Confessions of a Yakuza Page 20

  “He agreed right away. So I went down there and told them what I wanted; but they said they didn’t make them any more, nobody was buying them. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but orders are orders, so do what you can, and just name your price.’

  “ ‘Well,’ they said, ‘we could do it, but it’ll cost you seventy thousand.’ A hell of a price. But I told them OK, go ahead—it wasn’t my money, after all. And for two whole days they gave me the red-carpet treatment, with geisha laid on ... I couldn’t walk straight for a week.

  “A while later, word came that it was ready, so I went to the lieutenant to get the money. But all he gave me was a requisition order, no cash, and when I turned up in Chiba with it, the poor factory owner just burst into tears. You see, with one of those orders, you could walk off with anything—cars, cows, horses, boats, anything—just by handing over a slip of paper. And if anyone objected, they put the MPs onto him.

  “After all the wine, women, and song I’d had at their expense, I felt bad about it, but there wasn’t anything I could do. I got them to help me load it on the truck, and took it away. And it worked: it turned out thirty briquets at a time. I was impressed; the officers’ wives were pleased; and the lieutenant was plain delighted—told me that on the battlefield I’d have been decorated for it....”

  “Was there really all that much stuff at the base?” Okyo said, putting her head on one side as if she had trouble believing him.

  “There was! Oh yes, they made a packet out of what they stole.”

  “If I’d known, I’d have gone along myself,” somebody else put in. And they all looked as if they’d missed out on something.

  “That’s what I said, didn’t I?—anybody who didn’t join in was a fool. But you know—real thieves are in a different class. We had a few of them as well.” Saburo stared around at everybody and took a swig of his tea.

  “The biggest of the lot was the lieutenant himself. He was a real quick-change artist. Almost overnight, he got rid of everything to do with the navy—his epaulets, his sword, his cap. Then he called everybody of foreman rank together and told us: ‘As you know, this air depot, like everywhere else, has got to wind up business before the Americans arrive. I need your cooperation. You’ll all be wanting to get home as soon as possible yourselves, so from now on I’m going to pay you a daily allowance of five hundred yen.’

  “That made everyone rub their eyes. I mean, till then our salaries had been thirty yen a month. There were about fifty men of our rank, and we all jumped at the offer. What the actual work involved was loading heavy stores onto trains. There were plenty of sidings inside the base, and every morning dozens of freight cars came in for us to load.

  “Mostly it was steel plates, brass, sheets of copper, duralumin, and other alloys—high-grade stuff they used for making aircraft axles and so on. There was masses of tin as well, in bars the shape of bricks. As I found out later, one of them alone would have fetched thousands on the black market. Anyway, the loads were so heavy they made the springs sag if we shoved in anything over a quarter of the car’s capacity.

  “The trouble was that, like a fool, I thought it was going off to be handed over to the occupation authorities. But I was wrong. The bastards in charge knew it was worth too much for that. They’d worked out that if they got it hidden away before the Americans came, then sold it on the black market, they could make a fortune. And there we were, slaving away to make it easy for them.”

  “You mean, you did the work without knowing what they were up to?” one of us asked.

  “Yep. We were soft—we followed the lieutenant’s orders. Just went on loading till the warehouses were empty.”

  There was a groan from everybody in the room.

  “You really don’t know where they hid the stuff?” I asked, feeling a bit suspicious.

  But Saburo took it in his stride. “If I did, you’d have heard about it,” he said. “You could have bought all Hokkaido and Kyushu with that much stuff. So if I had any leads, I would’ve asked you to help track it down....

  “At any rate, payday came around at the end of August, and the lieutenant brought along this orange crate full of money. He took it out in bundles and handed it around. We were thrilled, of course—looking back on it, we must have been real dopes. You see, it was military scrip, issued by the navy. Not real money —pay for the troops, except there weren’t any troops left.”

  “Wow,” said Kamezo admiringly, with his arms folded across his chest. “That lieutenant of yours had brains.”

  “I know—we weren’t any match for him. He’d been to the Imperial University, so he was supposed to be bright.... Anyway, I was furious. But you never know when your luck’s going to change, do you? Not long afterward, I was sitting on a pile of firewood, eating my lunch, when along comes the head of the Accounts Department, on horseback, having a look around. ‘Here, Tsukada,’ he says, all high and mighty, ‘if there’s anything you need, just let me know.’

  “ ‘Fuck you,’ I felt like telling him. ‘You take all the best for yourself, and then get generous.’ But I managed to keep it to myself and said ‘Well, major, I’d like a truck really, but I haven’t got a permit.’

  “So he grins and says ‘That can be arranged. I’ll tell the transport section. How many do you want?’ ‘Four, please,’ I say. ‘Right,’ he says, not turning a hair.

  “Well, they gave me the permit—said the major had authorized it. So I dashed off on my bike and relieved the transport pool of four charcoal-burning trucks, then went straight off and called the ironworks in Chiba.

  “ ‘I’ve got that briquet machine,’ I told the owner, ‘so come and get it. Be quick about it, or someone else’ll pinch it!’

  “The next day, he and one of his people came over on bicycles. The machine was already loaded on a truck. Their eyes almost popped out of their heads when I told them they could have the truck as well. ‘Take it in return for the night with the geisha,’ I said. ‘I’ll never forget this as long as I live,’ the owner answered, with tears running down his cheeks. And off he drove, waving to me as he went. It was funny, really—all that fuss over something I’d swiped myself.

  “After that, I used the other trucks to make off with everything I could lay my hands on. Not being the lieutenant, I let everybody who helped me have their cut, so I wasn’t short of helping hands. In my case, though, it wasn’t just the depot stuff I was after: I knew where they’d stashed supplies in the hills and in bunkers here and there. But it was a race against time. We kept at it day and night, and it went so well that just before we all split up, I decided to throw a party for them.

  “About twenty-five of them turned up, so I put them in the trucks and took them to an inn up in the hills, a small hot-spring resort. We had to get out and push where it got too steep for those charcoal-burning things. But we made it eventually, and I rounded up all the geisha in the place.

  “I’d taken along booze and cigarettes, sugar, blankets and other stuff, so they gave us a royal welcome. We had a whale of a time; two days we stayed. But then, while my back was turned, I found that all the trucks except one had disappeared. D’you know what had happened? My own fucking men had gone and stolen them! It meant there were thieves everywhere : you couldn’t relax with anybody. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!... So I told the rest of them to go to hell, and came away on my own in the last truck.”

  “Did you ever get the trucks back?” one of us asked him.

  “Like hell I did! You didn’t expect me to go cap in hand and report it to the police, did you? Anyway, by the time I got back to the base there wasn’t a thing left. Nothing. It wasn’t just the stuff in the warehouses, either: there weren’t any warehouses any more. Roofs, walls, they’d stripped them clean. Not a telephone or power cable left. Not a telegraph pole. Even the underground cables had been dug up and had disappeared into thin air.”

  “And the stuff you swiped,” I said, “it’s still stashed away somewhere?”

  “Yep
. You name it, it’s there.”

  “What kind of things?” I asked him. Cars, he said, engines, electric fans, sewing machines, sugar, alcohol, tin, sheets of steel, silk—it seems he’d even got an electrocardiograph, which you couldn’t have found even in the best hospitals then. So I asked him if he couldn’t show us some of it. Saburo looked as if that was just what he’d been waiting for, and he started bringing samples in. One thing that sticks in my mind is a bale of silk—thick, heavy stuff like damask, a yard wide and a hundred yards long. I’m not exaggerating. Pure silk.

  Well, all good things come to an end. I heard later that he’d set himself up in business and made a packet. But, before long, someone put the finger on him, he was investigated by the occupation people, and all the stolen goods he still had left were confiscated, though he didn’t get sent to jail.

  But, you know, all the while he was telling us his story, he never looked sorry for himself. In fact, the worse things got, the more he laughed about it. He was a real character, he was....

  Below Zero

  It was just after I’d turned forty-seven, so it must have been 1951. The Korean war was going strong, and my new gambling place in Tokyo was doing really well. Early that spring, Osei suddenly turned up again, out of the blue. I was surprised, I can tell you—I mean, there hadn’t been a word from her since she disappeared years ago.

  “Osei!” I said. “What’ve you been up to?”

  “I’m sorry,” she answered, smiling. “Not even contacting you all this while.”

  “You had me worried. I didn’t know what to do, I owe you money and—”

  “Now, stop it,” she said. “What’s that between friends like us?”

  “Well, anyway, it’s good to see you.”

  And I took her through to the back room. She looked just as smart as always, but there was something foreign-looking about her this time. Her rings, and the things in her hair, the fastener on her sash—they didn’t seem quite Japanese.

  “What’s brought you back here now?” I asked her when we’d settled down.

  “I need somewhere to stay for a while,” she said. She was always one for springing things on you like that. Whatever her reasons, though, I couldn’t refuse, so I told her she could stay as long as she liked.

  But it led to trouble in the end. I found out later that she was dealing in stimulants, and she’d come to Tokyo on business. From time to time, I’d see her taking cans or bottles of something into her room, but if I asked her what was in them she just wriggled out of it, said it wasn’t important.

  I, for one, wasn’t going to press her if she preferred to keep it secret, but Okyo was really worried. She’d never much liked Osei.

  “It’s not that I mind you being soft on her,” she said. “But no good’s going to come of having her here.”

  “You don’t need to get so burned up about it,” I told her, trying to calm her down. “She’ll be going back to Kobe before long.”

  But, to tell the truth, I was a bit scared myself as well. The guy who brought the stuff was just a kid—tall, about twenty, probably a student. “Good morning,” he’d say, coming in with a big suitcase. “Sorry to barge in like this.” Then Osei would disappear upstairs with him, and you wouldn’t hear a sound from them for a couple of hours till the kid came clattering down the stairs again. “Thanks. See you,” he’d say, and leave.

  This began to put the wind up me, and I made up my mind to have it out with her. But she must have cottoned on, because one day she just cleared out, without a word, and never came back.

  It was about a month and a half after she’d disappeared again that I got a summons from the police.

  When I turned up at the station, I discovered it had to do with liquid amphetamine. I knew about the stuff, of course: Saburo—the guy I was just talking about—once brought a can of it to my place. When I asked him where he’d got hold of it, he said there’d been loads of it in the cellars of the navy hospital; apparently the kamikaze pilots had been using it to help them stay alert. He was selling it at ten yen an ampoule. But I told him to get lost: the old boss of the Dewaya, and Muramatsu too, had both been killed by drugs.

  A steady flow of it had been coming onto the black market, and it wasn’t hard to find—at one stage they were even selling it openly at ordinary drugstores. And for a while after the war the number of addicts was a real problem. But in 1951 or 1952, the police began to crack down on it. Osei, according to the detective I spoke to, was known to be a dealer, and though they hadn’t caught her or the carrier, they’d more or less worked out the route they’d been using.

  “Look,” the detective said, “do us a favor, will you? We know you don’t handle the stuff yourself, but you’re in for aiding and abetting. So why not just admit it? It won’t count as a serious offense.”

  There was a lot more of the same spiel. Their methods may have changed since the war, but they were still bastards—poking their noses into everything you did. Anyway, it went to trial. I had two good lawyers—one had been a judge, the other a member of the Lower House—but, given my own statement and the police report, I was told I’d be lucky to get away with only a year in jail. So I decided to serve the sentence without appealing. I was out on bail at the time the sentence was first confirmed, and it wasn’t until September 1953 that I actually went inside.

  After keeping me for about a month in a Tokyo jail, they decided to send me and ten other men north to Hokkaido, to a prison at the far end of the island, across the strait from Russia. We went by train, then ferry, then train again; two days, it took.

  The chief thing I remember about life in Abashiri is working in conditions that made you wonder how the warders could stand it. Unless the temperature went down to minus twenty-two, they kept us at it in the fields outside even in a gale or a blizzard. Then, when the snow really settled in and work in the fields became impossible, they sent us up into the hills to cut down timber. The snow made it much easier to tow the trees away. They were big, those trees—a good four feet across the trunk—and after hacking them down, we’d drive a couple of big spikes into the wood, fasten ropes to them and, with a yell at the horses, haul them off like sledges down the slopes.

  Horses are amazing creatures. I mean, the strength they’ve got—the way they’d heave and heave at those great trees, with the steam rising off their backs, till they finally got them moving. You see, the trunks were heavy—several times heavier than in summer—because their bark was frozen. The heaviest of the lot were the yews, probably the best-quality wood available then, with a very close grain; they used to make pencils out of it. But it was hard, too: if you banged your head against it, it made you see stars, like being swiped with an iron bar.

  Getting the roots up was the toughest job of all. Even the horses couldn’t budge them if the trees had only just been felled. So they’d leave them for a year, then drive an iron thing with points like a rake into the stump, hitch five horses together, and tug it out. Later, they’d cut it up small and use it as fuel in the prison kitchens and the stoves.

  It’s funny, you know—while we were doing that kind of work, we’d forget all about being prisoners, we’d get so wrapped up in it. The men really put their backs into it, sweating like pigs, and whenever a great big stump suddenly tilted over and slipped out of the ground, their faces lit up like kids....

  There was one prisoner in my cell that I remember well. Nagano Seiji, his name was.

  Nagano told me he’d been a foreman at a building site in Tokyo. One day, he got into an argument with one of the laborers; the other man pulled a knife, so Nagano whipped out a sword he’d got hidden away and sliced his right arm off at the shoulder.

  “He died almost immediately—loss of blood,” Nagano said. “I’d had some practice at it.”

  I asked him what he meant, and he said he’d cut off dozens of arms during the war.

  “Come off it,” I told him, “I don’t believe it.”

  “Why not? And I’m not tal
king about enemy troops, either.”

  “You mean it was our own men?”

  “That’s right.” He nodded and grinned. “Of course, they weren’t alive....”

  Well, I thought it was a lot of bullshit, and if it was a joke, it was a pretty sick one. But he wasn’t kidding, as he explained.

  He’d been in the attack on Hsühou in March of the year after full-scale war had broken out between Japan and China. But his unit had been ambushed and as good as wiped out.

  “We were about halfway across a field of wheat when suddenly we were caught in enemy crossfire—a real hail of bullets. The next thing we knew, the Chinese had withdrawn, but our company and platoon commanders had been killed, and when the corporal did a roll call, less than half the men answered. We’d lost forty men. Some of them were wounded and dying in the wheat.

  “The corporal then said we should collect the dead together and burn them on the spot. But I told him there wasn’t time; we were heavily outnumbered, and as soon as it got dark the enemy would probably counterattack. We’d all get wiped out.

  “ ‘What d’you think we should do with them, then?’ the corporal said, in quite a state. ‘Just leave them?’

  “ ‘No, but there isn’t time to burn as many bodies as this.’

  “ ‘Then what about cutting off their heads and taking them with us?’

  “ ‘They’d be too heavy.’

  “ ‘We could carry fingers or arms,’ he said.

  “ ‘Fingers are no good. Let’s take their arms.’ ”

  So the two of them, Nagano told me, used swords on the dead bodies. No fancy stuff—they were in too much of a hurry; they just hacked off the arms at the shoulder, then tied them all together, dozens of them, and slung them on a pole. When they got back to somewhere safe, they burned them. The only problem was, they’d have to hand over the right ashes to the right families. So, as they were cutting off each arm, they’d tie a rag around it with the man’s name on it; and later, when they laid them on the brushwood, one by one, the corporal wrote down the name in a notebook, before the things went up in smoke.