Tokyo Underworld (37 page)

‘No one’, said the narrator in a glowing summation, ‘had ever had as great an impact on the Japanese in such a short time as the great Rikidozan.’

(Not once in the entire sixty minutes was a reference made to Rikidozan’s Korean background. A study published that same year showed that roughly 80 percent of Korean youths living in Japan used Japanese names.)

It was fitting perhaps that 1995 was also the year that an athlete from Japan finally appeared who could be termed Rikidozan’s equal. Hideo Nomo, pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers,
became the first Japanese to star in the US major leagues. He won the Rookie of the Year award and led the National League in strikeouts (then followed that in 1966 by winning seventeen games and pitching a no-hitter).

Nomo’s success ignited a wave of nationalistic pride the likes of which had not been seen since Riki’s heyday. Every game Nomo pitched was telecast nationwide
twice
in the same day on NHK. Huge Hi-Vision screens around Tokyo had replaced the
gaito telebi
of Riki’s era, but the crowds were just as rapt. During the All-Star Game break, some fans even camped out in tents to catch the big-screen early morning telecasts relayed back to Japan. One radio station broadcast every game Nomo pitched, but only those half-innings Nomo was out on the mound. The rest of the time, when Nomo was on the bench and his teammates were batting, normal programming was resumed. It was a display of single-mindedness matched only by the TV station that ran an eleven-hour special on Japan’s new national idol.

In the years since his death, Rikidozan had also become a full-fledged North Korean hero and tool of the state. Celebrating in its own way the fiftieth anniversary of the end of Japanese rule, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea issued a Rikidozan ‘autobiography’ entitled
I Am a Korean
, which topped the charts in Pyonyang; an English version went on sale in the Pyongyang Airport departure lounge, alongside a popular liquor for foreign consumption, ‘Rikidozan Drink’.

In 1995, Riki’s one-time ‘disciple’ Kanji ‘Antonio’ Inoki, who was now, improbably, a member of the Japanese Upper House, representing the ‘Sports-Peace Party’, visited Pyongyang on a public relations pilgrimage to participate in the festivities celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. At the behest of the Pyongyang government, Inoki traveled to Rikidozan’s boyhood home accompanied by Riki’s daughter.

While in Pyongyang, Inoki took part in a highly touted East vs West wrestling exhibition. He propelled an outdoor audience of
100,000 North Koreans – supposed bitter enemies of Japan – into fits of confetti-scattering delirium when he handily dispatched an aging, pot-bellied, blond American wrestler.

That too was just like old times.

Aficionados of Roppongi history noted with interest the reopening on November 16, 1995, of the newly remodeled Nihon Kotsu Nicola’s, which had been closed for three years. The original plan had been to raze the building to make way for the construction of a new complex to rival Ark Hills – another grand
jiageya
plan from the bubble era. But somehow in the yakuza
jusen
recession that had not been possible. And so after being closed and standing silent and empty for three years, Nicola’s was renovated.

It boasted a sparkling new entrance, a six-car parking lot, a sign proclaiming it as the oldest pizza restaurant in Japan – ‘in business since 1954 [
sic
]’, and advertisements assuring customers of a ‘bright, airy interior’.

The main dining room would have made Zappetti’s widow proud; it was well lit and decorated with thin beige strips of chiffon suspended from the ceiling. The tablecloths were so white they almost hurt the eyes. On the second floor was a party room complete with
karaoke
equipment, for ‘group or corporate rental’. Outside in the parking lot were plastic round white picnic-style tables for dining al fresco – the latest Tokyo rage. The menu promised ‘light, sweet cuisine’, including a wide variety of different colorful mixed pizzas (olive oil on the side) and a diminutive thirty-dollar steak.

It was impossible to miss the huge painting of a bulbous-nosed black-mustachioed Italian chef holding a tall stack of pizzas that adorned one whole side of the two-story building, accompanied by a huge encircled ‘R’ informing everyone that the logo was duly ‘registered’. It was also downright impossible to ignore the complete absence of foreign diners inside, a phenomenon perhaps
caused by the fact that the pizza was nearly inedible to the Western palate – even the ones that weren’t topped with tuna and squid – or that a medium-sized pizza, a ‘Nicola’s Classico’ as it appeared on the menu, was three times the cost of a pizza in America and approximately one-third the size.

The new Nicola’s proved so popular with Japanese businessmen in the area that the sushi bar down the street suffered a precipitous drop in business.

Lamented the shop’s proprietor, ‘It’s hard to compete with foreigners in Roppongi.’

Guide maps were handed out to all customers introducing them to the seven other Nicola branches Nihon Kotsu was running, which, added to the Yokota and Chuo Rinkan branches, made for a total of ten Nicola’s restaurants in the Tokyo area.

In 1994, a half-block from the former site of Nicola’s Roppongi Crossing branch on the main drag, a cavernous new pizza joint with street-side seating and 1960s pop decor opened for business. It offered a smorgasbord of brawny pizza, all-you-can-drink sangria, and a rack of comic books for diners to peruse at their leisure. A year later, on the second floor of Nicola’s former building, the Il Cardinale, specializing in Italian cuisine
de la mare
made its debut, while around the corner above the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, Gino’s seafood Italian opened its doors. Then near the southwest corner of the Crossing a young American named Brenden Murphy opened up a tiny second-floor pizzeria with flowered tablecloths and a giant pizza oven imported from Canada where he mixed five different kinds of flour to get a unique pizza crust. At Pizza-la, a new pizza chain in competition with Domino’s, it was possible to buy a bacon–lettuce–tomato pizza. S-barro’s, another new addition to the pantheon of Roppongi pizza houses, became an instant gathering spot for hungry night club hostesses working in the area. And finally, just past the
Crossing to the north, appeared the Zia pizzeria, in front of which stood a sketch of the ‘proprietor’, a balding, mustachioed Italian man, drawn with hands out in a gesture of welcome. He looked just like Nick Zappetti.

My first real exposure to the Tokyo underworld came in 1969 when I was living in Higashi Nakano, just outside of Shinjuku, in the western part of the city. I had just graduated from Tokyo’s Sophia University and had gone to work in the editorial department of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, Japan. Each evening on my way home to my tiny box-like apartment, I would stop at a neighborhood snack bar for a drink; there I made the acquaintance of a short, muscular, mean-looking young man with a crew cut and scarred eyebrows. His name was ‘Jiro’, and, as I discovered from the membership badge he wore underneath the lapel of his suede leather jacket, he belonged to the Sumiyoshi-Rengo kai, the huge Tokyo-based criminal syndicate.

Jiro took an interest in me because he had been given the task of overseeing a Sumiyoshi-owned nightclub in Shinjuku employing English-speaking hostesses from Southeast Asia. Because he couldn’t communicate with them, he offered me the job of assistant manager, six nights a week, for the monthly sum of 300,000 yen (then roughly about $1,000). Although I turned him down because of other commitments, Jiro and I developed a relationship of sorts, because believe it or not, of a shared interest in politics. I had studied Japanese politics while at Sophia and had written my graduate thesis on the factions of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. At the time I was one of the few Americans alive remotely interested in such an esoteric subject – Japan was not yet the world power it was destined to become. In the course of my research, I had even met a Young Turk named Yasuhiro Nakasone, then being touted as the ‘JFK of Japan’, who would become prime minister from 1982 to 1987. Jiro thought that was just great. He was a strong supporter of the LDP, and so were all his fellow gang members. At the time, the LDP was in the midst of one of its many scandals (this one called the ‘Black Mist’) and its nationwide approval rating had sunk to around 25 percent. Jiro said it was vital that he and his confreres help ‘get out the vote’ at election time.

One of Jiro’s regular duties was collecting protection money from the nightclubs, bars and pachinko parlors in front of the Higashi Nakano train station. He frequently had envelopes full of cash in his coat pocket, but in all the time I knew him, I never ever saw him pay a bill. Periodically, he would invite me to one of the cabarets in the vicinity and casually offer me my choice of any hostess
in the house to spend the night with, if I so wished – no charge involved. (Or, if I preferred, a tête-à-tête right there on the spot in a back booth.) Everyone seemed terrified of him and willing to do anything to please.

Jiro was not the most psychologically stable person I had ever met. He had a razor blade secreted in his sleeve to be slipped between two fingers for use as a weapon in a fight, and a pair of sharply pointed polished ivory chopsticks contained in a case he carried in his inside coat pocket, which he explained could also be used in combat. After several drinks, he was apt to fly into a sudden, uncontrollable rage triggered by poor service or some unhappy memory, and overturn his table, sending beer bottles and glasses flying. Once, trying in vain to flag down a cab in the street around midnight – always a difficult task in a city like Tokyo – I saw him kick a dent in the side of a taxi which had slowed for a traffic light. When the driver got out to confront him, Jiro punched him in the mouth several times and kicked him in the groin. One memorable besotted evening, complaining that he was without friends or family, he pulled a jackknife out of his jacket and sliced his left cheek.

‘I’m human trash,’ he moaned. ‘
Ningen Kuzu.’

He said that foreigners and yakuza in Japan had one thing in common. They were outcasts from proper society.

Jiro lived alone in a tiny six-mat room, but often he would wind up spending the night in some semen-stained back booth in a neighborhood cabaret, too drunk to move. Periodically, he would disappear from the neighborhood. Once, after an absence of several months, he returned with the tip of his little finger missing, which, he said, he had chopped off himself as penance for being arrested and sent to prison.

I lost touch with Jiro when I moved to New York in 1972 and when I returned to Tokyo four years later to work for Time–Life, he had simply vanished. No one knew where he was and I never saw him again. This time around, I was living in the quarter of Akasaka, near the city center in a Western-style apartment complex known as Riki Mansion – my new lodgings a seventh-floor one-bedroom flat with a panoramic view of Tokyo Tower and environs. It was there that Phase II of my education in the ways of the Japanese underworld began.

The complex – actually two separate buildings in one compound – ‘Riki Mansion’ and ‘Riki Apartments’ – was named after a postwar national wrestling legend, Rikidozan. By the time I came upon the scene, Rikidozan was dead, having met his fate at the hands of a Sumiysohi gangster in an Akasaka nightclub, the New Latin Quarter. My landlady was Rikidozan’s widow, a policeman’s daughter. My fellow residents and neighbors came from a wide range of Tokyo’s nightlife. There were nightclub hostesses from the high-class clubs like the Copacabana and the El Morocco, as well as foreign models and foreign prostitutes
– tall, long-legged blondes from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America, along with assorted drifters, con artists, hustlers, smugglers and others. Frequently milling around in the lobby and outside in the parking lot were groups of dark-visaged, mean-looking, hard-bitten men wearing dark suits and sunglasses – men whom I later learned belonged to the Tosei-kai gang, a rival of the Sumiyoshi, especially in promoting professional wrestling. The parking lot through which I passed every day was the site of a famous bloody sword encounter in December 1963, involving foot soldiers from both gangs.

From Riki Mansion, it was a five-minute walk to Roppongi Crossing, the center of the city’s nightlife. I usually spent my evenings there and, quite often, I wound up at an Italian restaurant called Nicola’s for a late-night meal. The place was always packed with a fascinating mixture of foreigners and Japanese – movie stars, athletes and others – and it vibrated with excitement. The proprietor was a bullish, arrogant-looking man in his fifties who was not infrequently in the company of underworld types. People referred to him in whispers as the Mafia Boss of Tokyo.

I gradually came to know Nicola Zappetti, for it turned out we, too, had certain things in common. He was a baseball fan and he had read numerous books and articles I had written about the subject. The ballplayers I knew and wrote about frequented his restaurant. He was also a fan of pro wrestling, another subject I had written about. We were both acquaintances of Richard Beyer, otherwise known as The (Masked Man) Destroyer. Beyer, an NCAA wrestling champion at Syracuse, had performed professionally in Japan for several years and had also carved out an enormously successful second career as a comic on Japanese TV – appearing in Nazi helmet, polka-dot shorts, waving a Japanese flag and singing songs in fractured Japanese. Beyer had been one of the very few Americans to defeat Rikidozan and he was a close friend of Giant Baba, a 6′10″ 250-pound wrestler who lived directly above me on the eighth floor, in the luxury penthouse Rikidozan once occupied. From time to time I could hear Baba practicing his back flips, knocking loose tiny pieces of plaster from my ceiling as he landed on his living room floor.

In time, I learned of the ties that had bound Nicola to Rikidozan and the Tosei-kai gang, as well as other elements of the Tokyo underworld, politics and big business. I began to understand what a remarkable life he had led, dating all the way back to the postwar black market era when he had been one of the first Americans in Japan after the fighting had stopped. He seemed the very embodiment of a certain type of relationship involving Japanese and Americans that had sprung up in the wake of the Occupation.