Confessions of a Yakuza Read online

  “Let’s pack it in,” I said. “It’s looking at me as if it knows. No good’ll come of it, taking a woman’s money like this.”

  “Don’t be dumb.”

  “I’ve had enough.”

  “Well, don’t come whining to me for money later, then.”

  Kenkichi got the mother and the kid apart. A good deal of the skin came off its arm, but the arm itself stayed put, and one bit of it, all blackened and small, was still fastened to its mother’s body.

  “There!” said Kenkichi, “we managed it, didn’t we?” He took off his underwear, stuffed it full of money, and tied it around his waist.

  “With this much cash, you know, I can get a new boat made...,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “You’d better go on your own.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I’m quitting. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody.”

  Kenkichi walked off without so much as glancing back, and the mother and her kids, now separated, went on lying there on the ground.

  Just as an afterthought: I might seem to be making excuses for Kenkichi, but I don’t think you can really blame him. Up until the time of the earthquake, the woman and her kids had probably had an easy life in the kind of family that could afford a crowd of servants. They wouldn’t have ended up like that if it wasn’t for the money. Without the money, I expect they’d have been left in peace after they died, without getting pulled apart.

  An Apprentice

  Tokuzo, the raftsmen’s foreman, had got away to his other house, together with the people from his stable, and they were safe.

  The man took an advertising flier from between the pages of that day’s newspaper, and used a felt pen to draw a map of the burned areas on the back.

  This is where the fires were. It was the only place in his neighborhood that wasn’t burned down, so he was really lucky. By the time I’d split up with Kenkichi and went to have a look, the first house was gone without a trace, but they’d got a temporary shack up, and everybody was hard at work. You see, a good half of Tokyo had been destroyed, so it was obvious the timberyards were going to have more business than they could cope with. I don’t care what it is, I said, but let me do something to help. Tokuzo was really grateful—said they were so overworked they’d thought of asking the cat to lend a hand.

  So they decided I should do odd jobs in the kitchen and around the house until things got back to something like normal. That bought me into contact every day with the fishmonger, the greengrocer, the tofu man, and the other people who came around selling things, and I was soon on good terms with all of them. Looking back on it now, I’d say I never had it so easy as around that time. But it didn’t last all that long, as the next spring, early in April, someone who changed the whole course of my life came to visit.

  He was a gang boss called Momose Umetaro; his territory included the entire Yanagibashi district in those days, and it seemed he and our foreman were sworn “brothers.” That’s what they used to call two men from different organizations who’d promised to help each other whenever necessary. Anyway, he turned up in a rickshaw that day, bringing one of his men with him.

  When I took some tea in to them, Momose glanced at me and said to Tokuzo, “Brother, who’s this young fellow here? I haven’t seen him around before, have I?”

  Tokuzo told him who I was. It seemed to get him interested.

  “I see...,” he said. “Quite a guy, eh? Tell me, then, how does he fit in with things?”

  While he was asking this sort of thing, I was out in the corridor again, sitting just out of sight behind the sliding doors, as a youngster like me was expected to do.

  “You there—” Momose said, turning toward me, “what’s your name?”

  “Ijichi, sir.”

  “Not your surname, you fool—don’t you know nobody calls himself by his surname in our business.”

  “Eiji, sir.”

  “And what do you want to do with yourself?”

  “That’s the trouble—I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

  He grinned. Then, out of the blue, he said: “How’d it be if you became a gambler?”

  “A gambler?”

  “Don’t look so surprised! Listen: if you ask me, you’ve got the face of a yakuza, not an honest workman.”

  “Now you say so,” put in Tokuzo, “you might be right at that. We hold a session here sometimes, and I can tell he’s got what it takes. I’ve often thought so myself.”

  Momose took out a long small-bowled pipe and stuck it in his mouth. His deputy, who was just behind him, promptly came up with a light for him. He took a good drag at the pipe, then blew the smoke out through his nostrils, staring at me all the while.

  “Something about your face tells me you’re not going to stay here. Once you get stuck in a place like this, you could be here a hundred years and never get anywhere. Every man’s got his own nature, which decides what he’s best at. The guys in this place were cut out to be raftsmen. But with someone born to be a yakuza it wouldn’t work out, and I’ve got this feeling you weren’t made for the straight and narrow.”

  I hadn’t had any idea of becoming a professional gambler till then, but once it was put to me it seemed right, somehow. So I bowed and said, “Thank you, sir. I hope you’ll arrange things for me as you see fit.”

  Momose nodded. “In that case, I’ll see what I can do. There are reasons why I can’t have you at my place, but luckily there’s an outfit called the Dewaya whose boss is a pal of mine. I’m sure he’d be willing to take you on.”

  About a month later, with this gang leader as my sponsor, I joined the Dewaya as an apprentice yakuza.

  It was the day of the Boys’ Festival, in May 1924, when Momose took me there. The boss of the Dewaya lived in the center of the entertainment district of Asakusa, just behind the street where all the little sushi shops were. This was after the Great Earthquake, of course, but new buildings were already going up—not any of those temporary shacks, either, but properly built shops as you might expect in Asakusa. The whole area was humming with activity—I suppose they’d call it a building boom nowadays....

  In spite of the terrible fire, the Sensoji, the great Kannon temple, was still standing, undamaged. Everything round about was burned flat, but the temple buildings and the things in the grounds had survived. According to what people said, great waves of flame had come blasting toward the temple any number of times, but, each time, a breeze sprang up and the fire changed direction. More than a hundred thousand people had taken shelter there, all of them watching with their hearts in their mouths. When the fire finally moved away, they cried for joy; said it was Kannon’s doing, and went down on their knees. The day I went to join the Dewaya, there was still a great crowd of people come to worship there. And I remembered Sei-chan the bricklayer, and what he’d said about the blessings of Kannon....

  Anyway, the place my new boss lived in was a perfectly ordinary house, you’d hardly have noticed it was there at all; but when Momose took me through with him to the back of the house, we found the boss waiting for us in an impressive-looking room with a fine old charcoal brazier, just like something in a period movie.

  The two men said all the usual polite things to each other, then Momose told him all about me.

  “So there you have it,” he said when he was finished. “I hope you’ll do what you can with him.”

  The Dewaya boss, who was wearing an expensive kimono of handmade silk, folded his arms and took a long, hard look at my face.

  “Right, brother—it’s a deal. I’ll take charge of him and do my best to make something out of him.” He looked really dignified as he said it; and, then and there, I decided that it’d be a privilege to work for him.

  His name was Yamamoto Shuzo. I’ve had a long life, but of all the yakuza who’ve made it to the top, I’ve never come across a finer man than him. He was strict with himself and with others, but basically he was a kindhearted person, open to other people�
��s feelings, and very popular in Asakusa. Most people seem to think that all yakuza are bums; but for someone to become a boss it takes more than just muscle or brute force. Otherwise, any old fool could make it. What’s important is to have the kind of qualities that make the guys under you loyal to you—ready to die for you if necessary.

  The boss of the Dewaya

  It’s easy enough to talk about it, but it’s not half so simple in practice. The Dewaya was a genuine, top-ranking gang that was known everywhere, but it kept itself strictly out of the public eye. The boss’s house, for instance, belonged to the owner of one of the sushi shops on the main street, and at New Year’s and the Bon festival the boss would go personally to pay his respects to the landlord. He was never short of money, but it was typical of him that he’d never have used his money to force a neighbor to sell him his place.

  The Dewaya made its living, of course, through gambling. Yakuza nowadays are mixed up in all kinds of things—in the construction business, drugs, real estate, loan-sharking, you name it—but it wasn’t like that in the old days.

  The yakuza’s real trade was gambling, and nothing else. In my day, if a yakuza made money some other way, people would look down on him. “Oh, him,” they’d say. “He’s trying to have it both ways. Goes scrabbling after a few extra yen because he can’t make a proper living from gambling, he’s not good enough at it. He’s a fraud, that’s what he is.”

  A boss didn’t have as many men under him as he does today, either. All he needed was some guys to run the games and enough others to guard his territory—a few dozen at the very most. The Dewaya’s territory covered the area around the Asakusa Kannon, the rows of shops leading up to the temple, and over behind the International Theater, so it was one of the best bits in Tokyo. Still, there were only five or six of us who hung out at our home base, and about thirty altogether when you included those who had their own places and came to our joint as necessary.

  The gambling joint was on the other side of the alley from the house. To look at, it was just like any other housing in that area, but as it didn’t look respectable to have a lot of men traipsing in and out all the time without doing any actual work, the people in the neighborhood always called it the “scenery store.”

  There were lots of small theaters in Asakusa. You need a lot of scenery and props to put on a play, and the Dewaya was officially supposed to make the scenery. And there actually were all kinds of backdrops and stuff stacked in a corner of the joint. It was only a cover, of course; nobody did any actual theater work.

  When it got dark, they brought the dice out. I was only an apprentice, so I wasn’t allowed in on the games. An apprentice lived in, and was made to do the dirty work; it was a way of testing how tough he was, and whether he was really suited to the yakuza life.

  What did I actually do? The washing, the cleaning, the cooking, and the shopping. Besides that, I had to get on good terms with the local tradesmen, and help keep the streets in the neighborhood swept and clean. That kind of thing.

  The Dewaya didn’t have any maids at all. That meant that the rookies had to do everything there was to do inside the house. I used to wonder at first why they didn’t employ any women, till one of the older men called Shiro explained. He’d been the most junior one there until I came, so now that I’d turned up he was inclined to throw his weight around.

  “Here—” he’d say, staring hard at me out of his big square face, “think what happens if there’s a police raid and you get caught. They ask you who was running things, what kind of people came to play, how much cash was involved, and so on. A guy with any guts would rather die than give anything away, but you can’t expect the same of a woman.”

  According to him, women couldn’t ever be trusted in our line of work.

  “What I mean is, basically they’re weak. They might say they’d never spill the beans, but just strip them and get to work on them where they’re sensitive, and all their good intentions go by the board. They end up talking—and that’s the end of the organization. That’s why we don’t keep any women here and do everything—I mean everything—ourselves.”

  Besides Shiro, there was another lad just above me called Shunkichi. He was a good-looking guy, with a good brain too; the boss put a lot of trust in him. Once I’d started working in the gambling joint, it was Shunkichi who really coached me in the various rules the yakuza had.

  There were detailed rules for almost everything—the way you greet the people above you and below you, the way you talk to them, the way you show you’re listening to them—everything. It’s a feudal sort of world, quite different from or-dinary life outside. It even affects your personal relations with women.

  “Never get mixed up with a decent girl,” Shunkichi told me. “People would cut you dead for it; he’s a jerk, they’d say, he doesn’t have the money to pay for a woman and he doesn’t do his work properly—that’s why he runs after nice, respectable girls....

  “Suppose, too, you kept making trouble for people outside our business, d’you know what would happen? You’d be handed your walking papers. I mean, you’d be driven out of the brotherhood. And once a yakuza is disowned by his boss, there’s nowhere left for him to go. Japan’s not as big as you might think—you’d be out in the cold....

  “The most important thing in this business is guts. A man without guts just doesn’t get anywhere. Men are like the timber they use to build a house with—there’s the kind of wood that forms the main pillar supporting everything, and there’s the wood used for the paneling in the john. Without guts, you’re always going to be the underdog: you’ll stay a rookie. On the other hand, if you’ve got real guts, you’re going to be treated with respect—not just by other yakuza, but by the police as well.”

  Shunkichi was always saying that the crucial thing for a yakuza was to keep himself in a strong position.

  “Ask yourself, now, how the Dewaya manages to keep its territory in Asakusa. You want to know? It’s because anybody can tell right off that this is an outfit to be reckoned with. There are lots of places in this area where people come to eat and enjoy themselves, so you get a good class of customer at our games. Naturally, there are other yakuza who’d like the area for themselves. So you see, if you aren’t powerful, somebody’s going to come barging into your turf. And if you can’t shove him out again, you’ve had it. So you mustn’t ever show any weakness.

  “Suppose you get into a fight with a guy from some other gang: whatever happens, you’ve got to squash him. If you let yourself get hurt without hurting him back, then it doesn’t matter what happens to you, we’re the ones who’re going to suffer.

  “ ‘Look at that,’ people will say, ‘a guy from the Dewaya got worked over and he’s taking it lying down—I didn’t think they’d sunk so low.’ So it’s a rule that you give as good as you get.

  “If you lose, you’re either dead or in a hospital. And if you win, you go to jail—that’s the kind of life it is. Either way, if you get into a fight, you’ve got to make sure you win. Still, so long as you handle things properly yourself, there’s no need to pick a fight in the first place; after all, it’s the customer that’s the important thing, and if you get so scrappy that ordinary people get scared of you, you’re going to scare your customers away too.

  “So it’s like they say: the good hawk hides its claws. You’ve got to be on your guard, of course, but as far as possible you should take the ordinary people round about into account. That way, word will get around among the locals that the Dewaya rookies are a decent crowd.”

  I took all this to heart, and in the year or so I spent working in the kitchen, I was careful not to show off or act superior with the young assistants in the shops I visited, who knew I was with the Dewaya. The same went for the door-to-door salesmen I met every day.

  A street seller

  The first of these to come in the morning, of course, was the fishmonger. In the old days, they caught masses of sardines in Tokyo bay in the winter. There’s a
n island in the mouth of the Sumida river—the place I escaped to with Kenkichi and his girl after the earthquake—and almost everybody there was a fisherman. By the end of that year, things had settled down again, and the wharves were jammed with so many barrels of sardines there was hardly room to walk. The wholesalers and fishmongers used to take their pick of them, then go around selling the stuff in buckets slung from a pole across their shoulder. This was while it was still dark, so they’d sing out as they walked: “Sar–dines. Sar–dines!” And people would call out: “Over here, please!”

  We were a big household, so I usually bought a hundred or more at a time. The fish were absolutely fresh, with their scales all silver and shining. Not a bloodshot eye among them.... Sometimes we’d pound them up in a mortar to make dumplings to go in a soup for a kind of sardine stew. Good it was, too. Sometimes we’d have them raw. You pulled on their guts with your fingers so that they came out evenly, then took off the heads with your fingers too. Then if you stuck your thumb in between the flesh and the skin and pressed along gently, the skin would come off clean without using a knife at all. You couldn’t do that if the fish weren’t fresh, but these were only just caught, so it was easy. Then you’d slice them up thin and eat them dipped in soy sauce. That was good too, I can tell you!

  “Where’d you learn how to do that?” one of the senior guys used to ask me as he stood there watching.

  “At the timber foreman’s place.”

  “Did you, now.... Not bad, considering.”

  There was a maid at Tokuzo’s house who’d been there for ages, and she it was who taught me how to get the skin off. To her surprise, I got the hang of it immediately, and did it by myself, as smoothly as that, from then on. So I became the sardine specialist.

  They used to catch a lot of black squid, too, and whenever some good stuff came in, the fish man would come straight to us, seeing as we were one of his best customers. With black squid, you eat the thick parts as sashimi. The legs you chop up small, sprinkle with salt, and leave for several hours to make shiokara, to go to with saké. Just put some of the shiokara you’ve made that morning on a bowl of rice with your supper, then pour hot tea over it and shovel it down with your chopsticks—it’s delicious. They used to get gobies in as well, big ones—these were best made into tempura. The biggest ones, with a lot of fat on them, we’d grill on a charcoal brazier and eat with a bit of salt. Poor people, incidentally, used to have goby as a special treat on New Year’s Day.