Tokyo Underworld (26 page)

The TSK slide into oblivion had received an additional, if unneeded, kick when a US congressional investigation team visited Tokyo to probe suspicions that a wealthy Washington-based lobbyist named Park Tong Sun, at the center of an influence-peddling scandal known as ‘Koreagate’, had entertained American lawmakers at TSK nightclubs. (Soon after that, a Socialist member of the House of Councilors would charge that girls working for the TSK had been trained by the KCIA in political operations and, intentionally or otherwise, had given VD to at least one leading LDP figure.)

‘Ginza Machii’ himself had slid into a kind of Howard Hughes-like existence, holed up daily in his penthouse and refusing contact with the outside world. It was said that he feared being killed – especially after a story appeared in the
Weekly Yomiuri
magazine about a CIA plot to assassinate Yoshio Kodama. In fact, in March 1976, Kodama had miraculously survived a kamikaze attack in which a deranged rightist had crashed his Cessna into a deserted second-floor section of Kodama’s huge home. Cynical Japanese journalists said it served Machii and Kodama right for ever getting in bed with the Americans in the first place.

However, Zappetti had other things on his mind besides the shifting power structure in the Roppongi underworld, which was in the process of being taken over by the Sumiyoshi.

He was about to stretch the concept of
tatemae
and
honne
to new boundaries by applying for (and receiving) Japanese citizenship – something most people thought he had no chance of ever achieving. The Japanese Nationality Law was first and foremost based on bloodline, and it was generally acknowledged to be extremely difficult for a Caucasian foreigner to be naturalized. Moreover, under the criteria suggested by the Ministry of Justice, one also had to be able to read the Japanese language, to be of ‘upright conduct’ (which meant, of course, no criminal record),
and meet a number of other requirements, including making a loyalty pledge to the Japanese government. Final approval or disapproval of an application for Japanese citizenship and the length of time it took for the decision to be made was entirely at the ‘discretion’ of the justice minister, who would not automatically grant such requests, especially where Caucasians were involved. The wait could take years or even a lifetime – even for someone without Zappetti’s obvious handicaps.

There were deep historical reasons for Japan’s general ambivalence toward Westerners. Japan had only opened up her doors to the world in 1853, after centuries of feudal isolation, and although the Japanese were eager to modernize and to catch up with the more industrialized countries of the West, they were at the same time leery of too much Western influence. The Japanese philosophy was encapsulated in an oft-repeated slogan:
Wakon-Yosai
(Japanese Spirit, Western Skill) which essentially meant, ‘Give us your technology, but don’t disrupt our national spirit of
wa
.’ (Edo-era scholar Seishisai Aizawa wrote: ‘Barbarians are, after all, barbarians. It is only natural that they have their hearts set on transforming our civilization to barbarism.’) Meiji-era technocrats, imported from North America and Europe to help modernize Japan, were forbidden to proselytize or even socialize with the populace, under penalty of deportation and being forced to pay their own passage home. Remnants of such contradictory attitudes could still be found in modern-day ‘democratized’ Japan, where there were more private English conversation schools per square kilometer than anywhere else in the world. Elvis Presley, James Dean and the Beatles were icons, but where prosperity and the trappings of Western culture did little to change the insular attitudes toward the
gaijin
themselves. Foreigners who spoke Japanese
too
well were often regarded with a jaundiced eye.

Zappetti’s unlikely – and to some observers, galling – request for entry into such an exclusive club was for him nothing more than a necessary, if troublesome, business tactic, one prompted by yet
another court battle he had entered into. Awaiting a verdict in the interminable litigation with Nihon Kotsu, he became embroiled in a dispute with his ex-general manager, a man named Fujita, which had started when the latter approached retirement age and asked for his
taishokukin
, the customary lump-sum retirement bonus paid out by Japanese companies. An astonished Zappetti had angrily rebuffed the request.

‘What the hell do you mean,
taishokukin
?’ he had said. ‘I paid you a good salary, didn’t I? That’s enough. Americans don’t pay a retirement bonus.’

That turned out to be an irreparable mistake. Now Zappetti was not without his generous side. He once gave an ailing, alcoholic American writer who was broke and down on his luck a plane ticket to Hawaii and several thousand dollars’ worth of pocket money with which to get his life back in order. He paid the medical bills for an old friend from the black market days who was suffering from a bad heart. And, over the years in Roppongi, it was known that if a man needed a loan of money and a free hot meal he could always get one at his place – for Zappetti remembered all too well what life had been like back in his post-Tokyo jail, Turkish-bath days. By the time the 1980s had rolled around, he calculated that he had lent friends and employees a total of over a million dollars, money he never expected to see again. His neighbor, Dr Eugene Aksenoff, termed Nick a ‘soft touch for any bum or con artist with a hard luck story’.

Moreover, as an American boss employing Japanese workers, he had other virtues as well. He demanded none of the excessive formality and discipline that typified many Japanese-style establishments – some Tokyo bars required bartenders to bow at a certain angle, to slide the customers’ drinks across the counter with just the right ‘whoosh’, and then stand at something approximating parade rest while awaiting the next order. At Nicola’s there was no standing at attention for daily inspection. No lists of rules to memorize. No ‘self-reflection conference’ at the end of each day
to go over misdeeds, real or imagined. You showed up to work on time, cleanly dressed, and did your job. Period. You could stand there and chat with the customers without fear of recrimination. As longtime Nicola’s waiter Akio Nomura put it, there was no
burusheeto
– which was why he liked working there.

(More important, but seldom noted in a society where human rights were not a frequent topic of discussion, Nick was an equal opportunity employer. He hired Koreans, Taiwanese, Indians and others to work as waiters or managers and gave them the same pay he gave Japanese nationals – which separated him from other indigenous employers, for whom employing minority workers was only primarily a way to save on labor costs.)

Unfortunately, however, the master had his weak spots, and one of them was his total lack of interest in bonding with his employees. Typically, the Japanese expected a work environment that fostered a sense of belonging and gave them a say in how things were done. This meant periodic group parties, company outings, and frequent staff meetings to hear employee opinions. To Nick, however,
that
was all
burusheeto
. And he said as much to anyone who would care to listen. ‘We don’t need a relationship,’ he would tell his waiters. ‘I’m the one who is paying. Just do your job.’ No matter how much anyone tried to talk to him about changing his ways in that regard, he refused to listen. In fact, he became notorious in Roppongi, as years passed, for his increasing bluntness and his bad temper. More than once, in a pique over bad service or incompetence, he fired a worker, which is something Japanese managers simply
never
did. In Japan, one took a bad employee aside and with the help of a friendly third party persuaded him to find another job, one that suited
him
better. Face was all-important and the cardinal rule was you never made a man lose it.

Another notably weak area was his dismissiveness of the Japanese custom of paying bonuses – the annual summer, winter bonuses and, as in the case of his former GM, the traditional retirement
bonus. Had he taken a cue from Grolier International, the American encyclopedia company down the street from his restaurant, when it decided to drop a massive Japanese
Americana
translation project and fire all the editors hired for that purpose in the process, he might have saved himself some grief. In what became a notorious case, Grolier was sued by its own in-house union – over
taishokukin
– and a long court battle ensued, lasting several years, during which Grolier was forced to rehire the
Encyclopaedia Americana
Japanese translation team and keep them on the payroll – even though there was no work for them to do. It was a painful reminder that in Japan employees were supposed to be considered family and one did not lightly let them go. (
Reader’s Digest
later tried to close down shop in Japan without notifying its union and became embroiled in a similar battle.)

Instead Zappetti offered his GM a post-retirement job in lieu of cash. He sent Fujita to buy the land in Hokkaido he had been leasing, because Japanese law prohibited foreigners from owning farmland. Zappetti’s idea was for Fujita to set up residence on his ranch, qualify as a homesteader (meeting the legal requirement for a landowner to actually live on the land before being allowed to buy it), and thereby gain the legal right to purchase the land on which the ranch stood from its original Japanese owner. Upon completing this assignment, Fujita was then to have held the land for his master until such time as it became legally feasible to transfer the title, either directly to Zappetti or to Zappetti’s company. Fujita purchased the land as requested, and then, in a sudden, vengeful act, claimed the land as his own. Zappetti found himself with no choice but to file yet another lawsuit to recover his property.

Including a countersuit filed by Fujita for his retirement pay and a countersuit Zappetti himself had filed against his third wife for damaging his manly honor (a suit he would, to his great surprise, win), it would be Zappetti’s sixth lawsuit of the decade. That was believed to be a record for an individual
gaijin
, as was Zappetti’s
third divorce from a Japanese woman and as was Zappetti’s fourth marriage in late 1975, when he remarried Yae.

He could fill a page in Guinness all by himself.

Zappetti filed suit over the Hokkaido property in 1982, just as the long-awaited decision in his Nihon Kotsu case was handed down. After nine agonizing years in litigation, the judge deliberating that suit delivered a terse five-word verdict: ‘Mr Nicolas cannot be believed.’ Period. Given all that he had invested, Mr Nicolas had no alternative but to appeal that case, meaning that he would now have three court cases going simultaneously – another first for an American in Japan.

At the rate he was going, one page in Guinness might not be enough.

It was at this juncture that his Japanese lawyers, fearful he would lose again, twice, suggested he become a naturalized citizen and thereby increase his chance of winning; and in the hope it might help his cause, Nick took them up on the idea.

That the semiliterate white
gaijin
Zappetti, with a police file a foot thick, no less, actually managed to pull it off causes people in Tokyo even today to scratch their heads in amazement. In 1983, when he first filed his application for naturalization, he had yet to take a single lesson in the Japanese language and could barely put together a grammatically correct sentence. What Japanese he knew, he had picked up on his own, and it was a specialized and unique lingo, to say the least. He could easily translate
chobu
to hectares,
tsubo
to square meters, and give yen or dollar values on them in either English or Japanese; he could also shift from counting years in the Gregorian system to the
Showa
system, which was based on Emperor Hirohito’s reign from 1926 to 1989, without missing a single beat, and he knew words that could stump most foreign linguists – like
daibutsu bensai
– terms which he had picked up in the course of attempting to conduct his affairs. Although such knowledge was of little use in a language proficiency test, he did have a keen visual memory for names
written in
kanji
(Chinese ideographs), which had come from dealing with the business cards he had received over the years. Banking on this skill, he arranged, through an influential politician’s lawyer – one he had met through an introduction from his wife’s family – for a special language test to be given him, in the comfort and privacy of the lawyer’s office, where he would identify family names printed on business cards randomly handed to him. He passed with flying colors.

His criminal record was another hurdle. Fortunately, his lawyer’s expertise encompassed crime as well as language. The influential politician the lawyer represented was the LDP’s Yasuhiro Nakasone, who was about to become prime minister and a man with his own ties to the underground. Interestingly, Nakasone’s history as a member of the JPWA during the Rikidozan era, a rising star in the outer constellation of Yoshio Kodama, and a protégé of Kakuei Tanaka was a thread that wound its way into the Nick Zappetti story as well, ending as a neatly tied ribbon on the gift box of his naturalized citizenship.

On a bitingly cold afternoon in January 1983, he formally became a Japanese citizen and officially changed his last name to that of his fourth wife, as ‘recommended’ by Japanese authorities. Then he went to the US Embassy to surrender his passport – his US passport, one of the most coveted documents in the world – and verbally renounce his US citizenship.

Nearly all of the minuscule handful of Westerners who applied to become naturalized Japanese citizens in the postwar era did so out of their love for the culture and perhaps their desire to be accepted on equal terms with the rest of the general populace. But none of them ever did so lightly. Jesse Kualahula, a popular 300-pound sumo wrestler from Maui, obtained Japanese citizenship at approximately the same time as Nick because without it the Sumo Association would not allow him to start his own sumo stable. He
called surrendering his US passport the most difficult move he had ever had to make. He consulted often with then US ambassador Mike Mansfield and cried all night after making his big decision.