then, all of a sudden, everyone was woken up by the NCO yelling. His voice sounded quite different this time; it was as though a dog had turned into a wolf overnight.