Tokyo Underworld (33 page)

America, which had once relegated the subject of Japan to the back pages, now was experiencing its own brand of paranoia, a prime example being the best-selling 1992 novel
Rising Sun,in
which Japanese characters in pursuit of American technology were unflatteringly portrayed, including one who liked to slice up women with a sword during sex. (Said a perplexed
Bungei Shunju
editor after reading
Sun
, ‘In my whole life as a Japanese, I’ve never met anyone resembling the people portrayed in that book. I must be missing something.’) There was also the Japan expert who warned that Americans were all doomed to be enlisted men in the Japanese Imperial Corporate Army if something wasn’t done soon.

The marriage of Nick and Yae Koizumi was symbolic of the US–Japan relationship – two countries bound by a treaty and divided by a vast cultural gulf. They were a distinguished-looking couple when greeting guests at the entrance to the Roppongi restaurant – she elegantly dressed and bejeweled, he sporting a thick white mustache and dapper blue serge suit and cane of polished oak; they could have been hosting a diplomatic reception. When sitting together in a back corner of the room, however, they were often engaged in heated argument.

They fought about everything from household medicine to the auto industry. If he had a headache, he would take Tylenol brought from Hawaii, a brand-name pharmaceutical, she might note, that was not approved by the Japanese government. If
she
had a headache, she would put magnetic patches on her temple – something he referred to as a ‘quack’ cure. If the subject was which new car to buy, he would lobby for a Cadillac Seville, in his opinion, the best car in the world, while she might argue for a Japanese or European model; after all, the word around town was American cars were so poorly made you might cut your finger
opening the hood. She was inclined to agree with the Mitsubishi executive who opined that America ought to give up making cars because they just weren’t capable of doing it well.

More often than not the bone of contention was the management of Nicola’s empire, the major portion of which his wife now controlled – much to Nick’s unending vexation. In fact, the only restaurant over which Nick exercised complete authority was the only Nicola’s in existence losing money, a state of affairs that galled him even more and one that his wife did not fail to remind him of periodically. All the restaurants Yae’s company owned and operated were raking in yen, as were the Nihon Kotsu-owned branches. But the Roppongi Crossing branch – his baby – was in steep financial decline. Except for Friday night, when the expatriate community came out in force, business was mortifyingly behind the curve.

Modern Roppongi and its environs now offered too many other more fashionable spots. The ballplayers, the mobsters and the politicians still came around. The slick-haired future prime minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto, then biding his time as a cabinet minister, came in. Hollywood actor Tom Selleck, filming
Mr Baseball
, also graced his portals. But younger Japanese preferred the trendier places like Ristorante Sabatini, on the top floor of the nearby Ibis Hotel, with its house wines and
canzone
singers straight from Rome or the deluxe Le Patio in the ANA Hotel featuring an Italian chef who also sang opera. The new glossy Il Forno with its original menu of California Italian cuisine was turning people away at the door.

Without red brick walls, medallioned waiters, and wandering minstrels to attract diners, Nicola’s was starting to look old-fashioned. Unlike Nihon Kotsu, Nick did not have a fleet of 4,000 taxi drivers to turn to as potential ‘voluntary’ diners when business was slow.

He had tried a number of tactics to reverse his moribund business – sponsoring a late-night television show aimed at
younger viewers, installing a large new neon sign in his third-floor window, and erecting a life-size poster of himself at the front door – standing there, pizza in hand, next to a beaming nubile model, looking like some jolly old bald-headed Santa Claus. He also invested millions of yen in a large flat-paneled TV screen system so his customers could watch sumo wrestling and pro baseball games. But nothing happened.

In 1990, Nicola’s Roppongi lost over $700,000, the fifth year in a row Nick was in the red. By contrast, his wife had shown a profit of over $1 million in the Yokota operation alone, which she was running all by herself, and where the clientele was now 98 percent Japanese. It pained him greatly to admit it, but she was now worth far more than he. In fact, she had become one of the wealthiest women in Japan. Her Yokota interests amounted to $30 million, her Roppongi property worth nearly as much. She possessed five or six luxury golf club memberships, one of them valued at more than $500,000 and a million-dollar jewelry collection.

His wife told him that his present sorry state had come about because he failed to keep up with changing Japanese tastes. With Pizza Hut down the street, Domino’s starting the home delivery market, and Shakey’s operating branches all over town (serving eggplant and mushroom pizza made especially for the Japanese), he needed something different to compete.

You had to Japanize the product, his wife said, reciting the Japanese trade mantra. Nicola’s anchovy dressing was too strong for the Japanese palate. So was his sausage spice. Didn’t he know that Nihon Kotsu now served pizza with soy sauce? It was time that Nick started paying attention.

She herself had a tie-in with Tokyu, a major department store chain, for whom she supplied year-end holiday pizza with colorful pineapple and cherry toppings, as befitting the season. Nick said he had never seen anything so grotesque, but the department store people had been ecstatic and sales were terrific.

It was also an absolute must, she kept saying, to give
o-chugen
and
o-seibo
, summer and winter gifts, to business associates. She
always
did it. It was how she maintained and serviced business relationships in Japan and one reason why she kept getting repeat department store orders. It was something that Nick had always stubbornly refused to grasp. But he could not continue to dismiss such important customs as bribes if he wanted to revitalize his business.

Nick listened as much as he could, then told her to shut up and mind her own business.

He was the one who had started Nicola’s. He had taught her everything she knew. Who was she to tell him how to do things?

She replied that there was a limit to how Westernized Japan could become. The Japanese had accepted a massive infusion of bread and milk into their diets and adopted other radical changes into their daily lives in the wake of the Occupation. Would Americans ever tolerate a similar shift? Would they commit to a regimen of raw fish and rice every day? Would they start wearing kimonos instead of suits? The Japanese were flexible – a lot more so than the Americans, in her opinion. But there were limits, and it was time he learned that.

At the very least, she said, do something about the lighting and the music. Most Japanese people liked their restaurants brightly lit. They didn’t feel right eating in darkened rooms. They wanted to be able to see their food clearly as well as look at the faces of their dinner companions. And as for the music, it was much too soft. Japanese diners liked it louder. Everyone knew that.

He refused, and thus was the battle of the lights and music engaged. Growing ever more assertive and determined to help him turn things around in spite of himself, Yae would arrive at the Roppongi Crossing branch and turn the light rheostats all the way up. At the very first opportunity, Nick would turn them back down again. In the course of a two-hour meal, patrons might experience several levels of illumination. This continued for some
time until finally, in exasperation, Nick put cloth covers over each individual lightbulb.

The music, which was piped in from a local Roppongi service, experienced similar oscillations. Nick would be sitting at a back room table, squinting up at his giant TV screen, when suddenly the volume of the Muzak would swell. ‘Turn that goddamn music down,’ he’d yell at the nearest waiter, ‘I can’t hear a damn thing.’ And everyone in the restaurant would turn to stare.

Said longtime headwaiter Akio Nomura, who witnessed it all, ‘It drove me crazy after a while. His wife would give an order to turn up the sound or the lights, and thirty minutes later, Nick would countermand it.’ Nomura had seriously considered quitting, but his boss, in a pique over some minor insubordination, fired him instead, before he had a chance.

An argument erupted over the decor as well, which Yae thought all wrong for the times. The red-and-white checkered tablecloths, the Chianti bottles with the candles stuck in them, the trellises with their artificial grapes – they were all passé in her opinion and even looked cheap amid the new wealth and glitter of the city. Redecoration was a must, she said, to get the customers to start coming again. Nick resisted fiercely. He believed that once the new fads ran their course, ‘traditional quality’ would come back into fashion. What worked before would work again. All that was required was a little patience.

Some of the more cynical observers of their union believed that Yae had remarried him primarily to torment him about his business failures and remind him that she was now the more successful of the two, thereby exacting some measure of revenge for the way he had treated her over the years. Those same observers also believed that Nick had remarried her only in an attempt to get his property back. Nick encouraged both points of view in his fouler moods.

Increasingly, he took his frustrations out on lovestruck young Western men who brought their Japanese girlfriends in for dinner.

‘Did you know that the only reason a Japanese woman marries an American or a European is that she wants to dominate him?’ he would say with malicious delight. ‘If she marries a Japanese man, she has to be an obedient, stay-at-home wife. But if she can marry a foreigner, she can control him.’

‘One of the reasons I stayed in Japan in the beginning was because I was attracted to the women, too,’ he would add. ‘Now, four marriages later, it’s one of the reasons I’m anti-Japanese.’

His wife insisted to friends that she loved him, despite all the pain he had caused her, and wanted only to help him enjoy what was left of his old age, while Nick, in his rare, reflective moments would say, ‘Well, now, you don’t spend the rest of your life with someone you don’t have feelings for, do you?’

But such reflective moments were indeed rare.

He was too busy being angry.

It seemed that not a day went by without something occurring to arouse his bile and make him reach for another glycerine pill. The TV talk shows were now full of opinion makers running America down, and when US President George Bush came to Japan, hat in hand, to try to open the market for auto parts, they had openly ridiculed him (much as Americans a generation earlier had ridiculed Japanese leaders as ‘transistor salesmen’). That ridicule turned to laughter when Bush became ill at a state dinner and vomited on Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa.

High on Nick’s list of peeves was the new self-assertiveness of his Japanese customers. He could remember not so long ago when the Japanese businessmen who came into his restaurant sat there unobtrusively and ate their dinners. Now, it seemed to him, they were all puffed up with self-importance, shoulders thrown back in the manner of some ancient TV Daimyo, talking loudly enough for everyone to hear. One night a group of executives in his restaurant had been especially annoying.

‘Japan is now number one,’ he could hear them bragging drunkenly from across the room. ‘Japan can do everything better than anyone. Who are the Americans to criticize us when it is we who are more economically powerful?’

Limping over to their table, Nick launched into a tirade: ‘We gave our markets to you and paid for your defense. And now you think you’re hot shit, just because you got some money in your pockets? If you’re so wonderful, why is it you can’t even put a man in space? How come Hitachi’s got to steal its technology from IBM? To me, you’re like a banana republic, except you’re a TV republic, because all you can do is make TVs.’

Then he turned and limped away.

It was no wonder business was falling off.

To Nick, the whole city was going to hell. It pained him to witness the profound changes that were taking place right outside his window, starting with the new wave of discotheque doormen who barred all non-Japanese men from entering and including the unseemly spectacle of North American and European peddlers hawking cheap jewelry and trinkets on the streets of Roppongi. For some reason, this seemed especially galling to the former black marketeer.

Tokyo had once been a wonderful place to live in Nick’s view. Back in the old days they had called him ‘The King’, and they got out of his way when he came walking down the street. But not anymore. Now the shoe was on the other foot. They just brushed him aside as they sped past – many of the young men a head taller than he – and they didn’t even say excuse me.

‘You ever see that movie
Rio Bravo
?’ Nick would say to his foreign customers. ‘You remember the scene where the leering cowboy throws the money into the spittoon? And Dean Martin, who’s the town drunk, crawls after it? That’s Japan’s fantasy image of us. They want us to crawl and beg like Dean Martin.’

To the King of Roppongi, abandoned by his subjects and hounded by tormentors, for the Japanese to crow over their success
was, for them, to disdain America’s might and its largesse to them. He took it all very personally.

On a trip to Hokkaido he nearly got into a fistfight. He had been sitting on a bench at Sapporo Station, waiting for a train, holding on to his cane, when an elderly white-haired man wearing traditional
hakama
robes and a straw fedora approached him. The approach, of a sort experienced at one time or another by many foreigners in Japan, was not friendly. The man stopped in front of Nick and offered his hand, as if in greeting. Nick grasped it halfheartedly.

‘
Yowai ne
(You’re weak),’ the man growled, giving Nick a sour expression. ‘
Anta kaere
,’ he then added. ‘Go home.’