Confessions of a Yakuza Read online

  The professional outfits all had a kind of ranking inside their own world, and it was up to you to give an amount suited to your own status, too. It wouldn’t do to have people saying among themselves: “Look at this miserable little bit the Dewaya have sent—and them always pretending to be so grand.” So naturally you tried to make a good showing.

  On top of all these business obligations, there were also the local shop and restaurant owners to cope with. It happened all the time in an area like ours: one of them would turn up and say, “Boss—I’m opening a new place at such-and-such an address. I hope you’ll watch out for us.” And you could hardly ignore it. So you put a bit of money in an envelope and sent one of those big wreathes of artificial flowers they set up in front of any new premises. Then, on the day they actually opened, you’d take along seven or eight of your men to drink to their success and get them off to a good start. You gave tips to the staff, and you went around the customers saying you hoped they’d patronize the place; then, when you thought the right time had come, you thanked the owner and made yourself scarce. But you stayed in touch. And anything like a funeral or a birth meant another wreath or an envelope from the boss—it all added up.

  None of our income, though, came from these establishments; apart from some “protection” money, everything we earned was through organized gambling. Anybody who messed around with anything outside that wasn’t a real yakuza. Of course, there were always people who called themselves yakuza—pimps, for instance, who hung around the red-light districts—but we wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole.

  People often confused us with the tekiya, too, who looked after any kind of outdoor entertainment. There was a tekiya boss two doors away from us called Fukuda Tengai. Whenever a circus, say, turned up, the owner would drop in to pay his respects, and Fukuda would get what they called a “cushion charge.” This was half the fee they charged each person for the cushions they set out in the circus tents. But, though we were neighbors, he operated independently, and we just left him to it.

  The sort of entertainment the yakuza were connected with was anything performed under a roof—inside a building, that is. If some place where they usually showed movies or had strip shows decided to put on a play or a recital of some kind, the manager and the head of the troupe would come along and ask for our support. We’d wish them luck, of course, but we’d also give them a little consideration wrapped up in paper. At my place, it was Kamezo who looked after everything in that line. He was a cheerful fellow, and so long as they buttered him up a bit, he was more than willing. “Right,” he’d say. “From what day to what day, was it? OK, I’ll take care of everything personally; if there’s anything that bothers you, just let me know.” Anybody in the entertainment world who was going to put on something in Asakusa knew there wouldn’t be any trouble if he had the Dewaya’s backing.

  You might wonder, then, what was in it for us. Well, they didn’t pay for our support in money so much as in kind. We did it like this. If the International Theater, for example —which was on our turf—had a new show running for a month, the manager would pop in and say something like: “We’re due to open tomorrow—and everything’s going smoothly, thanks. We’ve set the twenty-ninth and thirtieth aside as your days, so we hope you’ll come to see us then and get the money for your expenses.” What this actually meant was that they’d give the returns for those two days to the Dewaya; if admission fees for the two days came to, say, three million in today’s money, we pocketed the lot. It was the same not just in Asakusa but in every territory.

  This sounds like good money for doing next to nothing. But no boss worth his salt would ever have let it go at that. He’d accept the days’ takings, but then—seeing as he was a sort of short-term promoter—he’d call all the performers together, along with the ticket collectors and stagehands, thank them, and give them all a tip. This was usually more than their normal wages for the two days. Now, if attendance was poor, you still had to give them a decent amount; and if the takings weren’t enough to cover it, you had to dig into your own pockets. So it wasn’t a bad deal at all the manager was making....

  Anyway, what with all these customs and obligations and looking after people and keeping up appearances, the boss of a yakuza gang was bound hand and foot, and however much money came in he never really had enough.

  Where the running of the gambling joints themselves was concerned, there were all kinds of carefully worked out arrangements between the different bosses. For example, places not too far apart would always schedule their sessions at slightly different times. There wasn’t exactly a fixed time-table, but supposing there were separate joints operating in Uguisudani, Shitaya, and Asakusa, they’d arrange it so that a keen player could take in all three of them. And sometimes one boss would drop in at another place for a game. I say “for a game,” but it wasn’t just that: he’d do what was called “working the tray”—the “tray” being where the dice were tipped out. And to “work it”—this isn’t so easy to explain—meant doing various things to push the game along and get the players really turned on.

  Pace is important. A gambling joint depends on the house cut. Suppose the guy running the place—the domoto—gets a five percent share of the takings on each game, by the end of the evening he might make five million for himself if they play a hundred rounds. If play goes slowly, though, and there are only fifty rounds, then his income is cut by half. Now, games can get bogged down when the bookie calls “Place your bets!” and somebody starts racking his brains about what to do—it’s his money, after all, and he wants to win. At times like that, a boss from another place can help. He’ll slap down a wad of money as if it was so much old newspaper and say something like: “Here—which side d’you say is still short? I’ll bet on whichever you like. What’s all the delay for? You can think about it as long as you like, but you’ll never win by thinking!” That’s his way of getting the game unstuck—and he’ll push through another twenty-five rounds where otherwise it would have stopped at twenty, and your earnings go up accordingly. It’s like the men carrying the portable shrine at a festival—they work themselves and everybody else up by shouting “wasshoi-wasshoi” until there’s a proper festival mood. Once the mood’s there, everything’s fine: the games race along, and even if the customers lose money, they’ll say to you as they leave: “Thanks, I really enjoyed today’s session.”

  A lot of people seem to think that gambling’s always crooked, but they couldn’t be more wrong. There are gamblers who cheat, of course, but the real professionals never do. I mean, think about it. Naturally, you do get newcomers at some games, but there are plenty of old hands, too. So if you didn’t play it straight, you’d soon get caught. Word would get around, and people would stop coming, it’s as simple as that. So the men running their own joints inside a fixed territory never cheat under any circumstances. The people who do cheat are the gamblers who go it alone, without any kind of boss–follower relationships. They don’t have any place of their own, and they hold their sessions in a room at an inn or somewhere.

  There are dozens of ways of rigging games, but the most common one is to use loaded dice, which you get a professional dice-maker to produce; he’ll only do it through a go-between, of course, someone he can trust never to mention his name. This usually involves weighting the dice inside with lead, so that either odd or even numbers tend to turn up more often. The “shooter” then slips the loaded dice into the cup to suit himself, whenever the betting gets one-sided. But there’s another special type of dice as well, with powder inside, and a tiny hole. When you shake it, a little bit of the stuff comes out whenever it’s at a certain angle—but not enough to notice normally unless you really strain your eyes. At first it’s just a perfectly ordinary dice, but as the game progresses its balance is upset, and the spots begin to turn up more odd than even or whatever. Still, it’s always best to keep the room dark with that sort of dice. You’ve had it if anyone notices those specks of dust....

&nbs
p; One glance at a player, though, is usually enough to tell you what kind of person he is. Better still, watch how he handles his money. Generally speaking, the loser in life is a loser at dice. He’s so keen to win that he can’t see how things are as a whole. He dithers over which way to bet, and then bets without looking properly. It’s a bit like Sumo wrestlers. If a wrestler feels pressed or uncertain what to do, his body tightens up and won’t move as he wants it to; he’s lost the bout even before he’s put any effort into it. You often see that kind of bout, and you see just the same sort of thing with gambling. A wrestler who’s undecided may use his arms, but he can’t use his legs properly at the same time. Well, he may use them, but his mind is there before him, and he ends up losing.

  Another thing: the professional gambler never worries about where a customer got the money he has to play with. After all, money can’t talk, it’s just pieces of paper, so you can never tell what he went through to get hold of it. The cash you see him holding in his hand might have come from stripping the quilts off his wife as she lay sick in bed, or by hocking all her kimonos and the sashes with them, but you can’t afford to worry about things like that.

  There’s a line in an old song: “Using the money he sold his missus for.” Well, there really were men who’d sell their wife to a brothel so they could gamble with the money. It wasn’t hard to find a “broker” in those days—the sort that bought and sold women—and a man could just go to one of them and say: “I need some cash. I’ll leave the wife with you, so lend me some till tomorrow.” “OK,” the broker would say. “Let’s see now—I reckon she’d fetch”—and he’d name a figure—“so I’ll give you half.”

  But he’d never win with money he’d gone to such lengths to get—he’d lose the lot. So what happened then? “We made an agreement, didn’t we?” the other man would tell him, and he’d take his wife off and sell her to a brothel.

  As for myself, gambling was my profession, and no matter how much a loser like that cried and begged me to do something, it was none of my business.

  Let’s face it, gambling is a mug’s game. It’s like putting an old pestle in an empty mortar and grinding away with it; the pestle gradually gets shorter, till you’ve got nothing left. Things are arranged that way from the start, so that the money, in the end, is all swallowed up. But you can’t stop people hoping their lucky number will come up. It’s pretty frightening, really, when you think about it....

  Osei

  You may remember I made friends in jail with someone called Muraoka, who helped me get started in Uguisudani. Well, a year or two later he went off to Manchuria, but before he left he asked me to keep an eye on his two stepsisters. He’d rented a house for them not far away. Muraoka had a bull neck, a square jaw, and a flattened nose, but both girls were really pretty, and the oldest of them, Osei, was bright as well. She had a way with men ... she’d get a man interested in her, then watch for a chance to duck out of reach, but still keep him dangling on a string. Her timing was perfect.... Neither of them, in fact, really needed any looking after at all.

  Anyway, I saw quite a lot of Osei myself over the years. “Uncle,” she used to call me. I had a wife by then, of course, but I didn’t think of myself as being all that old, so one day I told her not to call me that. What was wrong with “brother,” I asked. But she just laughed: “You might take advantage of it,” she said. “I’ll settle for uncle.” And she stuck to it, right to the end.

  One time—it was probably still fairly early in the war, because business was lousy around then—I didn’t see her for about ten days, then when she did show up she said:

  “Uncle—I’ve got a very special favor to ask.”

  “What is it,” I said, “and why all of a sudden like this?”

  “Lend me some money, will you?”

  “How much?”

  “A thousand yen.”

  That shook me. It wasn’t the kind of sum you asked anyone for lightly. I wanted to know why.

  “It’s got nothing to do with you,” she said. “Just lend it to me and don’t ask questions.”

  “Look, Osei,” I told her, “are you trying to make me feel small or something? You know I don’t have that kind of money at my place.”

  For quite a while, in fact, we’d been going through such a rough patch that I hardly had anything available, let alone enough to lend people. Luckily, I’d been able to farm out some of my men elsewhere, so I could just get by, but there was hardly any cash in hand at all. Being a man, I naturally wanted to help out a pretty girl like her, but this was one case where even that was impossible.

  So what do you think she said next? She asked me to be a guarantor. The catch was, I was supposed to guarantee a woman—her—being used as security. I’d better explain.

  There was a pawnbroker in Asakusa called Marushichi, and Osei had hocked a great pile of kimonos to them for a thousand yen. For a pawnbroker to fork out money like that, the kimonos themselves must have been worth several times that much. Apparently, the reason she’d borrowed such a hefty amount was that there were some goods she wanted to buy up for resale. She didn’t tell me as much herself, but I was pretty sure it was black-market stuff. She just couldn’t get enough money together, though, so she’d talked about it to a man called Seishichi, a playboy whose father owned a lot of land in Asakusa. It seems she was having an affair with him.

  According to Osei, Seishichi had told her: “I could lend it to you easily enough, but that’d be no fun. Why don’t we do it like this? There’s another pawnbroker called Maruto. If I ask them, I’m sure they’ll offer you more for the kimonos than Marushichi did. So the first thing to do is redeem them, then take them and hock them at Maruto.”

  “Yes, but I don’t have any cash,” Osei had said, “so how can I get them out of the first place?”

  Seishichi laughed. “That’s the interesting part. You can pawn yourself instead. Then while you’re sitting in the cage at Marushichi, I’ll take the clothes to Maruto and borrow the money there. If I take them myself, they’ll give me a good rate, so I’ll bring the money back, pay off Marushichi with interest, and get you back. There—isn’t that a good idea?”

  It sounded typical of him to me. Only somebody with his time and money to waste could come up with such a harebrained scheme. His father, too, believed in burning the candle at both ends—he even told me once that he’d cover any losses his boy made at my place—so no wonder Seishichi had turned out that way. “Fun” was the name of their game.

  “I’m not going to interfere with anything you two want to do,” I told Osei, “but Marushichi’s always been known as a respectable business. I’m sure they’d refuse to take a woman instead of a normal pledge.”

  “I know,” said Osei. “That’s why I want you to help. If only you said you’d be my guarantor, they’d hardly be able to refuse. They might not trust me, but with you in on it ...”

  For one reason or another, and being at a bit of a loose end anyway, I sent for Seishichi and asked him whether he thought he could bring it off.

  “Leave it to me, boss,” he said. “I swear I won’t do anything to embarrass you.”

  So in the end I agreed, and the three of us went along to Marushichi. The owner, not surprisingly, sounded shocked.

  “Nobody does that kind of thing, I’m afraid,” he said. “No pawnshop could keep going if it returned goods without getting the money back first.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “And I know we’re asking a lot. But if we leave Osei here instead, couldn’t you let us keep the kimonos for a while?”

  That shocked him even more. “Come on, boss, give me a break, will you?” he said. “We deal in things, not bodies.”

  “Well, then—this may sound weird, and it makes me look a fool, at least—but couldn’t I be the pledge while Osei’s here? That’d be good enough, surely?”

  “You must be joking. It’d scare all my customers away, having a boss like you hanging around the shop.... Still ... you mu
st have pretty good reasons for going as far as that. OK, then: I’ll give you back the goods. But make sure you bring in the money before the day’s out.”

  So he gave way in the end, and brought out all the kimonos. Osei, to make it look right, went and sat inside the cage behind the counter. Then Seishichi disappeared with the bundle of clothes, and got Maruto to pay up on the spot.

  He’d known what he was talking about, boasting that he could take care of everything: I found they’d lent him two thousand yen. I mean, two thousand—a ridiculous amount! I reckon it was his reputation more than the actual value of the stuff that did it. Anyway, we gave Marushichi their money back with interest, and Osei did what she wanted to with the extra cash. She used it on some black-market deal, that’s for certain. And she must have made quite a bit on it, too, because it wasn’t long before she’d got her kimonos back from Maruto as well.

  One thing that showed she’d made a decent profit was this. I suppose it was a month or two after the pawnshop business, and I was still kicking my heels; I couldn’t organize any games, because you need customers for that, and there weren’t any. So one day I took my last hundred yen in ready cash and went to play at a place run by a boss called Gen-chan, in Senju.

  But you’re never lucky at times like that. Before I knew what hit me, I’d lost it all. As I was sitting there feeling disgusted with myself, Gen-chan came up and said: “You haven’t got warmed up yet. How about another try?” Unlike some of us, he was doing pretty well in those days, and there were at least fifty men in the room.