Tokyo Underworld (45 page)

Katsushi Murata’s life and exploits were described in ‘
Jiken No Ato’
[‘After the Scandal’],
Shukan Sankei
, December 2, 1982; in the
Sunday Mainichi
, April 9,
1989, pp. 220–21; in ‘
Hanin Ga Kataru’
[‘The Criminal Talks’],
Shukan Shincho
, December 2, 1989, pp. 129–31; and Oshita Eiji,
Eikyu No Rikidozan
.

A NOTE ABOUT THE END OF THE OLD YAKUZA ERA AS REPRESENTED BY KATSUSHI MURATA

During a period of several years, beginning in the 1980s, there was a public revival of interest in yakuza, ignited by a best-selling novel about gang and prison life,
Hei No Naka No Korenai Men Men
[
Those Behind Walls Who Don’t Learn Lessons
], penned by a retired gangster named Joji Abe, which made him wealthier than he had ever been in his previous life. Abe’s success inspired other such works: a best-selling novel about yakuza wives,
Gokudo No Onnatachi [Gang Women]
, which became a hit movie and was followed by several book and film sequels. Among them were
The Lonely Hitman
, a book based on a real-life antique dealer in Osaka who rubbed people out in his free time, which sold 180,000 copies and was also turned into a film; and a popular nonfiction book and movie, and
Kizu
[
Scar
], depicting the life of a famous Shibuya gangster, Kei Hanagata. Abe even had his own talk show on Asahi TV.

Sociologists explaining the phenomenon said that the Japanese were drawn to the world of the
gokudo
(villain) and its strict moral code of honor and obligation because those traditional values were disappearing from modern Japanese society. And Abe was the first to agree, for he believed that the real
gokudo
, as he knew them, were fading way as well – which was somewhat ironic, given the suspicions that the old
bakuto
and
tekiya
had once held for members of Abe’s generation.

‘For many years, up until the time of the Olympics,’ he said in an interview, ‘being a yakuza meant living by a certain spirit and code – being unafraid, sacrificing yourself for others. The yakuza I knew put value on
giri
and
jingi –
duty and loyalty. It all began to change as Japan began to accumulate vast wealth. A new breed of gangsters appeared whose sole interest was money.’

No better example of the dying breed of mobster existed, said Abe, then his prison cellmate, Katsushi Murata, famous all over Japan as the man who killed Rikidozan.

Murata was given grudging respect, even by the authorities. Gushed an admiring police investigator, a man who had once arrested Murata on suspicion of gambling, ‘The man has ability and talent. He has a way of running his gambling sessions that one can’t easily detect. What’s more, Murata has a strong character. If you don’t have something special, you don’t rise to the top rank in a gang the way he did.’

Murata made the national headlines once more in 1989, but in a way that none of his admirers had ever imagined, when suddenly, he was in jail again – arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting his wife in a case of assault and extortion.
According to police reports and press accounts, the trouble stemmed from an unpaid loan in the sum of 1,200,000 yen that Murata’s wife, Megumi, had guaranteed on behalf of one of her hostesses. The hostess, a nineteen-year-old minor identified only as ‘A’ by police, had been paying the money back in monthly installments and had whittled the debt down to 700,000 yen when medical expenses for a sudden illness caused her to halt payment. Late one frigid night in February, Megumi and her husband broke into ‘A”s suburban Tokyo apartment and, according to police reports, began punching and kicking the teenaged hostess. When ‘A’ sought refuge in the toilet, Megumi pulled her out by the hair and continued the assault. Unable to locate any cash, ‘A”s assailants left, but the next evening, Megumi returned with a truck and three of her employees, who hauled away some of ‘A”s belongings, including a laser disc, a stereo, a washing machine and an electric gas range, worth an estimated 1.2 million yen. The police issued several arrest warrants. Murata, who checked his various pets into a neighborhood pet clinic prior to turning himself in, told police that he had only stood by and watched. The investigator on the case, noting how worn and flabby his suspect appeared, said he believed it. ‘With his diabetes,’ he told reporters, ‘he doesn’t look like he has the energy to hit anyone.’ See
Yukan Fuji
, March 25, 1989;
Sankei Shimbun
, March 25, 1989; ‘
Hakaba No Kage De Rikidozan Mo Naiteiru?’
[‘Is Rikidozan Crying in the Shadow of His Grave?’],
Sunday Mainichi
, August 19, 1989. The charges against Murato were dropped and his wife settled out of court.

An excellent article on the old and new versions of the yakuza was ‘The Honourable Mob’,
The Economist
, January 27, 1990, pp. 21–24.

An excellent survey of the
keizai yakuza
was the cover story of the November 21, 1991, edition of the
Far Eastern Economic Review
, pp. 28–35, entitled ‘Power to the Yakuza’.

‘Total annual revenue … exceeded that of … drug trafficking’ and ‘lender bank in the Pebble Beach transaction – mob connected’, from ‘A Japanese Laundry Worth $1 Billion?’
Business Week
, May 24, 1993, p. 30.

Also informative was ‘The New International Criminal and Asian Organized Crime Report’, prepared by the US Senate in 1993, after extensive hearings. It focuses on money laundering, Ken Mizuno, and Minoru Isutani, among other subjects.

Ken Mizuno descriptions and currency law violations charges also appear above, and in ‘Fraud Suspect Amassed Huge Gambling Debts’,
Japan Times
, March 29, 1992, p. 2; the
Mainichi Daily News
, issues of April 29, 1992, ‘Golf Club Developer Declared Bankrupt’; May 14, 1992, ‘Four Charged with Tax
Evasion in Golf Club Membership Sales’, and June 14, 1992, ‘Mizuno Illegally Funneled over 32 Billion Yen to U.S.’. Also see ‘Ken International Ordered to Pay 13.4 Billion Yen in Back Penalty Taxes’,
Asahi Evening News
, June 12, 1992, p. 4; ‘U.S. Agents Seize Ken Mizuno Resort’,
Mainichi Daily News
, August 20, 1992, p. 4; and ‘Mizuno Group Pleads Guilty in Golf Membership Scam’,
Mainichi Daily News
, October 16, 1992, p. 12.

Also see ‘Agents Seize Palm Springs Resort of Japanese Tycoon’,
Los Angeles Times
, August 19, 1992, p. D-2. ‘High Roller’s Past, Fortunes Fueled Probes’, by Karl Schoenberger,
Los Angeles Times
, March 16, 1992, p. A-1. ‘Mizuno’s Former Company Agrees to $65 Million Forfeiture’, U.P.I. October 5, 1993. ‘Japanese Firm Agrees To Forfeiture’, by Karl Schoenberger,
Los Angeles Times
, October 5, 1993, p. D-3. Also ‘
Gorufu Gyokai No Mondai Oni, Mizuno Ken to iu Otoko’
[‘The Problem Ogre of the Golf World: A Man Called Ken Mizuno’],
Shukan Bunshun
, September 12, 1991, pp. 194–97’, and ‘
Mizuno Ken Moto Scacho, 11 Nen Choeki’
[‘Former President Ken Mizuno Sentenced to 11 Years’],
Asahi Shimbun
, Yukan, March 25, 1997, p. 14.

BANKS, BOB HOPE, AND PRESCOTT BUSH

The mob-backed Hope Golf Club scam episode was related by American Richard Roa, who was the Tokyo sales manager for the organization and was caught in the middle of the scam. Certain details were confirmed by Hope’s lawyer at the time, Ed Barner. Desmond Muirhead, a golf architect involved with Hamada and Nicklaus, confirmed other details of that particular venture, as did Takeaki Kaneda, a former national golfing champion in Japan and a
Sports Illustrated
representative in Tokyo who unsuccessfully tried to warn Nicklaus away from the deal. Kaneda said that Nicklaus told him years later he wished he had listened to Kaneda’s advice.

A NOTE ABOUT MOB TAKEOVERS

Yakuza moneylenders have used their loan operations as a very effective takeover wedge, which gives the lie to MOF claims that the Japanese system of managed capitalism was somehow better than that of the United States because it prevented leveraged buyouts.

One very good example of such a takeover involved the Arabian Nights restaurant, which opened in 1985 on a Roppongi back street. Owned and operated by an Iraqi businessman, it was one of the most beautiful restaurants in the city. All the decor, including the gold-plated fixtures, was imported from the Middle East, as was a chef who specialized in Arabic food.

It cost the Iraqi $2–3 million to get the operation off the ground, plus an extra
$2 million he borrowed from a Japanese bank to get the lease. But business was slow and costs were surprisingly higher than usual. Unbeknownst to the owner at the time, the meat, the vegetable, and the
oshibori
(hot towels) vendors were all friends of the Japanese floor manager and were charging double the going price for their wares.

Soon, the Iraqi found himself in need of 30 million yen to pay his staff, make bank payments, and meet other obligations. Confident that a payment would soon be coming from an associate in the Middle East, he went, through an intermediary, to a Tokyo loan shark, a young Korean man who drove a fancy sports car and who offered to loan the Iraqi the 30 million yen for thirty days if the restaurant was put up as security.

The Iraqi agreed and signed the necessary documents, and the loan shark brought out a suitcase of money, putting 30 stacks of 100 crisp new 10,000-yen notes on the table, neatly lined up. He promptly took out 13 million yen as his ‘commission’. Then handed over another 3 million yen to the intermediary as
his
commission. That left the Iraqi with 24 million, and the ink on the loan document hadn’t even dried yet.

The Iraqi restaurateur paid his bills, and at the end of the thirty days, the 30 million being late arriving from the Middle East, found himself physically barred from his restaurant by several yakuza, under the direction of the moneylender, who became the new owner.

There is a veritable mountain of published data in Japanese and English on Kanemaru and the illegal contributions he received. The March 9, 1995, edition of the
Asahi Shimbun
contains an excellent full-page graph of how the illicit funds were distributed.

The Political Spectrum column of the
Asahi Evening News
, August 15, 1991, and the Kyodo News Report ‘Black Current’ contain good summaries of the activities of gang boss Susumu Ishii, the brokerage houses and the LDP.

The open court testimony by the Inagawa-kai associate in regard to the relationship between the Liberal Democratic Party and the yakuza was reported in ‘Black Current’.

The
Far Eastern Economic Review
cover story of November 21, 1991, quoted Jiro Ode, president of a finance company in Osaka with extensive contacts in the underworld, who said, ‘the Yakuza are part of the LDP. It is a relationship of mutual help, friendship, cooperation, and support. There are no straight lines, nothing dividing them. Everyone is gray.’

Shin Kanemaru, in announcing his resignation as vice-premier on August 27, 1992, admitted that he received 500 million yen in illicit contributions from
Sagawa Kyubin. This stunning admission was reported on page 1 of the
Asahi Shimbun
, morning edition, August 28, 1992, and in every other Japanese daily.

On November 27, 1992, Kanemaru testified under oath to legislators from a hospital bed that Susumu Ishii, the head of the Inagawa-kai gang syndicate, had indeed helped stop a rightist group from harassing former Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita in 1987, when Takeshita was running for the LDP presidency. This admission was also splashed across the front pages of all of the Japanese dailies the next morning.

The head of Tokyo Sagawa Kyubin, Hiroyasu Watanabe, had earlier testified in a pretrial deposition that Kanemaru had sought his help to stop the rightist group from harassing Takeshita, fearing the smear campaign would hurt Takeshita’s bid for the LDP presidency, and that he in turn had sought the help of Inagawa-chief Ishii. See ‘Kanemaru’s Reliance on Gangs Comes Out’,
Asahi Evening News
, September 24, 1992, p. 4.

Kanemaru was arrested on March 6, 1996, and made a full confession in regard to illegal donations he had accepted, mostly from construction-related firms. His lengthy confession was excerpted in English in the July 28, 1993, edition of the
Mainichi Shimbun
, for those who may be interested.

‘Obituary, Shin Kanemaru’,
Economist
, April 6, 1996, p. 108, offered a concise but detailed history of his colorful career.

A good overview of the machinations of Susumu Ishii, Sagawa Kyubin and the brokerage houses appeared in the October, November and December 1992 issues of
Tokyo Insideline
, an informed if somewhat irreverent monthly newsletter on Japanese politics, published and edited by Takao Toshikawa, which became part of
The Oriental Economist
in 1997. A summary of the ramping of the Tokyu stock appeared in the
Asahi Evening News
, August 24, 1991.

For material on the Tokyu stock crash, the Nomura scandal, and the Sagawa–Kyubin scandal, the author relied on the very heavy reportage in the Japanese media of the scandal in the early 1990s, among them: ‘
Beikoku nara, Okurasho Kambu Mo Kemusho Iki’
[‘If This Were America, the Head of the Finance Ministry Would Go to Prison Too’],
Shukan Asahi
, July 26, 1991; ‘
Tabuchi Kaicho No Jinin de Sumu no Ka?’
[‘You Think This Will End with the Resignation of Chairman Tabuchi?’] and ‘
Yakuza to Sejika Ni Kuwareta Ni-sen Oku Yen’
[‘2 Trillion Yen Eaten by the Politicians and the Yakuza’], both in
Shukan Asahi
, August 2, 1991. Also useful was an exclusive interview with Susumu Ishii, which appeared in an article entitled ‘
Yakuza No Kigyo Ka Wa Koko Made Susundeiru’
[‘Gangster Business Has Come This Far’], in the
Shukan Posuto
, August 2, 1991, pp. 36–40, and ‘
Nomura Shoken Kambu wa “Soba Soju” wo Mitomeita’
[‘The Management of Nomura Securities Admits Manipulating the Market’],
Shukan Asahi
, September 6, 1991.