Confessions of a Yakuza Read online

  I remember they used to cook the abalone in soy sauce and make it up into eight-pound packages, dozens of them, which they’d bring around. Normally you couldn’t buy them in Tokyo for love or money, so they were fetching thirty yen a package. Now, that’s expensive, when you think that the monthly salary of a man who’d been to college was around fifty yen at the time. But with our games bringing in thousands of yen at every session, we weren’t going to quibble over the price of a few abalone.

  Anyway, we paid the women about twice as much as they could get anywhere else, and we got the pick of the bunch. They brought us plaice, as well—big ones, a good two feet long, and fat, because the fishermen were all away and they had time to grow. It can’t have been easy to hide them from the policeman on the bridge they had to cross to get to our inn.

  For once, my own business was doing so well that I actually had trouble finding somewhere to keep the profits. If I told you how much we made, you probably wouldn’t believe me. But I couldn’t put it in the bank, and, times being what they were, there wasn’t much to spend it on, either. It just went on piling up.

  Okyo’s kid was literally brought up on wads of money. You remember those big bamboo baskets they used to have at the public bath in the old days, the ones you put your clothes in? Well, we used to put piles of ten-yen bills in one of those, then lay Masako down to sleep on them. They were soft and springy, and she slept well. Sometimes she’d wet herself, you know, and we’d use the spoiled bills to light the fire under the bath with.

  Still, while we were having it easy, the war situation was getting worse and worse, and in the end we decided to move out to Kashiwa, just northeast of Tokyo. Nowadays it’s pretty built up around there, from what I hear, but back then it was real country, with no town to speak of at all. We rented a big house standing in the middle of the fields, and went to live there—me and Kamezo, and Okyo and her baby.

  Village scene

  Even in those days I still had seven or eight men left, though they were all a bit long in the tooth. And we kept up the Two-Seven Circle, right on into 1945 when things were getting really rough, with air raids every day. I remember the twelfth of February, around the beginning of spring. When I arrived at the inn where we held our sessions, the manager said to me:

  “We’ve had it, boss.”

  “What d’you mean?” I said.

  “Japan’s just about finished.” He was looking more down-in-the-mouth than I’d ever seen him. According to him, there’d been a big B29 raid two days earlier, enough planes to turn the sky black, and Tokyo had been beaten to a pulp.

  His assistant was looking pale, too. “We’d better stop the games, with things the way they are,” he said.

  Well, I wasn’t any happier about the B29s than they were, but I didn’t see much point in packing up and hiding down a hole. It was carpet bombing; they flattened everything—ordinary houses, hospitals, the lot.

  The assistant went on mumbling, till Kamezo spoke up. “Look,” he said, “I know some people—there was an air raid, so they all went into the shelter. There was a great shower of incendiaries and the house was burned down, but the shelter survived. They didn’t come out again, though. So the neighbors went and looked—and found every one of them dead, done to a turn. You might as well die doing something you enjoy. Come on, then—let’s play, and to hell with them.”

  That cheered the manager up, and we decided to carry on. Then, on February 16, there was another terrific raid. This time they came over low in the sky: carrier-based planes, raking everything with machine guns and scattering incendiaries. Almost none of our planes went up to meet them, so they could do just as they liked.

  The biggest of the Tokyo raids came on March 10, and from then on there were machine-gun attacks by carrier planes almost everywhere. The big Hitachi works weren’t far away from us at Katsuta; these were attacked in June, and more than a thousand people were killed. The planes were small fighter-bombers, so it looked as if there was a carrier somewhere close. Even so, we didn’t close down the Two-Seven Circle: we were past caring by then.

  But then one morning, on July 17, something new happened. The game had just got into its stride when there was this low rumbling noise in the distance, like someone dragging a big millstone around. And it kept on coming. It was a deep, heavy kind of crunching that made you feel uneasy just to hear it. And then came the sound of horses—neighing, rushing around in a panic—from an open space quite near the inn where the army kept a number of them. Everybody half got up, then stopped there with the money in their hands, waiting. The rumbling got worse, and the next minute there was an almighty crash, as though the sky’d fallen in.

  “That was over by the station, wasn’t it?” somebody said. There was a Hitachi arms factory near the station.

  “Something blew up, I’d say.”

  “No. More likely we’re making some new weapon to flatten the Yanks with, and they’ve started testing it.”

  Surely no gun would kick up a row like that, people were just saying, when that awful rumbling started up again, followed by another great crash that turned your belly inside out. This time there was really something wrong, no mistake about it. It wasn’t any use putting on a brave face, pretending it was nothing—the sound would have put the wind up anyone. And it came again, and again, another fifteen or sixteen times.

  “What the hell is it?”

  “You know—it could be an enemy battleship.”

  “You’re right. Yes, they’re shelling us from the sea.”

  Everybody turned pale. So this is it, I thought, the American fleet’s coming ashore.

  “There’s nothing we can do about it, anyway,” I said, trying to cheer them up. “If there’s a direct hit, it’ll be the same whether you’re in bed or up.” So we all moved into the inn’s biggest room and drank our way through several crates of saké.

  It was offshore shelling, as it turned out; and they’d even been able to hear it deep in the mountains off to the west. A great fleet of ships—I don’t know whether they were battleships or cruisers—came sailing south, shelling the coast all the way. What was heartbreaking about it was that while they were slamming shells into our towns, not one of our own ships had been around....

  Before long, the war was over. But we went on gambling, right to the end.

  Free-for-all

  The man was lying flat between the quilts. The bright rays of a late winter sun were falling on the windowpanes. Inside the room, the kettle on the stove gave off a faint, soft plume of steam, and from the kitchen at the back came the sound of someone chopping something on a board.

  “A patient gave it to my father,” I was saying. “One single apple. But I felt it would be a waste to eat it. So I left it on a shelf in the kitchen and gazed at it every day. In the end, of course, it went bad. I was only four at the time, but I remember I was so upset I cried.”

  The man lay there, looking through half-closed eyes, listening with apparent pleasure.

  “Anyway,” I went on, “where were you after the war?”

  “I stayed in Kashiwa for a while. I mean, things were hopeless in Tokyo.”

  “Did you organize any gambling?”

  “Yes. All kinds of people turned up to play, you’d be surprised. With a lot of them, you had no idea what they did for a living. Some of them, even, stayed for a month or two. There were two who later got on in the world, became town councillors. They’re still in office now, so I can’t tell you their names.”

  The beams of sunlight swayed in the steam, and, off and on, the sound of children playing on the riverbank could be heard.

  “By the way,” he said, “have you ever been to a geisha party?”

  “A lot of my patients are former geisha. Most of them are in their seventies or eighties by now. Why do you ask, anyway? Are there any particular geisha you remember?”

  “Of course, lots of them. Tsuchiura wasn’t too far away, and it being a naval base, you found some real beauties there
.” He gave a sidelong glance at the woman by his bed as he spoke.

  It wasn’t long after the end of the war. I’d been having a game at a friend’s place in Tsuchiura, and I’d won some money, so I went to a geisha house. When the girls came in, there was one who was really stunning.

  “What’s that girl’s name?” I asked the guy running the show.

  “Ah. You’ve got a good eye, boss,” he said, “—just as I’d expected. Her name’s Kofuji, and she’s the girl that Yamamoto Isoroku, the commander of the Combined Fleet, took a fancy to when he was here in his younger days.”

  I was kind of tickled by the idea that this was the woman the head of the whole navy had had an affair with. Anyway, that day I left without doing more than talk a bit with her. But somehow I couldn’t get her out of my mind. So I went there pretty often after that. One day, she said to me:

  “Boss, there’s a favor I’d like to ask.... You see, I want you to take care of a sword for me.”

  “Funny thing for a geisha to ask a yakuza to do, isn’t it? What’s this all about?”

  “Apparently it’s a Bizen sword,” she said, perfectly serious still. “It scares me, and I don’t want it lying around.”

  “You’ve certainly got something on your hands there! They’re valuable, those things.”

  “I had a hundred of them until a while ago, but I got rid of all the rest.”

  I was shocked. “I could understand, say, two or three,” I said, “but—a hundred! Where the hell did you get hold of them?”

  So she explained.

  Around the time the war ended and naval officers were due to be discharged and sent home, there were various rumors going around about the occupation forces. One was that women would be raped, and it’d be safer if they shaved their heads. Another was that anyone caught with a sword on them would be arrested and shot. Well, it seems a lot of officers believed this story and just chucked their swords away, dumped them in a river or something. But some of them had swords by famous swordsmiths, and rather than lose them altogether, they got the idea of leaving them somewhere safe and getting them back later. That way, a number of officers came to see Kofuji and ask her to look after the things. The Bizen sword was one of them. It had been in the man’s family for generations; his grandfather had carried it into battle against the Russians. He told her before he left for home that she was to get rid of it if he didn’t come back for it within three years, but not before.

  “My place was completely cluttered up with swords. And you know, it’s strange, but I kept feeling chilly with them in the house.”

  “I wonder why, though?” I said a bit doubtfully.

  “It’s true.”

  “And so?”

  “So, late one afternoon, I found this farmer in the alley outside, and gave him some money to put the swords in the box he used for collecting scraps of pig feed.”

  “I bet he was pleased, wasn’t he?”

  “He’d have been in trouble if he was found out, so he piled the scraps on top of them.”

  The idea made me laugh. “Good for him!” I said. “But what about the Bizen sword—you didn’t get rid of that?”

  “I was going to, but I couldn’t bring myself to somehow.”

  “So you want me to look after it for you, eh?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “But what’ll you do if the officer comes back?”

  “I’ll tell him the Americans took it away. After all, the kind of man who’ll leave a family treasure with a geisha just because he’s afraid the Americans might catch him doesn’t deserve to have it back, does he?”

  She had a point there. After I’d agreed to take it off her hands, I got an expert to have a look at it, and he said it was a fine piece of work. He wouldn’t name a figure, though, so it must have been quite valuable. I kept it around till only recently, but as there wasn’t much sense in keeping a sword at my age, I sold it to an antique dealer. I got a good price for it, too.

  One of the “big spenders” at our games in those days was a guy called Tsukada Saburo, and his story’s worth telling you. I suppose it would have been about two months after the defeat that he first turned up. He came in carrying a big cloth bundle of money slung over his shoulder. Kamezo pointed him out to me.

  “What do you think he is?” he said, looking worried. “Not one of those, I hope.” And he crooked his finger in the sign for a thief.

  But when you heard what Saburo had to say for himself, you felt that “thief” didn’t do him justice. He was the kind of man, in fact, who makes you want to take your hat off to the human race. I mean, the way they won’t let anything keep them down for long.

  He was the seventh son of a greengrocer, but he was turned out of home when he was still a kid. After that, he tried his hand at all sorts of jobs, and ended up a rickshaw man. That was just before the war. But since he only stood about four foot seven and was kind of scrawny, he was never called up. In due course, though, he was mobilized for war work, and the place they sent him was the naval air base at Tsuchiura.

  A bunch of us were sitting there listening to him when he told us all about it.

  “You ever been inside the base?” he asked me.

  “I’ve been past it in the train, but never inside.”

  “You wouldn’t understand what happened unless you’d actually seen inside. It was the biggest supply depot in the country. You name it, they had it. And within two weeks of the end of the war the whole lot had disappeared. I mean, vanished—without a trace.”

  According to him, it was the Emperor’s broadcast—the one announcing the defeat—that started it all off.

  “It made thieves of everybody,” he said. “There were some, of course, who wept and wailed about it, but most people were as pleased as punch. Up till then, you couldn’t so much as fart without written permission for some high-up, but now it was first come, first served. And there was this treasure trove right under their noses, waiting to be cleaned out before the Yanks got to it.

  “It started with things like blankets and parachute material. They were falling over each other, dragging it out in great bundles and taking it home. The parachute stuff was silk, and worth its weight in gold. You had to be a fool not to try and nick your share.”

  But that was only the beginning. Before long, he said, it wasn’t just the civilian workers and NCOs, but anyone else who’d heard that since the defeat you could get into the base without a special pass.

  “They came in swarms, like ants. They barged into one warehouse after another—whichever was nearest—grabbed whatever came to hand, put it on carts, and hauled it off.

  “The bigger things took a bit of organizing. What happened was, the local big shots used the name of some organization—the Agricultural Co-op or something—and applied to the Supplies Department for an official transfer of property. Not that the department had much clout by then, but they must have been on the take as well, and stamped the documents for them. So naval trucks were made available, and carried off loads of heavy stuff....

  “In Takatsu,” he told us, “they’d dug deep tunnels in the cliffs, and when the raids got bad the navy shifted tons of food there to keep it safe. I was around when this was going on, so I knew where it was, and so did the people in the neighborhood. And under cover of night, they ‘evacuated’ it themselves—left the place as clean as a whistle, apparently.

  “Evacuating” military stores

  “Some of these supplies, in fact, were already in ordinary people’s homes. The military had taken over civilian storehouses to keep their own supplies in, a bit in each place —clothes, blankets, canned food, machine tools, etc. Well, with the end of the war, the original owners sort of disappeared, and nobody saw anything wrong with helping himself to them.

  “There was masses of timber in the depot, too. Forests were requisitioned during the war—leaving most of our hillsides bare as a result. They used some of the wood to build boats and so on, but a lot of it was left o
ver. So the navy turned it into charcoal and rationed it out to the families of NCOs and above.

  “I knew about this,” he said, “because while the war was still on, I’d been in charge of the men making the charcoal. I had three kilns built outside the base, and we produced bales and bales of it—good oak and beech charcoal that you’d never get in most households at the time.

  “Being an insider, there wasn’t much I didn’t know about how the other half—the officers—lived. Like what went on in the galleys, as they called them. They had everything: meat, fish, vegetables, piles of the stuff. I was always trying to lift a bit of their grub and give it to the women workers at the base. Lots of them were just middle school girls, you know; they barely got enough to eat in their own homes, and they were stunned when they heard about all that meat.”

  Another luxury the officers had was coal briquets. Heaps of coal had been commandeered from the mines—more than they could ever use—but as there was nowhere in ordinary houses where you could burn coal directly, it had to be turned into briquets.

  “One day,” Saburo went on, “this lieutenant in Supplies sent for me and said he’d give me twenty men to do the briquet-making work. I’d put ‘briquet manufacturer’ down as one of my trades in the form I’d given them, so he must have thought he was onto a good thing.

  “Well, making things is just my line—I can even make babies with other men’s wives!—and this was a cinch for me. First you powdered the coal, then made a paste out of it with water and a bit of clay. Since the clay wasn’t enough to make it set hard, we used to mix in a kind of seaweed called Ise laver as well. After that, all you had to do was shape it and dry it, and you’d got your briquets.

  “But there was a limit to the number we could turn out. I knew an ironworks in Chiba, though, where they made briquet-producing machines. So I told the lieutenant about it and suggested he order one; that way, he could keep all the officers supplied, I said.