Tokyo Underworld (6 page)

To some Japanese, the tall rangy Oklahoman embodied the ideal image of the American, the one they saw in the popular TV series
Father Knows Best
. He lived with his wife, a graphic designer with the State Department named Frances Baker, in a newly built American-style house that stood on land in central Tokyo purchased at bargain basement prices. There was a big, modern, American-style kitchen and a huge refrigerator stocked full of food. Blakemore’s dogs, a pair of blooded Irish setters, ate better than most Japanese.

Tokyo was a city brimming with opportunity of all sorts where there were also thousands of other
gaijin
– ex-Occupationnaires, carpetbaggers, drifters on the make – whose presence caused many Japanese observers to bemoan the transformation of Tokyo as a ‘miserable colonial city’.

One of them was American Ted Lewin, a thickset, flashily dressed man in his fifties, of Asian extraction it was rumored, who traversed the ruined city in a black Cadillac limousine, one of the few deluxe cars in a sea of Army jeeps and three-wheeled trucks. Lewin, a mobster formerly associated with Al Capone, introduced casino gambling to the Japanese.

Gambling was illegal in Japan and had been for centuries (the old shoguns had believed that such a ban was necessary to maintain order among the populace, even though they themselves occasionally invited the
bakuto
into the castle for a private gaming session). Indeed, the only type of public wagering allowed was on thoroughbred racing under the aegis of the Ministry of Agriculture and on municipally sponsored bicycle and motorboat races established after the war specifically to raise needed revenue for local government. In fact, the Japanese authorities took the anti-gambling laws so seriously they once blocked a raffle at the American Club.

But Lewin, who had been in and out of Asia since the 1930s – he had managed the Riviera Club in Manila and had reportedly maintained a business relationship with the Japanese Imperial
Army there during the early stages of the war – had a fairly good idea of how things worked in Japan. He had paid a $25,000 bribe to a certain Japanese politician, one of the first recorded post-Occupation bribes, and that was enough for the concerned authorities to look the other way while he opened up an operation on the Ginza.

The set-up looked like something out of a Warner Brothers movie. On the first floor was a nightclub restaurant, with a Filipino band, called the Club Mandarin managed by Lewin’s Taiwanese unwitting landlords. On the second, down a narrow back corridor near the restrooms, was the casino. There was a peephole, several levels of guards, and double-layered walls enclosed by iron shutters. In the inner sanctum stood a big Las Vegas – quality roulette wheel, as well as craps, blackjack and baccarat tables. Thanks to the patronage of the diplomatic crowd, Japanese politicians, and assorted black market gang bosses, several hundred thousands of dollars changed hands there every night.

Lewin also opened another club, the Latin Quarter, in Akasaka, noted for its red curtains and risqué entertainment. As one Japanese journalist wrote, describing live sex shows and rampant drug use, ‘It was a real 100% American style club, meaning that the mood was one of freedom and that it operated outside the law.’ Lewin’s Latin Quarter partner, Yoshio Kodama, was a former operative in the Japanese military who had taken part in the rape of China. His floor manager was an ex-CIA agent named Al Shattuck, a tall, rugged, bespectacled man in his thirties who, as shall be seen, was about to become famous in Japan – but in a way that he perhaps never imagined. Shattuck’s Japanese assistant was a veteran of naval intelligence. Lewin’s chauffeur and interpreter was a Korean-American from Hawaii with ties to the Tokyo-based ethnic Korean gang Tosei-kai.

Lewin’s political contributions in high places served him well. Although police closed down his casino twice in widely publicized raids, each time, after a short interval, Lewin was back in business
in a new location in the same general vicinity – operating under the Mandarin moniker. He was later reported to be involved in gunrunning, drug smuggling and prostitution as well. It was only after a phony stock scheme was uncovered in which Lewin swindled Japanese and Chinese investors out of hundreds of millions of yen that he wore out his welcome.

That other notorious foreign operation of note, Lansco, remained in business, continuing to generate profits by going into the pachinko business, a craze that swept Japan at the time. Pachinko was a form of early American pinball, introduced to Japan in the 1920s as a crude candy store game, which produced various prizes. Due to the space limitations Japan faced, the machine had evolved into a compact, upright, glass-fronted apparatus using tiny silver steel balls. The player sat in front of the device and by manipulating a lever propelled a rapid succession of balls up to the top of a board covered with a maze of steel pegs, the idea being to maneuver them into special payoff slots producing bonus balls redeemable not for free games but for prizes. In the postwar era, the prizes became daily necessities like coffee, canned fruit, sugar, soap and domestic cigarettes like Golden Bat. Since it cost so little to play and was the essence of simplicity itself, the popularity of pachinko skyrocketed. By 1953, there were over a million machines housed in some 50,000 pachinko parlors, all filled to capacity, day and night. Critics complained the pachinko boom was creating a nation of idiots and that it also increased the crime rate. Indeed, people were so eager to try it, they would literally steal for the money to play.

Under Japanese law, pachinko was technically not gambling because the prizes were goods, not currency. But this being Japan, where there was always a dichotomy between surface appearance and reality, the winners could sell their bounty for cash at nearby back-alley exchange stores.

Lansco made money by supplying prizes (goods obtained from
friends at Army post exchanges) to a chain of pachinko shops in the Ginza area owned by a Korean yakuza and even supplied ball bearings, purchased at a discount from a military supplier. However, a bizarre series of events put Lansco out of business. A frail, stateless White Russian youth named Vladimir Boborov had joined the firm as executive assistant to Zappetti along with his fiancée, a young Russian woman named Nina, who became the Lansco bookkeeper. It was Vladimir and Nina’s plan to emigrate to the Soviet Union to join the Communist Party and have babies so they could donate them to the state. When Vladimir found himself unable to get a passport, however, he decided to sneak into the motherland and lay the groundwork.

Boborov and a friend drove a 1953 red Dodge all the way from Tokyo up to the port of Wakkanai, the northernmost tip of Japan on the island of Hokkaido, not far from the Russian mainland. There they procured a rowboat and headed out across the Straits of Sakhalin. The currents, however, would not cooperate. They became lost in a thick fog and when it cleared they discovered they were back on the Hokkaido coastline. On reaching shore they were arrested by the Japanese police and interrogated by the US CIA on suspicion of being Communist infiltrators. The authorities had found the red Dodge and demanded to know who their accomplices were. Soon they were questioning Zappetti and the others on suspicion of being Communist sympathizers.

It wasn’t long after that episode that ‘The Raid’ occurred. It happened one afternoon when Zappetti and the others were at their second-floor desks in the Lansco Building, toting up quarterly profits. They had pulled out three big green metal containers – one full of Japanese yen, one for military payment certificates (MPC), and one for US dollars – which they kept in a desk drawer and had counted out what amounted to over a million dollars in currency. Zappetti had just removed 3 million yen for pocket money and closed and locked the containers when in strode an American flashing an Army CID (Criminal Investigation Division) badge accompanied by several uniformed Japanese policemen.

‘This is a raid,’ said the CID man. ‘Don’t move. Don’t touch anything. And keep your mouths shut.’

A Japanese policeman reached for the three metal containers, still on the desk, only to be stopped by the man from the CID.

‘Don’t touch those boxes,’ he barked.

The policeman was momentarily stunned. Years of obeying GHQ orders had perhaps made him and his colleagues temporarily forget that the Occupation was over and the Americans were no longer in charge – ostensibly, at least. The CID man picked up all three containers and, declaring he was ‘confiscating’ them as ‘evidence’, took them away. The Japanese police stayed around to arrest the Australian for illegal possession of MPC.

It never did become clear why Lansco was raided or what happened to the million dollars the CID had taken that day. Zappetti figured he had just been robbed by American Intelligence. At any rate, Lansco was now effectively out of business. One by one, the partners split up and disappeared. Vladimir was arrested again, this time for operating yet another incarnation of Lewin’s Mandarin casino – another bizarre detour on the road to his Marxist paradise – and he was kicked out of the country after the Soviet Union agreed to take him and the Japanese government decided to issue a passport. Leo Yuskoff, Vladimir’s associate at the Mandarin for a time, also emigrated to Moscow, where after being arrested by the KGB on suspicion of being an American spy he was allowed to join the party. Ray Dunston then started his English school in Tokyo, perhaps or perhaps not the only quasi-literate high-school dropout to do so. And Zappetti, not knowing who to bribe in the new order and reduced to running slot machines and the ‘onlies’ at the Hotel New York (the seedy bordello for GIs on R&R from Korea, where trade had also fallen off with the end of the Korean War), found himself drawn into the murky world of professional wrestling – yet another dubious area of US–Japan commercial intercourse – and then, in turn, into armed robbery.

It is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which professional wrestling captured the imagination of the post-Occupation Japanese public. Suffice it to say that the sport, one of the very, very few where Americans routinely went down to defeat at the hands of smaller Japanese, electrified the nation as nothing else had in the postwar history of Japan. Not only did it single-handedly resuscitate the wounded Japanese national psyche, still smarting from defeat in war and stung by the ongoing unofficial occupation of their country by the Americans, but it also jump-started Japan’s fledgling television industry. Almost overnight, the phenomenon spawned dozens of books by serious historians and sociologists and clearly demonstrated for the first time since the war just how strongly the Japanese clung to their ideas of being Japanese.

The
puro-resu bumu
, as it was called, officially began on the night of February 19, 1954, with an unprecedented and highly dramatic tag team match held in Tokyo, pitting two professional wrestlers from San Francisco – the Sharpe Brothers, Ben and Mike, against a twenty-nine-year-old retired sumo wrestler of some repute named Rikidozan and his partner, ten-time national amateur judo champion Masahiko Kimura.

It wasn’t the first professional wrestling match held in Japan; there had been a handful of exhibitions before the war. But most Japanese had preferred their own ancient sport of sumo to the sort of gouge and bite practiced by the Westerners. Sumo was a sport that dated back to the fourth century in which wrestlers wearing topknots and clad only in loincloth-like garb tried to force their opponents out of a small dirt ring. Size, weight and strength were key factors (wrestlers were routinely expected to eat themselves into obesity), and the matches were filled with pomp and ritual tied to Shinto, Japan’s native religion of nature and ancestor worship. The combatants purified themselves in sacred pre-bout rites, which included tossing salt.

This time, however, it was different. The Sharpe Brothers were
the reigning world tag team champions. Ben at 6′6″, 240 pounds, and Mike at 6′6″, 250 pounds, had defended their joint title successfully for five years running and both, still in their twenties, were in their prime. They were bona fide world stars, and the fact that athletes of their magnitude had been persuaded to come to an impoverished country like Japan was considered a major coup – in those days, Japan ranked so low on the list of places to tour internationally that a visit by, say, the Belgian foreign vice minister made headlines in Tokyo. In the weeks leading up to the Sharpes’ arrival, newspapers were filled with stories about them. Tickets were sold out well in advance, and so were the rights to televise the bouts on Japan’s two fledgling TV networks – the quasi-national NHK and NTV, Japan’s first commercial station.

Rikidozan was half a foot taller and some fifty pounds heavier than Kimura at 5′8″, 170 pounds, but when the capacity crowd of 12,000 people at Kokugikan sumo arena in Eastern Tokyo saw the four combatants together in the ring for the first time, they emitted a collective groan.

‘Those Americans are huge,’ said the ring announcer. ‘How can they possibly lose?’

The symbolism was all too painfully clear, as one Japanese journalist wrote later of the event. ‘The difference in physical size, especially in Kimura’s case, triggered painful memories among the spectators of Japan’s devastating loss in the Pacific War. It was a reminder of the very deep complex Japanese felt toward the Americans.’

But then the match began and something very surprising happened. Rikidozan flew into the ring and began pummeling Mike Sharpe with powerful karate chops. As the American gradually retreated under the furious onslaught and eventually gave way to his brother, the crowd erupted into an astonished cheer. When Ben Sharpe entered the ring, Rikidozan continued the frenzied attack and sent him reeling from corner to corner too, until he finally collapsed in a daze. Rikidozan pounced on him for
the count of three and the fans shot to their feet in mass hysteria, tossing seat cushions, hats and other objects into the air.

The pandemonium in the arena, however, was as nothing compared to what was going on outside. At outdoor television sets installed around Japan as promotional devices, gigantic crowds had gathered to view the proceedings, among them the 20,000 onlookers who had crammed into the tiny West Exit Square of Shimbashi Station, staring up at a twenty-seven-inch dais-mounted ‘General’ and cheering wildly as Riki beat the Americans senseless. The mob was so large that it overflowed onto the main thoroughfare in front of the station, blocking traffic. Unable to move, taxi drivers simply parked their cabs in the middle of the street and joined the raucous throng.