Confessions of a Yakuza Read online

  At that time all the main waterways had lookout posts on them. They’d been there for centuries, and they kept a round-the-clock watch on anything afloat. Wherever two canals crossed or met in a T shape, there’d be a lookout, so there was no question of going via those places. It was the same with any bridge that had a police box: if anybody happened to look over the railing, you were obviously in trouble. Even without police boxes, though, there was always a chance of being caught by a cop on patrol. So we moved in the shadows close to the bank, slow enough to be able to stop at short notice; and we kept our own lookout men on shore, walking along on each side of us, a little way in front.

  As soon as one of them saw a copper coming, he’d chuck a stone as a signal, and get himself hidden away behind something. Kenkichi would quickly pull in to the side and stay put. You see, there were so many other boats around that once we’d stopped we were usually safe. If helped, too, that we could count on the other boatmen to turn a blind eye. If they’d given us away, they risked—well, policemen poking around on their own boat, for one thing—but also being outlawed by the other people working on the river, and being driven out of business.

  Then, when the coast was clear, we’d slip quietly away, and move on down the dark river.

  The Bricklayer

  There were no bunks on our boat, so Kenkichi arranged for me to stay at the home of a man called Tokuzo, who was in charge of a crew of raftsmen. By now the timberyards have shifted out into Tokyo bay and there’s no trace of the old Fukagawa left, but when I was there Fukagawa meant only one thing: timber. There were timberyards and timber wholesalers everywhere you went—hundreds of wholesalers alone.

  Timber rafts in Fukagawa

  Timber was floated down to Fukagawa from all over Japan; by the old way of reckoning it would have been worth millions of koku of rice. The logs were then left to float in the timberyards, where merchants bought and sold them. Whenever they towed the stuff they’d bought to the lumbermill, or when they wanted it brought ashore, the raftsmen would take care of everything that had to be done. Their foremen kept “stables,” where they trained the men.

  Each foreman usually had about thirty people working for him, so they had to have big rooms for everybody to eat and sleep in. Those rooms were just the place for gambling. The raftsmen didn’t do much of it among themselves, though, and players came in from outside.

  Serious gambling isn’t all that popular nowadays, but in my time all kinds of people—the owners of large shops or classy restaurants, for instance—used to go in for it in a big way. Gambling was a big thing at Tokuzo’s place too; there was hardly a day when there wasn’t a session.

  Maybe I’d better say a bit at least about the dice games at our stable. A professional was in overall charge, and the foreman just supplied a room, he wasn’t personally involved. You sometimes get scenes in movies showing “the good old days” of gambling, but they always mess it up. For one thing, a gambling joint was a quiet place; nobody ever shouted. After all, they weren’t supposed to be doing what they were doing, and they were afraid of being caught, so they kept quiet in case people passing outside got wind of it.

  The actual game was run by a man called a nakabon, a bookie.

  “Evens, odds ... right, place your bets,” the bookie would say in a soft, deep voice.

  “Odds still to go.” All the rest were quiet, so his voice sounded quite intense, and there’d be a kind of keyed-up atmosphere.

  “No more odds. No more odds. Evens still to go. Evens, evens.”

  This meant the odds were all covered, with no further bets being taken there. Until someone bet on even, though, the game couldn’t move along.

  “Anyone for evens? No dice till there’s a bet.”

  People follow their own hunches on how the dice will roll; but when the game’s held up with “evens still to go” everybody gets impatient, so at least one person usually gives in, just to keep things going. When enough chips are out, the bookie then calls, “Right—stop. Odds and evens are covered. Here goes!” And the “shooter” turns the dice cup upside down on the red cloth spread out between the rows of players. That moment when he slams the cup down—that’s the best part of the whole thing, you know.

  Workers like the raftsmen didn’t have much cash, so they weren’t all that popular. The people who were really welcome—it’s obvious why—were elderly landowners, rich men’s wives, and so on.

  Everybody wanted to win of course, but people came as much for the atmosphere as for the gambling. So the important thing was to see that even if they lost they went home feeling OK. In movies and plays you sometimes see a guy getting thrown out of a game after losing his shirt to some professional; but that’s a load of rubbish. I mean, if you did that kind of thing and the customer happened to tell the police, everyone who’d had anything to do with the game would be pulled in.

  Besides, anybody who lost so much at gambling that it ruined him once and for all wouldn’t be able to come again, and word would get around that it was that kind of place. And that would be the end of it. So if someone started losing too heavily, the boss would have a word with him—something soothing, like “Look, sir, you don’t seem to be in luck this evening. Why don’t you call it a day?” And he’d give him a bit of money and say, “Here’s something to get home with—it’s on the house.”

  The professional gambler was quite different from gangsters nowadays. He was more like a master craftsman, who happened to make his living by the dice. It paid to be considerate—no one who was just out to make a profit at other people’s expense would have kept going for long in that business.

  One of the players who always appealed to me was the madam of a brothel in Monzen Nakacho. She was filthy rich, but her man apparently gave her a bad time; she was always in a stew about something, and she’d gamble to get it off her chest. She was always in a hurry, too; she’d come in and without even taking her cape off she’d fish a great purse out of her sash and say, “Now what am I supposed to do? Which side is still short? Evens? Not enough evens? Right—evens it is!” and she’d plonk down a pile of money. She won sometimes, but with that way of doing things you always lose in the long run, so her purse would soon be a lot lighter. Even so, she seemed to feel better for it.

  “Now I enjoyed that,” she’d say to the boss. “Thanks.” And off she’d rush again.

  She was in such a tearing hurry that you never felt you could settle down to the game properly if she was there, but she was one of the better customers just the same.

  Another one was a man we called “Sei-chan the bricklayer.” We took him on the midnight boat any number of times, but I’m not likely to forget the first time he showed up at the gambling joint. He had brand-new leather-soled sandals and wore a fancy silk kimono tied with a shiny sash and a gold chain that must have been a good half inch thick dangling on his chest, with this huge gold watch to match at the end. He was lavish with his money too, he’d chuck it down as if it was so much wastepaper; if he lost, he’d just laugh it off. He was a bit below average in height, and plump, with bulging eyes; you’d never have called him a good-looking man, but even so he had this air of authority, as if to say: I’m the boss where I come from. He made such an impression on me that I asked Tameji what he did. Tameji was only a couple of years older than me, but he already passed as a first-rate raftsman.

  “Him? That’s Sei-chan the bricklayer.”

  “That’s a funny name.”

  “Seems his father was a master bricklayer, but the son was light-fingered even when he was young. His dad threw him out, and now he’s master of another trade.” And Tameji bent his right index finger into a hook shape, meaning a pickpocket.

  “Is he? You’d never think it to look at him, would you?”

  “I know, but he’s got real clout. He’s got dozens of people working for him. The whole Asakusa area is his territory.”

  No wonder he could afford to throw his money around like that! I was kind of impressed, you
know, and I used to watch what he did. Sometimes, as I said, Sei-chan came on our boat, and one night just as he was stepping off onto the bank he said to me,

  “Hey, Eiji—how about coming to do the sights of Asakusa tomorrow? I’ll be at the Niomon gate at twelve o’clock. All right? I’ll be expecting you.”

  The idea caught my fancy, so I thought I might as well stroll over and take a look. Those two fierce-looking statues in the gate—they’re a fine pair. I was waiting in front of them when Sei-chan came along with one of his men. He was wearing a kimono of handmade Oshima silk, with that great long gold chain dangling in a showy way in front. He was so got up, you’d have taken him for some rich hick up from the country.

  We strolled along till we came to the main building of the temple, where they keep the statue of Kannon.

  “Look at that!” he said proudly. “The greatest of all the Kannons in Japan! Asakusa owes everything it’s got to this Kannon.

  “Here—” he said, holding out something, “my offering.” I looked, and it was a one-yen bill. Then he smiled and flashed his gold teeth at me and said, “You’ll never get lucky if you’re mean with your offerings.” And he got another one-yen bill out of his wallet and threw it into the offertory box, then pressed his pudgy hands together in front of him and bowed his head to the Buddha. After that we wandered past the souvenir shops leading up to the temple, then went into a sukiyaki restaurant called Imahan.

  The manager and a maid were in the entrance hall to welcome us.

  “The boss says he’ll treat you to anything you feel like,” said his bodyguard.

  I was reasonably well off myself around that time, but I didn’t like to offend him, so I decided to say nothing and let him treat me. That was the first time in my life I ever had sukiyaki. You know, even now, I always remember Sei-chan whenever I eat the stuff.

  Sei-chan seemed to be concerned about me.

  “Tell me,” he said, “just how long do you aim to stay on that boat? I can tell you, it’s all hard work, and it won’t last long.

  “They say you’re related to the coal merchant in Ishijima-cho. Your father’s not going to be very pleased to hear you’re on a midnighter.... How much do they pay you?”

  “I’m not hard up.”

  “I don’t suppose you are, but I’m sure it doesn’t come anywhere near what we make. Look, there’s something I’d like to ask you. Why don’t you join my staff? I’ll see you’re well looked after. You’d get to know the job a bit at a time. You could have your keep for a while without doing anything in particular. It’d be much more fun for you in Asakusa than wasting your time hanging around a timberyard.”

  It seems Sei-chan had decided I was suitable recruiting material. Quite an honor! To me, I already felt like a grown man, but in his eyes I guess I was still just a kid: someone who had the makings of a good pickpocket, given the right education....

  Sei-chan was drinking as we ate, and after a while he got quite cheerful. I hadn’t agreed to join his crowd, of course, but he seemed to feel he could talk me into it, given time. I was in quite a fix.

  Just then his bodyguard suddenly said, “I think he’s coming.”

  I saw a man hurrying toward us, a short man with a nasty look in his eyes and the kind of face that had pickpocket written all over it.

  “Boss—we finally caught him,” the man said, looking very pleased with himself.

  “Where?”

  “On the train.”

  “Didn’t he put up a fight?”

  “There were three of us, and Tiny was one of them. You can’t do much against a former Sumo wrestler.” He gave a nasty little giggle, then opened his rattrap of a mouth to ask, “What shall we do about it?”

  “You don’t need me to tell you, do you?”

  “D’you want us to ...?”

  “Yes,” Sei-chan answered, as if it didn’t matter much.

  In the yakuza world, they sometimes cut off a little finger, but among pickpockets a person who’s poached on someone else’s territory loses the forefinger of his working hand.

  The guy gave me a sort of sidelong look and trotted out again. None of this seemed to spoil the other two’s mood. Sei-chan went on buttering me up, then gave me ten yen: “Here—” he said, “here’s some pocket money.”

  People are liable to get annoyed if you refuse something they’ve offered you, so I took it and was grateful. But then he reached inside his kimono and said, “I can give you more if it’s not enough.”

  That shook his sidekick: “You’ll get him into bad habits if you give him that much,” he said, and it occurred to me, too, that it’d be risky to accept any more.

  Sei-chan had some meeting or other later that afternoon, he said. He paid the bill, then before he went off he said to me, “Any time you like. Just come to the address on this card and I’ll be ready to discuss things with you, any time. Think it over, anyway.”

  The name card was a grand affair with a gold border, and on it it said:

  Takamuro Seizaburo

  Specialist

  in

  Trouble of All Kinds

  Riots

  It was around the end of spring in the year of the Great Earthquake. The weather was perfect, and I was lying dozing on the boat when I woke up and saw Kenkichi close by me. He was sitting there quietly with a frown on his forehead as though he was thinking about something, so I didn’t say anything. But then he suddenly looked at me with a serious expression and said—it took me by surprise—“It’s no wonder Sei-chan’s worried about you. You’re not going to do yourself any good by staying on this boat.”

  “Well, then,” I asked him, “how come you got into the business yourself?”

  He grinned. “I come from a different background to you,”

  he said. Then almost at once he went back to looking gloomy, and sat for a long time without saying anything. Normally, he had that kind of shadow over him that you see with people in that kind of life, but this time it was somehow different. He was leaning on the edge of the boat looking up at the sky. I can see him now, his hair with its white streaks fluffed up in the evening breeze, as he started telling me his story.

  “I don’t expect you’ve heard of them, but in 1907 there were big riots at the Ashio copper mines. I was in Ashio myself at the time, working in the mines. I got mixed up in the disturbances and ran away from the job. What really started it all for me in the first place was that I was an orphan.

  “My mother was a stupid woman. She was the daughter of a wealthy farmer, but she had an illegitimate kid—that was me—then went and died when I was eleven. She was only twenty-nine herself. I heard that my father was a traveling salesman who called at the house regularly, but I never met him.

  “They held the funeral with as little fuss as possible, and as soon as it was over I ran away from home. There was an uncle of my mother’s who ran a sawmill back in the hills of Numata in Gumma prefecture; I’d been to stay with him just once with my mother, when I was seven. He was a nice man, I won’t forget him. He did all kinds of things to try and cheer my mother up. I remember her kneeling in front of him with her head bowed right down to the floor, crying.

  “The children living round about used to come and play with me, but they didn’t tease me, which was a surprise. We used to play together in the river that ran down the valley; for me, it was all like a dream, with the sound of the woodsmen working in the hills, and the birds chirping away. I’d never known there were places like that. Maybe my mother was hoping to leave me there. Either way, she was disappointed, and we went back home in tears.

  “After my mother died, I decided it’d be best to go and try my luck there. I walked for days on end, but when I finally got there I found my uncle had died and the sawmill had passed into somebody else’s hands. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I worked there for a while helping a packhorse man. The work meant taking the trees the foresters had felled down to the sawmill, but I was too small to be much use. I used to put the
ropes around the timber and untie them again later, clean up around the mill, wash the horses, and other things like that, getting bawled out all the time.

  “I gradually got to be able to handle the horses on my own, and started taking the lumber from the mill to the yards. I used to load on a little more wood than I was supposed to be carrying, and take it to a general store where I knew the people. They’d buy it from me, and I’d use the money to buy myself some buns and save a bit on the side. I mean, the packhorse man would never have given me a single bun even if he’d had ten himself. He didn’t give me a penny in wages, either. So I’d have starved in time if I hadn’t learned to look after myself.

  “Then, in the year that I turned sixteen, a man who came to recruit laborers for the Ashio copper mines asked me if I’d care to work there. They paid one yen a day, he said. I jumped at the chance. Five others were taken on besides me, and we set off on foot.

  “The whole way it was nothing but hills and mountains. We went so far up into the hills you’d never have thought anybody could live there. But after we’d been walking I don’t know how many days, the man from the mine suddenly pointed and said,

  “ ‘That’s Ashio, over there.’

  “I couldn’t believe my eyes. ‘God, just look at those hills!’ I said, goggling.

  “Everywhere you looked, the hills were bare. Not a tree in sight, not a blade of grass. We kept on up a narrow valley, and then got an even bigger shock: you see, there was a town, a proper town, there.

  “There was a town hall and a hospital. An iron bridge over the river to take the trollies from the mines. Electric locomotives to haul trains carrying the ore. There was a hydroelectric power station, and the town had electric lighting. None of us had ever seen electric light before, and we were bowled over.

  “It was a fantastically busy place. Every kind of shop you could think of. There were lots of inns, too—one of them was where all the people connected with the copper mines stayed, and it had a telephone. There was a photo studio as well, which had some connection with the mines, but they’d photograph you any time so long as you paid for it. That was something new to us, so we had our pictures taken to celebrate. There were two or three geisha houses, and four brothels. Two theaters, too, which opened whenever a traveling troupe came. I’d say the population was something over thirty thousand. It was a really lively place, what with miners, merchants, government officials, and women and children all stuck together in that little bit of space between the hills. We were as pleased as punch—told ourselves we’d come to a wonderful place. But things aren’t like that in real life.