Tokyo Underworld (10 page)

Zappetti set about redecorating. He painted the interior completely black so the cracks in the cheaply constructed wall would not show. He squeezed in eight booths with tables covered by red-and-white checkered cloths and lit only by Chianti bottles with burning candles stuck in them. He set up a bar on one side and on the other a Wurlitzer jukebox loaded with all the latest hits, like ‘Too Young’, ‘Written on the Wind’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. It was the quintessential East Village grotto.

He hired a young Japanese lady from a Tokyo business school to be his cashier, recruited a Japanese waiter from a coffee shop on the Ginza, and ensconced himself in the tiny kitchen to do the cooking, turning out pizzas, lasagna, spaghetti, and big thick steaks served with glasses of wine and large drafts of beer. He also did the dishwashing, the accounting and the shopping. After closing, he would clean up and move two tables together for a makeshift bed. In the morning, he would go to the nearby public bath for 13 yen, enduring the stares of fellow Japanese bathers who hardly ever saw a naked white foreigner.

In the beginning, he was forced to pay his rent each day in advance before the Chinese tailor would give him the key to the front door. But he grossed 75,000 yen his first month and doubled that the next. Nicola’s, as he called his restaurant, quickly became a second home for
Stars and Stripes
personnel, after a famous
Stripes
entertainment columnist named Al Ricketts announced in print it served the best meal in town, and it also became a favorite gathering spot of the diplomatic crowd.

In short order, it was time to expand. Using his restaurant as collateral, Zappetti secured a bank loan to buy the building from Wu. But when Zappetti tried to give him the money, Wu promptly increased his price from the original 40,000 yen a
tsubo
to 80,000 yen.

‘You promise pizza and suits, remember?’ said the tailor. ‘You going to double my business, remember? Well, not one American customer came up to second floor.’

‘Really?’ replied Zappetti, feigning surprise. ‘Well, I can’t help it if Americans prefer to shop in the PX.’

‘You liar,’ said Wu. ‘Big liar. I want 80,000 yen for one
tsubo
.’

Zappetti had to pony up the extra money, but soon he owned the building and had doubled
his
business.

By the end of the decade, Nicola’s was, improbably, the talk of the town. Japan’s economy was gathering a full head of steam, and with more and more Tokyoites eating out, the strange new Italian restaurant in Roppongi was where they often chose to go, attracted by its bizarre ambience and culinary peculiarities. Few Japanese had ever eaten dinner in such a dimly lit place or drunk draft beer with a meal, and the American-style pizza Nicola’s served was such a totally new experience that some customers could be seen wrapping slices in paper napkins to take home. The sight of some stiffly conventional corporate department head depositing a wedge of pizza in his briefcase was strange enough to merit the restaurant mention in the press, and as the word spread, a line of illegally parked automobiles began to form outside, eventually curling around the block.

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.

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.