Tokyo Underworld (2 page)

At war’s end, millions of demobilized soldiers, war widows and other displaced persons began to make their way back into the
cities and, as virtually all moral and government restraints subsequently collapsed, the mob strengthened its grip on the municipal economy. Open-air marts sprang into operation at every commuter line train station almost before the arriving Americans had a chance to unpack their duffel bags. The largest were at the major hubs on the Yamate Line that circled the city – Ueno, Tokyo, Shimbashi, Shibuya and Shinjuku. Within weeks, there would be an astonishing 45,000 stalls in the city, many of them under the control of the leathery-faced
Ozu-gumi
boss Kinosuke Ozu, and they provided jobs for half a million people.

The outdoor black markets were, incidentally, Japan’s first experiment in democracy. Japanese society had for hundreds of years been divided into castes, socially and legally. The nobility and landed aristocracy were at the top; below them, the samurai warriors, farmers, townsmen, and
eta
(outcasts), in descending order. Status was rigidly fixed and every Japanese knew his proper rank and position in the community at large.

Centuries of feudal serfdom and national isolation under the Tokugawa Shogunate were followed by the domineering rule of military, bureaucratic and financial cliques, starting in 1868 with the Meiji Revolution, which restored the emperor to the throne. In all, it had served to create a highly restrictive society where the arrogance of superiors was as ingrained as their subordinates’ fawning obeisance.

In the Ozu and other markets, however, social rank no longer mattered. No questions were asked of applicants about their status, family origin, educational background or nationality. Everyone was welcome, from high-ranking military officers to lowly privates, landed nobles to tenant farmers, college professors to unemployed gamblers. They all started out equally, spreading a mat on the street or setting up shop on top of a box to sell their goods. They all wore the same ragged clothes, lived in similar jury-rigged barracks of corrugated tin, and bathed out of the same oil drums. As journalist Kenji Ino later wrote, ‘For a feudal country like Japan
which had a long history of class and ethnic discrimination, this was indeed an unprecedented event.’

The American Occupation officially began on September 2 with the signing of surrender documents aboard the USS
Missouri
in Yokohama Harbor. Its General Headquarters (GHQ) was located in the fortress-like Dai-Ichi building facing the Imperial Palace grounds and operated under the authority of the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP), run by the dictatorial General Douglas MacArthur, who hardly ever consulted the Allies on anything he did. Although the occupiers were ostensibly in control (behind a shadow government of veteran Japanese bureaucrats), the black market bosses continued to operate as before. The Tokyo municipal authorities quietly continued to let them function as official tax collectors, allowing them to keep half the proceeds as payment. In addition, the mob ran the fire departments, the street-cleaning services, and all public transportation on behalf of the metropolitan government. Since the gangs also controlled the construction crews, the stevedore unions and the operators of the newly emerging bars and noodle shops being slapped together with two-by-fours, they were, in effect, running the city.

GHQ had been assigned the massive and difficult task of democratizing a militaristic Japan – to write a new war-renouncing constitution, to abolish the Imperial Military Headquarters, to arrest war criminals, and to lift restrictions on political, religious, and civil freedoms. However, it was in other areas where the Americans would have a more immediate impact – like the underground economy.

MacArthur had made it clear he would tolerate no cruelty, no barbarism, no individual acts of revenge; thus the 600,000 Americans in the initial Occupation force were made up by design not of combat-hardened soldiers who had fought in the jungles of the Pacific and were therefore burning with hatred for the Japanese but of mostly fresh-faced teenagers who had seen little battlefield
action and who viewed occupying Japan as their first big adventure in life. These youthful occupiers proved to be prodigious suppliers of heavily rationed commodities like cigarettes, sugar, salt, chocolate, soap, rubber and beer, not to mention the more easily obtained C-rations and powdered milk. According to one informal survey, some 90 percent of the residents at the ‘Nomura Hotel’, a former office building in Shimbashi housing several hundred Americans in ‘rooms’ partitioned by blankets, were out daily in their off-duty hours dealing liquor and other items from the hotel military exchange. The statistic was considered typical of the Occupation as a whole.

The primary distribution system for American plenty to make its way to the black market gangs comprised thousands of young ladies who had been readied by a Japanese governmental group called the Recreation and Amusement Association to sleep with the Americans. The RAA had been established immediately after the cessation of fighting to sate the much anticipated and much-dreaded Yankee libido while sparing the virginal flower of young Japanese femalehood (most of whose ranks had, in any event, been dispatched into hiding).

The association had called upon operators of bombed-out clubs, bars, geisha and quasi-geisha establishments, as well as outright houses of prostitution, to mobilize all their available female talent in the cause of patriotism. And mobilize they did, with remarkable speed and efficiency.

An advance party of fifty men from the Marine Air Group 44, dispatched from Okinawa in early September to help secure the local air base at Omura in North Kyushu, was welcomed by a delegation of kimonoed women who invited them to move into an off-base ‘geisha house’. The men spent the next few weeks there drinking beer, eating hibachi-grilled fish and cavorting with the young ladies in residence – obligingly reimbursing their hostesses from a footlocker full of confiscated yen. (When a naval patrol happened by in late September to find some of the men lying about
in the sun on a nearby beach, bearded and wearing cut-off fatigues, the officer in charge initially thought he had stumbled on a prisoner-of-war camp.) The first US Army ground reconnaissance patrol to enter Tokyo, on September 2, was intercepted by an RAA truck filled with prostitutes, bedecked in their best finery; a spokesman explained that the women were ‘volunteers’ to satisfy the lust of the Occupation forces. By October, the RAA had opened what may have been the largest brothel of its type in the world: a long open-bay barracks divided into cubicles by sheets hanging from the ceiling and with futons on the floor serving as beds. Nicknamed the International Palace and located in Funabashi in Eastern Tokyo, it processed hundreds of priapic GIs a day. It was an assembly-line operation so smooth that a soldier would leave his shoes at one end when he came in and pick them up, cleaned and shined, at the other end when he left.

There was also a half-mile strip of real estate stretching west from the Imperial Palace moat abutting the GHQ building to the Nomura Hotel, which quickly became known as Hooker Alley, in tribute to the several hundred young damsels patrolling the area. For a pack of Old Golds, the ladies would willingly cater to patrons in jeeps, in building stairwells, or in the cheerless Quonset hut complex nearby where lower-ranking men stayed – not really caring who watched. The moat around the Imperial Palace was so clogged with used condoms it had to be cleaned out once a week with a big wire scoop.

As winter set in, there were many deaths from exposure and starvation. Groups of people huddled around bonfires, covering themselves with burlap rags, shivering through the night, much too cold to sleep. Gangs of vagrants roamed through the back alleys of buildings where Americans stayed, rummaging through the trash and garbage for food. Yet thousands of well-coiffed ‘comfort girls’ could be found at special rec centers ready to play billiards and cards with servicemen and otherwise entertain them. Several cabarets, including one six stories high, had opened up in the
Ginza. In February 1946, the Mimatsu Cabaret started business next to the Ginza Mitsukoshi Department Store. All of these enterprises featured floor shows and Japanese dance bands that played Western music.

As conqueror and conqueree got to know each other better, illicit commerce grew in scope and dimension. A band of enlisted men at the Yokosuka naval base began making midnight speedboat runs across Tokyo Bay carrying loads of PX contraband to gangs on the far shore of Chiba. An NCO club manager in Sugamo took to selling sugar in hundred-pound lots to the Ozu market. A civilian American trader with the Tokyo Metals Association was stunned when an Army lieutenant came to see him, first soliciting advice on how to sell several tons of manganese he had acquired and then asking, ‘Do you know where I can find a buyer for a shipment of mattresses? That’s the next item on my list.’

By mid-1946, members of the armed forces had remitted back to America approximately $8 million a month, a sum exceeding the entire military monthly payroll. Army finance officers attributed this phenomenon directly to profit from black marketeering, and although SCAP subsequently declared it illegal to reconvert yen to dollars, the dealing continued unabated anyway, as did other forms of corruption.

By 1947, the New York
Herald Tribune
and
New York Times
were publishing accounts of American officials misusing their positions to grow rich – for example, by extorting stock and real estate from Japanese businessmen in exchange for their ‘cooperation’. The International News Service was describing illicit links between the 8th Army Procurement Office (which controlled reconstruction expenditures) and a triumvirate of Japanese politicians, subcontractors, and gangs, while the Associated Press, for its part, was reporting on an urbane prewar
bakuto
boss named Akira Ando who had won several lucrative GHQ transportation contracts for his fleet of taxis, trucks and private cars by bribing GHQ officials. Ando, who had grown rich during the war doing construction for
the Tojo government, openly bragged that one high-ranking general was his protector. He had a black book that reportedly contained the names of hundreds of Occupation officers he had befriended whom he could frequently be seen entertaining at one of the several Ginza nightclubs and Asakusa bordellos he owned. To AP correspondent Mark Gayn, Ando’s activities were part of a well-organized and well-financed campaign to corrupt the US Army. But, as many cynical observers liked to point out, it was not a very difficult campaign to wage successfully.

In later years, Japanese gangsters liked to boast that
they
were the ones who, with their postwar markets, had saved Japan from starvation. However, while it may be true that the open-air stalls did help get the economy going again to some degree and feed some of the hungry masses (government rationing being so inadequate that a Tokyo District Court judge who refused to eat anything purchased illegally died of malnutrition), the men who ran them were anything but altruistic. They charged criminally high prices for their wares – the equivalent of a day’s wages, say, for a stale bun or a handful of surplus cornmeal originally donated by the US State Department – and also demanded outrageous fees from those who participated in their wondrous democratic experiment. To operate in the Ozu market, for instance, a seller had to pay a tribute of half of his daily profits, among other charges. Ozu himself personally ripped down the stalls of anyone who objected to such extortion, which may be why an Occupation authority would later term him the ‘worst criminal in Japan’.

It was perhaps understandable that a self-descriptive word that
bakuto
used for a losing hand at cards,
ya-ku-za
(8-9-3), a term occasionally used to refer to Japanese mobsters in general – alluding to what some believed to be the uselessness of gang members to proper society – would gain currency as the years passed. (So would
gokudo
, meaning ‘scoundrel, villain, rogue’.)

Attempts by honest officials in the GHQ to control crime and corruption during the Occupation were not overly successful. A four-year campaign to crack down on lawbreakers was launched in late 1947 when Colonel Charles Kades, sub-head of the GHQ Government Section, formally declared war on what he called Japan’s ‘Underground Government’. In a much heralded press conference, he announced that the real rulers of Japan were not the duly elected representatives of the people, as the GHQ had intended, but the ‘bosses, hoodlums, and racketeers who were in league with the political fixers, the ex-militarists and the industrialists, as well as the legal authorities from the judges and police chiefs on down’. This, of course, was something most Japanese already knew.

Several police raids ensued, in which fully half of the known 50,000 underworld figures in the country were arrested. However, only 2 percent of them ever wound up doing any time. The rest were released, benefiting from the unwillingness of witnesses to testify, missing evidence, and pressure on the courts from corrupt politicians, including several dozen Diet members who would later admit to having taken illegal donations during the first Occupation-sponsored parliamentary elections in 1946. Black market godfather Ozu was among those tried and convicted, but the police, the public prosecutor and other judicial officials involved in his case certified that he was too sick to be jailed. Attesting to his ‘high moral character’, they recommended release instead, and much to the chagrin of Kades’ crime fighters, Ozu walked out of jail a free man. That the intelligence wing of the GHQ was hiring Japanese gangsters at the very same time to fight Communist insurgents and break labor strikes did not further the overall effort to serve justice.