Tokyo Underworld (43 page)

LEGITIMATE SUBTERFUGE

Business data here were supplied by the ACCJ, the Coca-Cola story by Thomas Scully, a former Burson-Marstella official, and the IBM story by representatives of IBM, Japan office. IBM’s efforts in Japan are also described in
Nippon: New Superpower
, by Horsely and Buckley (pp. 141–147).

Blood Toast
was released by the Shochiku Film Studios in 1969.

The author worked for Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1969 to 1972 and is familiar with that company’s sales history. Additional information came from interviews with Toshiro Suzuki, EB general manager.

The Ransburg story was related in its entirety by attorney James Adachi, whose office holds the relevant documents.

The Yozawa River project was related by Thomas Blakemore, Frances Blakemore and Jim Phillips, with background information provided by Rosser, Yin-Wa-Mah Brockman and Tetsuo Sato.

A NOTE ABOUT THOMAS BLAKEMORE

Blakemore was the most successful foreign attorney in the city’s history. Blakemore translated the Japanese Civil Code and Criminal Code into English. He knew the law so well that he was the only Westerner who could presume to lecture Japan’s implacable bureaucrats on the finer points of their own voluminous statutes.

An oft-told tale concerns the time Blakemore, a hunting enthusiast, neglected to register the offspring of two blooded Irish setters he owned and had bred. The required time to register such pups was six weeks from birth, but Blakemore had let a full six months elapse before he took the documents to the appropriate government office to file an application. When the official in charge of dog registration told Blakemore that he was too late and that nothing could be done, Blakemore retorted that something certainly
could
be done. He produced a copy of the Japanese Civil Code, opened it to a dog-eared page, and read in his fluent, Oklahoma-accented Japanese: ‘The subsequent marriage of the parents provides for the legitimization of the offspring.’

‘This law applies to animals as well as human beings,’ he explained patiently, ‘By analogy, what is applicable to humans is applicable to animals too.’

Blakemore informed the clerk that he was a full-fledged American lawyer who had passed the Japanese bar, and to his legally trained mind the pups’ parents were in the truest sense married – under ‘common law’. They had been living together with him on his Chiba farm for several years; he could attest to this personally. Thus, for the dogs’ sake and for the sake of their offspring’s future, something had to be done.

Although the government official was dubious, in the end, he bowed to Blakemore’s obviously superior knowledge and validated the dogs’ papers. It was a feat the likes of which no other foreigner was ever capable of duplicating.

5. MISS HOKKAIDO

The American Buddhist priest’s name was Robert Wheeler; he adopted the Japanese pseudonym Shuzen, meaning ‘absolutely excellent’.

The ‘What are you talking to me for then?’ quote came from an interview with Yae Koizumi and Nick Zappetti.

The data on careerist women in Japan are from Patrick Smith,
Japan: A Reinterpretation
, pp. 158–159; and
Japan Almanac
, 1998. For an excellent essay on the role of women in Japanese society, see George Fields,
From Bonsai to Levis
,
Chapter 3
.

The source for the virginity requirement and other details of the Zappetti–Miyoko marital life came from Zappetti himself, who freely admitted the most sordid facts of their relationship. Miyoko declined to be interviewed when Zappetti asked her to cooperate. She has since remarried and joined a religious order.

Zappetti’s daughter Patricia confirms the general gist of the relationship, including her father’s keeping Miyoko under ‘house arrest’.

Details of the mink farm came from Zappetti and Eugene Aksenoff, who also watched another Zappetti disaster, a nutria farm in which the American had invested only to see it completely wiped out by a typhoon-induced flood that scattered hundreds of the furry little creatures across the countryside.

For details of the Nihon Kotsu takeover, the author relied on interviews with Zappetti, Yae Koizumi and Vince Iizumi, who was an officer in Nicola’s enterprises at the time, Yutaka Mogami and court documents. The chief Nihon Kotsu executive is deceased. It is Vince’s conviction that once the deal had been entered into and the people at Nihon Kotsu saw how profitable Nicola’s restaurant was, they began looking for ways to drive Zappetti out of the pizza business in Tokyo because they effectively blocked Zappetti from using his name. After the takeover, only Nihon Kotsu was allowed to use ‘Nicola’s’, by court order, and Zappetti thus had to start calling his restaurants ‘Nicola’. Dr Aksenoff watched all this from his perch next door at the International Clinic and provided additional background, as did Y. Mogami, who interpreted in court and translated the legal documents.

TOKYO DISTRICT COURT

For information on how the Tokyo legal system works the author relied on interviews with Tokyo attorneys Thomas L. Blakemore, Raymond Bushell, Rosser Brockman, Shin Ashina and James Adachi.

Yokoi’s fraudulent concealment of assets and his subsequent shooting were described in Noboru Ando’s autobiography,
Yakuza to Koso
, and in ‘
Ando Noboru To Yokoi Hideki 7 nen me No Taiketsu’
[‘7th Year Confrontation of Ando Noboru and Yokoi Hideki’],
Shukan Bunshun
, August 1, 1965, p. 75. Also see ‘
Futatabi no Taiketsu’
[‘Second Encounter’],
Heibon Punch
, August 2, 1965, p. 29. The facts behind Hachisoka’s friend hiring the mob to collect the debt was described in
Yakuza to Koso
.

The shooting of Yokoi was one of the more bizarre incidents of the postwar era. How the gang boss Noboru Ando, angered over Yokoi’s rude dismissal of his
efforts to collect the aforementioned debt, came to order it done is described at great length in the above autobiography. Also, Ando explained his motives, in an unusual essay written by Ando shortly after his arrest, in the
Bungei Shunju
monthly, October 1958, pp. 232–237. Ando made it clear he ordered his hit man to shoot Yokoi in the right shoulder – only to wound him, to ‘teach him a lesson’. Unfortunately, the hit man’s aim was bad. The bullet hit Yokoi in the left side and traversed several of his internal organs, nearly causing his death. At the time of the attack, Yokoi had been conferring with two business associates, one of whom was a black belt in judo. ‘If you help us in the project,’ the man had been saying, ‘I will risk my life for you.’ When the gunman burst into the conference room, however, the judoist-turned-businessman immediately dove under the table, leaving Yokoi and the other party to face the assailant. Said Yokoi later (during the
Shukan Bunshun
interview in August 1965, when Ando and Yokoi met in a restaurant to have dinner to promote a movie,
Chi to Okite
, about the affair), ‘You just can’t trust people nowadays.’

Ando went into hiding at the Pan American employee dormitory in Izu, eluding a nationwide manhunt for two months, before an eagle-eyed resident of a nearby town recognized him from his picture on the wall of the local post office and turned him in. While incarcerated in the Tokyo Detention Center, Ando wrote his famous
Bungei Shunju
mea culpa, in which he bemoaned the economic violence that was supposedly crippling postwar Japan.

Chi To Okite [Blood and Law]
, which devoted several scenes to the incident, was produced by the Shochiku Film Studios and released in 1966. Hachisoka is dead. As of this writing, Yokoi, eighty-three years old, is in prison and in failing health. Ando, still alive, runs a film company. He was arrested twice for illegal gambling after his ‘retirement’ from organized crime.

The data on lawyers came from the
Japan Almanac
(Ministry of Justice), the Tokyo Bar Association, and the American Bar Association. Also useful was an in-depth special report, ‘A Survey of the Legal Profession,’
Economist
, July 18, 1992. So was Jack Huddleston’s
Gaijin Kaisha
, chap. 4.

The Hilton–Tokyu affair was described to me by Thomas L. Blakemore, who handled the case. It was also reported by Richard Halloran in
Japan – Images and Realities
, pp. 154–55.

The Nihon Kotsu case court procedures were related by Zappetti and Y. Mogami, court interpreter and document translator.

6. BEHIND THE SHOJI

In 1969, three players were suspended for life after it was discovered they had participated in fixing games. In fact, fixed matches in sumo were an open secret, and in 1996, a former sumo wrestler blew the whistle on stable masters who
ordered their underlings to lose for money in a highly publicized book. He and his co-author died of the same mysterious illness within twenty-four hours of each other. (Police ruled them both natural deaths.)

Talk of the CIA funneling money to the LDP had been around for years in Tokyo, but the party had always vigorously denied it. The New York
Times
reported on October 9, 1994, that the conservative Liberal Democratic Party had been funded by secret payments of millions of dollars from the CIA. The payments were part of a major covert operation during the cold war to make Japan a bulwark against communism in Asia, to check opposition led by the Socialists, and to fight off Socialist-led public resistance to building US military bases in Japan.

‘We financed them,’ the
Times
quoted Alfred Ulmer, Jr, who ran the CIA’s Far East operation from 1955 to 1958. ‘We depended on the LDP for information.’ He said that CIA had used the payments both to support the party and to recruit informers within it from its earliest days.

By the early 1960s, said Roger Hilsman, head of the State Department’s Intelligence Bureau in the Kennedy administration, the payments to the party and its politicians were ‘so established and so routine’ that they were a fundamental, if highly secret, part of US foreign policy toward Japan.

Hilsman, as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, was quoted in the
New York Times
, April 2, 1976. ‘The principle was certainly acceptable to me,’ he said.

In response to the revelation, John Dower, a leading Japan scholar at MIT, said, ‘This story reveals the intimate role that Americans at official and private levels played in promoting structural corruption and one-party conservative democracy in postwar Japan, and that’s new … We look at the LDP and say it’s corrupt and it’s unfortunate to have a one-party democracy. But we have played a role in creating that misshapen structure.’

Reports in the
Asahi Shimbun
(October 10 and 12, 1994) identified an LDP official as a
madoguchi
, or conduit. So did ‘CIA Had Japan Funding Group’,
Asahi Evening News
, October 10, 1994.

Also see the multi-part series, ‘
CIA to Yoshio Kodama’
(‘Yoshio Kodama and the CIA’), in the weekly
Shukan Bunshun
, April 15, April 29, May 13, May 20, and May 27, 1976, and ‘
GHQ Johobu, CIA, Soshite Uyoku To No Setten Wo Arau’
[‘Laundering the Connection between the GHQ Intelligence Wing, the CIA and the Right Wing’],
Shukan Asahi
, April 23, 1976, pp. 173–76.

Even after the 1996
Times
report, the LDP had steadfastly refused to admit taking any CIA money. (See the front pages of the
Asahi Shimbun, Japan Times
, and other Japanese- and English-language dailies, October 11, 1994.)

For material on vote buying, see Eiji Tominomori, ‘Structure of Sponging’,
Asahi Shimbun & Asahi Evening News
, March 19, 1976.

Mob support of the LDP has been an open secret ever since its inception. The LDP kingmaker of the 1950s, Bamboku Ono, was an adviser to the longshoremen’s association, controlled by Kobe yakuza boss Kazuo Taoka, of the Yamaguchi-gumi. When the police raided Taoka’s house in the 1960s, they found the name card of the prime minister, Eisaku Sato, in his desk. LDP members like ex-PM Kishi were not averse to attending gangster funerals, weddings and other mob gatherings. (In fact, more than one gang boss kept an office next door to that of his friendly local parliamentarian.)

In 1989, according to the
Far Eastern Economic Review
(November 21, 1991), the secretary of a large factional leader in the LDP, Hiroshi Mutsuka, solicited gangsters to suppress a book exposing corruption in his district. The same issue reported that in 1990 Shintaro Ishihara, the Man Who Could Say No to Americans, was accused of accepting illegal political contributions from notorious gangland figures like Ken Mizuno. An unidentified mobster was quoted in that
FEER
issue as saying, ‘The Yakuza are part of the LDP’ (p. 30).

For an interesting discussion of vote buying
within
the party in Japan, see Karl’s Dixon’s essay on Structural Corruption in
Pacific Community
, January 1977.

For material on Hamada, see ‘Black Current’,
Kyodo
, April 1, 1992. A good profile of Hamada appears in Kaplan and Dubro’s
Yakuza
, pp. 110–11. In March 1980, it was first disclosed in a Tokyo courtroom that Kenji Osano had received $200,000 in Lockheed money at Los Angeles Airport, money that Osano used to cover some of Hamada’s gambling debt. For reports on the disclosure, see
Asahi Evening News
, March 14, 1980, and the follow-up on March 25, 1980, and the article ‘Lockheed Payment Used to Cover Hamada Losses’ in the
Yomiuri Daily News
, March 7, 1984, and the long article ‘Black Current’,
Kyodo, Japan Times
, April 1, 1992. The
Yomiuri Shimbun
of March 11, 1977, reported that a joint FBI, IRS, and Immigration Service investigation had uncovered Osano links to the American Mafia in Las Vegas.

Media reports on the arrest of Caesars Palace Tokyo employees and death threats they were charged with making can be found in the
Yomiuri Daily News
, June 21, 29, 30, and July 11, 1975. Also see
Japan Times
, June 21, July 13, October 19, and December 19, 1975. Among those arrested and indicated were the expresident of the Tokyo Bar Association and a Toho movie producer named Okuda, who was an associate of Frank Sinatra; the two had met while he was associate producer for
Never So Few
.