Confessions of a Yakuza Read online

  Shunkichi had been in Sugamo himself a couple of years earlier, so I was all ears. I’d assumed that everybody I met in jail would be like he said; but I don’t know why, this man next to me really got on my nerves. I put up with it for a while, then began to lose my temper, and in the end I shouted at him:

  “Look, mister, with all respect, why don’t you just shut up.”

  “Say that again!”

  “I mean, you keep cackling like an old hen.”

  I suppose anybody’d be annoyed by that. Anyway, he went pale and got to his feet.

  “You bastard! You know what happens to people who say things like that around here?”

  He grabbed the collar of my kimono and yelled “Get up!” So I put a twist on his arm and threw him. He let out a great yell. That brought a warder at the run, and he clapped some handcuffs on me on the spot. Didn’t say a word to the other man, though, who just sat there sneering at me.

  “What’ve I done wrong?” I yelled.

  “That’s enough! You keep quiet!”

  It really wasn’t fair. I just didn’t understand why the warder took the other fellow’s side. It didn’t stand to reason. I sprawled out in the corridor with my legs and arms out, and the warder tried to drag me away by the handcuffs.

  “Come on, get up, you awkward bastard!” The warder called another of his mates, and they hit me across the face. Then I was dragged up to the second floor.

  They make prisons so that everybody can always see what’s going on. As I was hauled upstairs, the prisoners in the cells round about were all watching, holding on to the bars like monkeys. One loop of the handcuffs was taken off my wrist and fixed to an iron bar in the floor. “Let’s see his ass,” the warder said, and his assistant pulled my kimono up to the waist. Next the warder told him to tie my legs together, so he bound my ankles to another iron bar with a rope so that they’d got me on all fours, unable to move at all.

  “You won’t look so pleased with yourself when we’re finished with you. We haven’t had any trouble here for a long while, but look what happens as soon as you come in. I’m going to beat a bit of sense into you!”

  You just can’t imagine what punishments were like in prisons then. Police torture was an amateur affair, but in the jails it was really professional—in a different league altogether. The police, after all, were supposed to be interrogating a suspect, but once you were inside you were a condemned criminal, so they didn’t need to hold back. And since dealing out stiff punishment was the warders’ business, they showed absolutely no mercy.

  I was wondering what they were going to beat me with, and it turned out to be a rubber hose, a six-foot length of the stuff. It really did the trick, too. It’s far more effective than hitting you with a hard stick. When it whacks against your ass, it bites into the flesh and snicks a bit out as it goes. I’ve put up with all kinds of pain in my time, but they don’t come much worse than this. You sometimes see slaves being whipped in movies, don’t you? Well, nobody who hasn’t actually experienced it can come close to imagining what it’s really like. If you have, the sound alone’s enough to make your skin crawl and your hairs all stand on end.

  When it comes down thwack across you, you feel it’s ripping out the marrow in your bones, and your head reels right to the core. And everything around you goes black for a moment. Those warders were experts at finding just the right spot to hit. When they hit you across the back, the end of the hose curled around your belly and sliced the skin like a razor blade. The blood oozed out. All the same, I didn’t think it’d look good to make a noise with everybody watching, so I kept a desperate grip on myself. I counted up to fifteen strokes, but the rest I was past thinking about.

  It was all I could do to stop myself groaning out loud. As the hose came whistling through the air, the pores all over my body gave a kind of shudder. When it landed, it felt like it had smashed the bone. So I hung on desperately to the metal bar—but then it came whistling through the air at me again. The sound of bombs coming down during the war wasn’t anything compared with that. There must have been a lot of men who died in prison that way.

  I suppose it was being young that helped me get through it, but, all the same, when they finally let me go I could hardly breathe, even. It hurt too much to lie down, so I sat upright all night. When I leaned against the wall, it was like my bones were crying out. I spent three days like that, sitting up, but then it gradually got better and I was able to lie down again.

  Even so, what happened to me had its advantages too. I mean, after the beating, the other men looked at me in a completely different way from before. I hadn’t called out, however much it hurt, and they treated me with a new respect. Even the guy who’d got me into trouble in the first place said he was sorry in quite a humble way.

  II

  From the end of January on into the middle of February, the man was confined to his bed almost completely. He had a persistent cough and a low fever, and I was afraid that he might get pneumonia if something wasn’t done about it. So I suggested that he go into a hospital for a while, just until the fever disappeared. But he obstinately re-fused. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’ll get better eventually if it’s going to.” The woman who was nursing him said much the same. “It’s no use once he’s made up his mind,” she told me, “so if it’s not too much trouble perhaps you’d drop in occasionally and take a look at him?”

  I had never spoken to this woman until the man took to his bed. Her name was Hatsuyo, and I was told she was his wife—whether the second, or third, or what, I wasn’t sure—but you could tell from a glance at her face that she had originally been in the bar or restaurant trade. I’d already been visiting the house for some months, and spending hours there at a time, but not once had she put in an appearance. It gave me the uneasy feeling that she’d probably prove a very difficult sort of person. When I actually met her, however, she was surprisingly straightforward.

  She would bring in cakes and tea, for instance, and make some remark such as “I must say, doctor, you seem to have plenty of time to spare. If you go on visiting a dump like this every evening, people are going to start saying I’ve got a lover.”

  So I would sit by his bed, listening to what he had to say, till he slowly began to recover; then, sometime after mid-February, he was finally able to get up and sit with his legs in the sunken hearth again.

  Sea Bream

  I’d done my three-month term in jail, and it was the evening of the day before I was due to leave. The governor summoned me and gave me a talking-to. “I know the sort of world you’re mixed up in,” he said, “but if you commit an offense again, don’t expect to get off as lightly next time. So try to keep your nose clean. Tomorrow morning, I want you up at four, ready to move out.”

  That shook me. “Four o’clock’s a bit too early, isn’t it?” I said.

  “No,” he told me. “I called your boss, and he said a lot of them would be coming to meet you. But the locals won’t want a crowd of gangsters standing around in front of here, so the earlier the better.”

  Being still under twenty and a new boy in the gang, I didn’t think it was very likely there’d be much of a welcoming committee at all, and I still felt that four o’clock was going a bit far. But I was wrong. When I came out of the prison gates carrying my belongings, with a warder to see me off, I couldn’t believe my eyes: there must have been seventy or eighty men waiting there for me. Even the boss himself had turned up specially.

  It was pitch-dark and cold enough to make you shiver. But they’d split open a bale of charcoal and got a whole line of fires burning cheerfully along the prison wall. I just couldn’t see why they’d laid on such a homecoming for a kid like me.

  As I walked toward the boss with my head bowed, first one then another of them called out to thank me. I remember he was wearing a black silk kimono and a cape with a boa collar around it, and as I came up to him he said,

  “Thank you, Eiji, you did pretty well.” Then he took a closer
look at me. “Well, I’m pleased to see you looking fairly fit,” he said, “and not any thinner.” At the sound of his voice again, the tears suddenly came into my eyes.

  “At this rate,” his deputy, Muramatsu, said with a smile, “you’ll be a real man in no time now.”

  “Here, Eiji—” said Shiro, “change into these.” I took the cloth bundle he gave me and went up close to one of the fires. I wrapped the long loincloth tightly round and round me and put on the kimono, which was one of Shiro’s old ones.

  The welcoming committee, outside Sugamo jail

  The first thing I did after that was go to the boss’s home in Asakusa and pay my respects to him properly.

  “I’m glad you came through all right,” he said. “Good work.”

  Boss Momose looked in, too. “I was worried,” he said, looking pleased with himself, “seeing I’d recommended you to the Dewaya myself. But it’s turned out OK.”

  Muramatsu added his formal thanks, then handed me an envelope with more than two hundred yen in it. “This is what you made while you were on the job,” he said.

  You might wonder what “on the job” meant, but in our world, you see, serving time in jail is considered a kind of work. So they make a point of putting your money by for you while you’re inside, and handing it over when you get out.

  After that, on a different day, there was a “coming-out party” for me. I was obviously pretty junior in rank, so they could hardly have had it in too classy a restaurant, but it was on the second floor of a sushi shop right by the Asakusa temple; and, as the main guest, they put me at the top of the table close to the boss, with the other heads of the gang on our right and left. There were some quite high-up members sitting down there near the bottom of the table, which made me feel uncomfortable. And the food! I mean, one of the dishes laid out for me was a great sea bream a good foot long, on a fancy plate.

  Before we dug in, I went up to the boss, bowed down with my forehead on the tatami, and “reported for duty,” so to speak. Then I did the same thing with each of the older men in turn, who thanked me again. After a while, the boss called me over.

  “You’ve had a rough time,” he said, “so take it easy for a while—don’t try to do too much. You’ve got to think of your health. Why don’t you go to a hot spring or somewhere and rest up for a bit?”

  He took a big paper packet out of the front of his kimono.

  “They all chipped in to give you this present. And here’s a list of people who contributed; make sure you take care of it.

  “Listen,” he went on. “You’re going to find yourself relying on these people one way or another all your life from now on. Mind you don’t forget your obligations, because it would let me down if you didn’t....”

  In our line of business, this sense of obligation to the people you were connected with was incredibly strong, I’m not exaggerating. I took the list of names, and always kept it by me from then on. As for the money I got from the boss, though, I’m afraid it all went on gambling and visits to the red-light district long before I got around to going to any hot spring.

  So I enjoyed myself for a while; but there’s an end to all good things, they say, and one day without warning I got a letter that gave me a nasty shock. Believe it or not, it was from my father’s place in Utsunomiya.

  When I opened it I got another shock: it said a notice had come for me to go and have an army physical, and I was to go home immediately. I’d assumed the old man had washed his hands of me long ago, so it put me on the spot, having a letter suddenly turn up like that. Even so, I could hardly ignore it, so I went and talked to the boss. The boss took a hard look at me.

  “I see...,” he said, taking things in his stride. “You look grown-up too—I’d assumed you were about twenty-five or -six. Thought you were past the call-up age.”

  “What should I do about it, then?” I said.

  “There’s only one thing you can do,” he answered. “Go straight home and put your father’s mind at rest. You’re lucky to have both your parents alive. The best thing would be for you to follow in the family business. After all, you don’t have to be a gambler, do you? So get off home and do your duty by your family!”

  And without any more ado he arranged a farewell party for me. So I said goodbye to the older men and went back to Utsunomiya.

  I found that both my grandparents had died some while back. My mother cried when she saw me.

  They did the physical at the town hall. There was quite a crowd of other guys there taking it too, but what surprised me was that only three out of all the men examined in the Utsunomiya district were given a grade A, myself included. That would never have happened later, as the Pacific War got closer. You see, it was 1926 when I went for my checkup, at a time when people were still feeling fed up with war. The First World War had started in 1914 and gone on for four years, and everybody felt tired of fighting and everything to do with it. There’d been a lot of disarmament conferences, and the trend was for big cuts in battleships and weapons and troops.

  My father felt a bit better about things when he heard his son was one of the few people in all Utsunomiya to make the A grade. Some of the neighbors actually sent around a box of “red rice” to congratulate the family like they used to. That was as far as the good things went, though; not two weeks after I’d passed the test, along came my call-up papers. I was to report for duty with the 75th Infantry Regiment on such-and-such a day in December. The 75th was one of the units policing the northern part of Korea, so things didn’t look too promising.

  There was no Manchukuo yet in those days, which meant that Sakhalien and northern Korea were as out-of-the-way as you could get in Japan. Korea of course had been annexed about twenty years earlier and was Japanese territory.

  Anyway, that was the place I was supposed to go and guard. The time for me to leave wasn’t far off when an invitation came from the Veterans’ Association—which meant, mostly, retired army officers living in the Utsunomiya area—saying they were holding a send-off party for us and would I be kind enough to attend. And, sure enough, they put on quite a show, with a crowd of old men in beards and uniforms with lots of decorations dangling on their chests, all of them there specially for us. Seemed we were to go in a bunch to visit the local shrine. A lot of ordinary townsfolk came along with us, and what with the banners they carried and the rising sun flags, you’d almost have thought it was some big festival. Anyway, off we went in fine style to pray at the shrine in the center of town, like we were heroes or something....

  Leaving for service overseas

  Troops in Kimonos

  When we actually left to join up—now, that was a real send-off. The whole station was crammed with people. We weren’t wearing uniforms, though, but kimonos: all three of us in cheap everyday kimonos with capes over them and wooden clogs on our feet. We didn’t have any belongings with us—no cases, no bags, nothing but a bit of cash and a cotton towel tucked away in the front of our kimonos. The army had told us they’d supply us with everything we needed when we got there, so we set off in the clothes we stood up in.

  We got to Osaka sometime after noon the next day, and the day after that left harbor in a six-thousand-ton freighter bound for Korea. There were hundreds—maybe thousands—of conscripts on that boat. Meals consisted of riceballs and pickles, that was all. A temporary john had been set up on deck; the other ones below decks couldn’t keep up with the demand, so they built this big boarded affair up top. You had your crap, and it slid off straight down into the deep blue sea....

  We arrived in Korea, and some of the new recruits left the ship at Wonsan. The ship couldn’t be brought alongside the cliffs there, so the troops went ashore by lighter. The rest of us stayed on board and went on to a place called Unggi, in what’s North Korea nowadays. It was the harbor closest to the Soviet Union, with Vladivostock, the biggest Soviet naval base in the Far East, not so far away. It was a fishing port, a desolate kind of place, population three thousand at the mo
st, I’d say. I could only see a few people dotted about here and there. The wind off the sea was bitterly cold—it was December, after all. There must have been about a thousand of us who’d come on this far.

  Well, they got us all neatly lined up, and an officer strutted out like a toy soldier to give us a pep talk.

  “This here is the northernmost outpost of the Japanese Empire,” he said. “You men, as soldiers, have been entrusted with the great responsibility of guarding one of the nation’s frontiers. I want you all to bear this in mind, and carry out your duties to the very best of your ability....” And so on, lots more of the same stuff, his moustache bristling all the time.

  None of us recruits had been abroad before of course, so we were completely lost. We just knew we’d been brought to a pretty godawful dump, and we felt jittery, though we tried not to show it. On top of it all, it was hellish cold.

  The speechifying went on and on, and people were beginning to mutter that they’d freeze to death if they were kept standing there much longer, but it came to an end at last, and everyone was issued with special overcoats against the cold—great loose-fitting things made of fur, cut big so you could put all kinds of things on underneath without making them tight. They were really warm, and everybody sort of came to life again and cheered up.

  We were also given fur hats. I think they were made of dog fur, anyway they were all stiff, and they covered you up leaving just your face peering out. We looked at each other when we’d put them on, and laughed and fooled around like a bunch of kids. But then a train arrived, and we were ordered on board.