Tokyo Underworld (36 page)

Efforts by bankers to collect this sour debt showed just how overmatched their institutions were in dealing with their recalcitrant clients. In 1994, the manager of Sumitomo’s branch in the city of Nagoya, who had sought to retrieve billions in overdue
jusen
loans, was shot in the head outside his tenth-floor apartment as he responded to an early morning knock at his door. The year before, the vice president in charge of loans at Hanwa Bank near Osaka had been murdered. Government money subsequently had to be used to rescue the leading failed housing loan corporations, making the bailout, as one magazine put it, ‘The first ever taxpayer-financed debt forgiveness of a nation’s criminal underworld.’

The highly touted enactment of antigang laws and outlawing organizations with over a certain percentage of members having arrest records and electoral laws that increased somewhat the power of the urban voter, modifying somewhat the old multimember district during the nineties, did little to dislodge the black streak of corruption and influence peddling embedded within the system. Although a wave of FTC investigations into construction bid-rigging, for example, actually led to the indictment and conviction of an ex-construction minister in 1994 for taking a bribe – an
eyewitness insider in another more important case was ‘persuaded’ to recant his accusations against thirty-one other
dango
participants. Thus were collusive arrangements among industry construction heavyweights able to continue.

With only 2,000 prosecutors in the entire country, the approximate number that serves an average big city in the United States, there was simply not nearly enough honest manpower to investigate all the corruption that continued to go on, so relentless was the circulation of back-door gelt.

In 1997, the big story was that the chief brokerage houses were paying record amounts of cash, secretly, to corporate extortionists, to keep them from revealing facts about hidden debt, illegal loans, and secret accounts the houses held for VIPs in the Japanese government. One of the VIPs, according to the
Shukan Gendai
, was the then prime minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto, while another was a cabinet minister who had once solicited gangsters to suppress a book exposing corruption in his district. In the ensuing turmoil, the nation’s oldest securities house, Yamaichi Securities, was discovered to have billions of dollars in hidden debt and forced to declare bankruptcy, leaving 6,000 workers jobless and helping to send the Nikkei Stock Index, which had been showing signs of recovery, into another tailspin. This was not beneficial to the financial currency crisis that struck Asia in the fall of that same year, the repercussions of which were felt all the way back to Wall Street.

The
sokaiya
at the center of it all, a smiling,
keizai yakuza
with designer glasses and fashionably long hair named Ryuichi Koike, was yet another by-product of the environment created by US–Japan ‘cooperation’ that allowed organized crime and the government to join forces and flourish. He had been able to get close to the companies involved because of links to the infamous Yoshio Kodama Sokaiya group, still going strong despite the master’s demise.

Koike, arrested and accused of receiving nearly 700 million yen in illegal payments from the securities houses and 12 billion in illegal loans from a Dai-Ichi Kangyo subsidiary, was released on 40 million yen bail – not even 1 percent of his total take. The harshest penalty was given to Nomura, a five-month suspension this time. Two more officials subsequently committed suicide.

In October of that year a politician in the ruling party, sitting for a magazine interview, openly expressed his view that cutting the links between the world of the gangs and conservative politics was impossible given the close ties that bound certain underworld and political bosses. He even boasted that he did not have to engage in vote buying because he could rely on the Yamaguchi-gumi to get the vote out for him. As he offered these remarks, a nationwide shoot-out involving rival factions of the nation’s largest gang was going on.

It was an admission that surprised no one, save perhaps the US government, which had been loudly complaining about ‘discriminatory’ port charges imposed by the Japan Harbor Transportation Association and had leveled retaliatory fines against Japanese vessels using American harbor facilities. The effort was, of course, doomed to failure since the United States was taking on a formidable featherbedding source of post-retirement positions for government officials – and an organization tied to organized crime in Japan. It was as if MITI had decided to take on the New York City Harbor Dockworkers Association.

In March 1997, the Tokyo District Court sentenced Ken Mizuno to eleven years in prison and a fine of nearly 70 million dollars. This came some eighteen months after the US Customs Service auctioned off Mizuno’s Los Angeles mansion (used in the movie
Beverly Hills Cop II
). It was the last of Mizuno’s US assets, including properties in California, Hawaii and Las Vegas, auctioned as part of a plea bargain with US Federal authorities in which Mizuno’s firm plead guilty to fraud and money laundering. The money was to go to the US Treasury Asset Forfeiture Fund, to be
divided between the fraud victims and Mizuno’s creditors. US law enforcement officers said they had obtained unprecedented cooperation from the notoriously secretive Japanese police in their investigation of Mizuno’s money laundering and that Japan’s Finance Ministry had identified some $250 million in fraudulent funds he transferred to US banks.

However, the FBI and Japanese police would continue to have their hands full. The last two years before the millennium, as Japan began implementing a program of deregulation known as the
biggu ban
(big bang), were witness to the unusual spectacle of US financial companies buying up substantial amounts of bad Japanese real estate-backed loan portfolios (in January 1998, the Ministry of Finance had pegged the size of bad loans at well over $600 billion, larger than the US S&L crisis), thus putting themselves on a collision course with the
keizai yakuza
, who owed much of the debt in question and who, in some cases, were occupying property facing foreclosure in the wake of the deals with the Americans. Amid media cries and rightist protests that Japan was ‘selling out’ to the United States, the head of the Sumiyoshi was standing by to offer his assistance to any American firm that had difficulty collecting its money – for a commission of only 40 percent. Back in Los Angeles, an investigator associated with the LAPD, long familiar with the scene in Japan, was shaking his head in disbelief at the risks being taken.

‘One would think’, he said, ‘that these American financiers would have more sense.’

Then again, one never knew. Perhaps they knew more than they were letting on.

Thomas Blakemore died in 1996 in Seattle, where he had moved to be treated for the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. He was seventy-seven. But he left behind a legacy that is not likely to be matched by any American in Japan. In
addition to ably representing the fortunes of many US firms for forty years, including GE (a company that remained the largest single investor in Japan, with 13 percent of Toshiba’s stock), he was decorated by the Emperor – receiving the ‘Third Order of the Sacred Treasure’, in 1989 – for legal services Blakemore had contributed to the Japanese Supreme Court over the years.

Blakemore had been a perpetual goodwill machine. He and his wife Frances set up an experimental farming project on five acres of agricultural land outside Tokyo where they introduced short hybrid fruit trees, a series of miniature orchards that grew apples, loganberries, raspberries, blueberries and cherries, among other fruit. (‘The Japanese people know what starvation is,’ he said, ‘and this is one hedge against it.’)

Moreover, he also identified two species of Iriomote Wild Cat from the Ryukyus and a species of bear from Hokkaido, passing on his discoveries to the Museum of Natural History of New York. He sponsored adventurer Naomi Uemura for membership into the New York Explorer’s Club. (His wife, in addition to introducing many young artists in her Okura gallery, authored several books on Japanese prints.) Before moving back to the States to battle his illness, Blakemore used much of his wealth to set up a foundation in his name to provide scholarships for aspiring students of Japan.

If Blakemore was the symbol of one side of the US–Japan dynamic, Nicola Zappetti was certainly the symbol of the other. Although
he
had never been in danger of receiving an imperial decoration, he had indeed left his own unique legacy: Roppongi. When he first opened his tiny eight-table bistro, Roppongi was little more than a military camp. By the end of the century, it stood in the same league as the Champs Elysée, the Via Veneto and other famous international playgrounds. Many longtime observers of the Tokyo scene gave Nicola’s much of the credit for that happening; his restaurant became such a lodestone for Tokyo night owls that it caused the creation of other nightspots in the area. By the time
Tokyo Tower had gone up in the neighborhood, in 1959, with a big television studio opening up a year later, Roppongi had come to stand for the exotic and the advanced. As
Tokyo Rising
author Edward Seidenstecker would write about the area – ‘young people went to ogle and to imitate, and to dance and eat pizza.’

By the late 1990s, there were enough restaurants serving ethnic delicacies in the quarter to please even the most serious gourmets, and there were perhaps more places per square kilometer to sit down and eat Italian food than any other area of the world – even New York City and Rome. At the same time, Roppongi had also became a magnet for Southeast Asian drug dealers, prostitutes, illegal workers, and foreign college girls seeking work as lap dancers to earn their tuition. Notable in the new landscape was One-Eyed Jack, a casino club that had opened in the early 1990s. Outside stood a tall white American doorman dressed in a tasseled greatcoat and cap who greeted one and all in flawless Japanese: ‘
Irrashai. Irrashai. Wanu-aido-zyaku e dozo.’
Inside, operating roulette and blackjack tables, where customers could gamble for ostensibly worthless chips, were attractive Caucasian female card dealers and croupiers – who plied their trade in perfect Japanese, to a clientele that was almost exclusively young and well-heeled Nipponese male. In an adjoining room was a large circular bar surrounded by a number of private booths occupied by some seventy-five imported
gaijin
women – Americans, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, British and Russian – clad in miniskirts, fishnet stockings and low-cut silk blouses. A seminude revue of Las Vegas dancers helped liven up the proceedings every half-hour, while gangsta rap played in the background. It was the largest assemblage of Caucasian hostesses in the history of Tokyo – not to mention Japanese-speaking Caucasian hostesses – and was a stunning example of the power of the yen, even with the long recession.

The club, managed by an American, occupied the former site of the fabled Caravansary and was so successful that several sister clubs popped up in the vicinity, all of them in buildings owned
outright by the TSK or TSK affiliates. One of the operations,
The Pharoah
, was closed down in 1997 for illegal gambling. A casual observer might think
Toa Sogo Kigyo
was making something of a comeback.

The TSK still owned a number of cabarets and hotels in Seoul, a resort in the Philippines, interests in Okinawa, casinos in the Marshall Islands and, of course, the
Toa Yuai Jigyo Kumiai
(East Asia Friendship Enterprises Association), as the criminal wing was now formally known, had made it into the US congressional record, having been cited in a 1993 US Senate report as being behind most of the crystal methamphetamine business in Hawaii. It was quite an achievement for a group that did not even constitute 1 percent of all
boryokudan
members. A representative of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Organized Crime Intelligence Division told the
Mainichi Shimbun
in 1994 that he had a strong suspicion that the Santa Monica-based Machii-Ross operation was now a money-laundering cover for the yakuza, something which the company’s spokespeople strenuously denied. (Ross, now involved in gold mining in Liberia, had always firmly denied any wrongdoing and had expressed his belief that his partner’s criminal activities were a thing of the past – something which had occurred well before their company was ever formed.) The 500-some active Tosei-kai yazuka operating as the
Toa Yuai Jigyo Kumiai
(East Friendship Enterprises Association) were showing renewed signs of life on the homefront as well as abroad. In 1994, a forty-four-year-old TSK captain named Hiroji Tashiro stormed into the Tokyo headquarters of the
Mainichi Shimbun
and fired three .38 bullets into the ceiling. Tashiro was upset with an article published by the
Mainichi
weekly magazine that described the Tosei-kai as ‘over the hill’. The article concerned a new skirmish between the Tosei-kai and the Sumiyoshi-kai in Shinjuku, which was ignited when a TSK soldier was stabbed to death for kicking a Sumiyoshi car that had honked at him. The offending article quoted a police detective as saying that the TSK of the nineties was
nothing compared to the much larger Sumiyoshi, which had just signed a ‘gangster’s constitution’, or peace treaty, with the three other big gangs of Japan, the Inagawa-kai, the Yamaguchi-gumi, and the Kyoto-based Aizukotetsu, to peacefully divide up territory around the four main islands. The author of the
Mainichi
piece added sarcastically that perhaps even the new Chinese gangs in the city were scarier than the TSK, which caused Tashiro to shave his head and launch his one-man assault on the nation’s third largest newspaper.

Then, in March 1995, a high-ranking member of the Toa Yuai Gang, Kenji Jojima, was shot in the back four times in front of a Roppongi pachinko parlor by a man police identified as a member of a gang affiliated with the Sumiyoshi.

It was just like old times.

The year 1995 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war and the occasion inspired a wave of nostalgia in Tokyo for the past. For a time, in the mid-1990s, the popular Roppongi Crossing bookstore was filled with memorial tomes about Rikidozan. The respected publishing house Bungei Shunju produced and telemarketed a retrospective four-hour video package on the most important figures of the postwar era, devoting one complete tape to Rikidozan.