Tokyo Underworld (17 page)

A loud, boastful Nicola’s customer named Dave, a big ex-GI who liked to preen, flex his muscles and talk tough, was removed from his stool at the bar one afternoon at gunpoint by the aforementioned TSK captain Matsubara and escorted outside into a waiting car. Nobody knows exactly what happened next, but several hours later, Dave returned, pale and shaken, to retrieve his coat. He was never seen in Roppongi again.

Then there was the retribution exacted from a French judoist named Maurice, a casual drinking acquaintance of both Zappetti and Machii, who had made the mistake of snubbing the Tosei-kai gang boss one night. On this particular occasion, Maurice had
walked into a Roppongi nightclub with the French ambassador, glanced at Machii and Zappetti sitting together in one corner, and without saying hello or even nodding, ushered his companion to a table on the other side of the room. Big foreign judoists were not very popular in Japan anyway, after a 6′7″, 250 pound blond Dutchman named Anton Geesink had captured the Tokyo Olympics gold medal in the open weight division, easily defeating Akio Kaminaga and thereby shattering the myth of Japanese invincibility at the sport – causing, in turn, grown men watching on street corner television to break down in tears. Big, stuck-up foreign judoists were even less liked. Thus, a few minutes after Maurice’s ill-advised entrance, the lights in the club were suddenly turned off and the Frenchman was escorted at gunpoint to a back hallway, where he was severely beaten.

When the lights came back on, Maurice reappeared, his face a bloody mess.

‘Machii,’ Nick had cried. ‘What the hell is going on? Why did they do that?’

‘Maurice
namaiki
[arrogant],’ was Machii’s reply, and he stuck his nose in the air to emphasize the point.

Zappetti was left with the task of explaining to Maurice what he had done wrong and why it was necessary for him to go and apologize, even though he was the one with the mashed-in face.

After Matsubara had come out on the wrong end of a brawl with an Australian reporter named Mike Sullivan and decided he wanted to kill him, Zappetti was forced to step in and broker a peace there, as well. Sullivan, who worked for a brief interlude at the
Stars and Stripes
during the 1960s, had been sitting in Tom’s late one night with a Japanese girl nicknamed ‘Crazy Emi’ (she once appeared at Tom’s clad only in a fur coat and her birthday suit, which she proceeded to reveal to the entire bar and
Stripes
reporter Corky Alexander). In walked Matsubara, not entirely sober and looking for trouble. He approached Sullivan’s party and invited Crazy Emi to dance. When she refused, he became abusive. He
said a few choice words about arrogant
Ameko
, although Sullivan was from Down Under, and the two began exchanging punches, knocking over tables and chairs, snarling and shouting insults at one another – Matsubara yelling, ‘
Kono yaro
’ (‘You SOB’), and Sullivan repeatedly shouting, ‘
Saru no chimpira
’ (‘You punk gangster ape’). The brawl lasted fifteen minutes. As befitting a high-ranking captain in the TSK, the shorter Matsubara struggled mightily to hold his own, but in the end he took a serious beating – incurring a huge gash in his scalp which sent blood streaming down his forehead into his eyes. The police arrived to restore order, but the fight was far from over, as Sullivan would discover.

That a TSK captain had lost a fight was bad enough. That he had lost to a big white
gaijin
right in front of the
gaijin
’s Japanese girlfriend only made the humiliation worse. The word went out that Sullivan’s days were numbered. And according to Zappetti, Sullivan then turned to him for help.

‘You’re the Mafia boss of Tokyo,’ the Australian reportedly said. ‘Can’t you do anything?’

Zappetti held a meeting with Machii and Matsubara. Finally, a deal was struck in which Sullivan’s life would be spared. Sullivan would make a token gift of cash and PX whisky as tribute (with Alexander’s help). And there would have to be one more meeting with Sullivan at Tom’s, where Sullivan would be expected to apologize.

On the appointed night, Sullivan duly made his appearance before a group of men waiting for him in the downstairs area.

As one of the men extended his hand in a feigned peace offering, two others suddenly pounced and held his arms. A man behind Sullivan picked up a chair and crashed it over Sullivan’s head, making a large gash in his scalp. A fourth man hit him in the face, breaking his nose.

Thus was Sullivan’s ‘apology’ accepted.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had made Zappetti number one on their ‘
Gaijin
Enemies List’, to use their term, but they could never catch him at anything. Police officers had arrested him several times throughout the 1960s on suspicion of black marketeering. Raids on his palatial home produced, on different occasions, 30-30 shotguns, freezers, cases of brandy, and other booty. But Zappetti was always able to come up with documents to show that the goods in question belonged to someone else, not him, and the police had to release him.

The police knew that Zappetti frequently traveled to New York, where he always paid his respects to the neighborhood dons – which caught the attention of local authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and caused them in turn to send queries to the Tokyo police about Mafia activities in Japan. After Zappetti and a cousin from New York had been surveilled by an FBI stakeout team in Fort Lauderdale in the company of a group of anti-Castroite Cubans in the market for guns, the Bureau even dispatched an agent to Tokyo to investigate and peruse Zappetti’s considerable MPD file in some detail. (Under questioning, Zappetti insisted, somewhat flippantly, that he and the Cubans had not been talking about ‘pieces’, as had initially been reported by the Bureau, but ‘pizzas’.)

On top of all that was the strong suspicion that in 1969 Zappetti had somehow been involved in the disappearance of a Portugese-Japanese businessman from Macao who had bilked him out of some money, but again, there was not enough evidence to file charges. The seeming ease with which Zappetti avoided prosecution was also further evidence to the Tokyo police that the American was indeed a Mafia boss. And they continued to believe it for years after.

Zappetti did nothing to discourage that belief. In fact, he had let it be known on the sly that he had ordered the killing of the missing Macaon – to show his power and to demonstrate that no one could cross him. He said that he had had the businessman
tracked down in Manila, and through a contact at the Philippine Embassy had hired a gunman to do the shooting. It only cost him sixty dollars, he bragged in hushed tones, plus a finder’s fee. (The victim’s brother had even come to Zappetti and begged him not to seek further retribution from anyone else in the family.)

There was no proof that any of this was true. And close friends of Zappetti suspected that someone else had been responsible for the deed and that Zappetti had made his involvement up just to enhance his image, just as he encouraged people to believe he was a ‘made guy’, even though he wasn’t. (Japan seemed to bring out that trait in more than a few foreigners.)

Zappetti confessed to a friend that being known as the Mafia Boss of Tokyo was the highest honor a man like himself could aspire to. That the center of the new Tokyo should have provided fertile soil for his peculiar brand of the American dream says as much about the postwar relationship between the two countries as any economic or political history written on the subject.

Not every foreign businessman had special access to the Tokyo underground economy. There were approximately 2,600 members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, and most of them could be heard grumbling in their beer about how hard it was to grab, legitimately, even a tiny share of the booming Japanese market. There were all sorts of roadblocks – tariffs, restrictions, bureaucratic regulations (one needed, for example, twenty-four separate licenses to sell meat or fish and had to pass a national examination just to open a laundry business) – and a complex nationwide distribution system in which products had to move through a series of warehouses, decreasing in size from large to medium to small and then smaller, before they reached the consumer, which dramatically increased the final sales price. With some 400,000 wholesalers and 2,400,000 retailers intertwined in a lattice of long-standing professional and social relationships, it was
easy for the foreign product to get lost in the shuffle. Commercial lawyer Tom Blakemore knew of a case where one Japanese trading company sold two competing products – one Japanese and one US – without revealing that fact to the American client with whom it had an exclusivity contract. It wasn’t the only instance of a distributor in Japan handling competing products.

Coca-Cola had succeeded in the country only by setting up its own dealerships in order to circumvent the distribution system. The US monolith joined forces with the powerful regional bottlers in Japan – the Daimyo bottlers, as they were known – offering a healthy percentage of sales to their distribution outlets as well as classy new shop signs. ‘We’ll put your name on top of the sign,’ they said, ‘but underneath it, there has got to be “Coca-Cola”.’ They also set up a nationwide chain of their own
talking
vending machines, introduced a sweeter-tasting formula designed to suit the Japanese palate, and conducted a massive ongoing marketing campaign, which turned
Koku
into a household word. But few companies had Coke’s unlimited resources.

One reason Americans found themselves in such a disadvantageous situation was the largely unspoken Cold War arrangement the United States had made with Japan in the post-occupation era, whereby Japan would become the United States’s main anti-Communist ally in Asia and in return Japan would get unconditional access to America’s rich markets, along with the privilege of keeping her industries at home protected from foreign competition. To American businesses that wanted access to Japan, the US State Department had essentially said, ‘Tough luck. Don’t interfere with Japan’s economic growth. Let them have their 100 percent tariffs on imports and sell them technology instead. We need a strong Japan for security reasons.’

Because of this arrangement, IBM had been obliged to license its patents to competing Japanese firms at the very low royalty of 5 percent in order to get permission to manufacture in Japan; not surprisingly, Fujitsu and NEC were eventually able to surpass Big Blue in the computer sales market.

Imaginative attempts to bypass this system often backfired, such as the American who parallel-imported whiskey via Hong Kong and was thrown in a Tokyo jail for his efforts. So did the man parallel-exporting TransAm sports cars to Japan, selling them at half the going sales price there. The exclusive TransAm agent in Tokyo complained to Pontiac, who in turn notified the Stateside dealer in question not to sell to the unauthorized Americans anymore.

Foreign companies also had to battle the perception among the masses that their presence was somehow harmful to Japanese society, that American executives were, in general, up to no good, an attitude reflected in the 1969 B-movie
Blood Toast
, which portrayed the American businessmen as the modern-day equivalent of the invading Occupation forces.
Blood Toast
starred retired Shibuya gangster Noboru Ando, a one-time mortal enemy of the Tosei-kai, whose face still bore the scars from the fifty-three-stitch knife wound he had received at the hands of a TSK foot soldier in the Ginza. After serving a six-year prison term, Ando had launched a film career in 1965, becoming known as the ‘George Raft of Japan’. In
Toast
’s opening scene, set in the immediate postwar era, a frail shoeshine boy in the streets of Tokyo asks a passing US soldier for some gum. The GI, (played by a blond German with a thick English accent) shouts an insult – ‘You stupid little idiot.’ The boy is infuriated. He chases the soldier and bites his hand, whereupon the GI, who is built like an Olympic weight lifter, knocks the boy to the ground. He climbs astride him, removes his gum from his mouth and begins to force the boy’s jaws open. ‘You want chewing gum?’ he snarls. ‘I’ll give you chewing gum.’

As he stuffs the wad of Doublemint down the boy’s throat, the pint-sized Ando comes along to save the day. He pulls the boy’s tormentor off and delivers several sharp punches to the face. The sergeant collapses in a heap. Later, Ando takes the grateful boy for a walk in the country; they sit by a river and the boy starts singing, in English, ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ Ando angrily rebukes him; he orders the boy to sing a Japanese song instead, and the boy dutifully complies.

In the second reel, set over twenty years later, a greasy-looking, shifty-eyed American businessman visits Tokyo and attempts to buy controlling interest in the stock of a company owned by one of Ando’s friends. The friend turns to Ando for help. Ando pays a surprise visit to the businessman’s room, where the unscrupulous American is busy sexually molesting a hotel masseuse. Ando pulls out his gun and comes to the rescue once more.