What started me on this chain of serious pontification, was a tweet from one of my favorite journalists covering Japan, Hiroko Tabuchi. (@hirokotabuchi if you want some good japan related tweets to read).  The tweet in question: Unshaven Women: Free Spirits or Unkempt?http://nyti.ms/9tbMPW “Is the fear that no man will want you and your hairy legs valid?” The article in the NYT itself was fairly interesting.

For hairy Japanese and barbarians.

In Japan, a certain degree of hairiness used to be considered sexy, in both men and women.  Body shaving wasn’t the big deal it is now as Western influences permeate Japan. Men, now, are also expected to be hairless. This seems odd to me.  It’s as if Japanese men have agreed to neuter themselves.  And of course, there are products to help rid them of any trace of icky manliness, such as the No! No! for Men neo-laser razor. Perfect for getting rid of those stray stomach hairs, or any hint of a five-o-clock shadow.

Three years ago, on a very long sleepless night, I had a strange dream about badger-dogs (tanuki) which I turned into a long short story. It’s my pontifications on hair, culture, and Japan from the viewpoint of a literate bake-tanuki, or were-badger dog. Obviously, it was inspired by the Miyazki Hayao film about Tanuki, several years ago, which I watched on the night I had the dream.  Whatever.

Anyway, for your enjoyment, I’m posting it here. It’s crude, rude, and probably inappropriate but then again anyway you talk about it, “pubic hair” is quite a mouthful.  For your reading pleasure: Letters From An Angry Werebadgerdog first edit. If anyone would like to contribute illustrations, it would be appreciated.

We drove to Mr. Greenriver’s condominium in a fancy part of Tokyo, parked the car, got past security, and took the elevator up to his place. Of course, Mr. Greenriver was in the middle of having crazy sex with one of his mistresses when we arrived, and we could hear it through the apartment door. So we knocked a couple of times, he grunted out a reply and we waited in the hall. He came out fifteen minutes later, looking very happy and smelling like a bottle of spilled Chanel No.5, sake and sweat.  He mumbled an apology, told a couple jokes, and we left.

The three of us got in the elevator and the door closed behind us.

And nothing happened.

Nobody moved.

Mochizuki-san had his back to the wall of the elevator.  I was to the left of the door, and Mr. Greenriver was standing close to the elevator button panel.

After about a minute, I cleared my throat.

Mochizuki-san perked up, as if he’d woken from his sleep, and said to Mr. Greenriver, “Hey, push the lobby floor button.”

Mr. Greenriver responded, “Oh, usually my bodyguard presses it for me. Forgot I’m on my own today.”

“Well, I’m not your bodyguard,” said Mochizuki.

“But I’m a yakuza boss and you’re not. Am I supposed to press the button?”

“That’s right, I’m not a yakuza boss. I’m a civilian, now,  so you should press the button.”

Mr. Greenriver frowned. “But you used to be a yakuza boss. So isn’t that different?”

“When I was a boss, I out-ranked you. And I’m older than you.”

Mr. Greenriver folded his arms and pondered the statement. The elevator still hadn’t moved.

So I pushed the button.

They both look a little shocked.  I had been totally forgotten.

“It’s okay,” I said, “I’m a gaijin. That makes me the lowest ranking person here.”

“Yeah, that’s right!” Mr. Greenriver seemed enormously relieved that the problem had been solved.

Most yakuza groups are very hierarchical  societies. Reach a certain level and you never drive your own car, never press the elevator button,  never open your own umbrella or carry your own belongings. You don’t even open the car door. So when a yakuza boss is left alone, there’s a tendency for him to just sort of stand there waiting for someone else to do what we would all do normally ourselves.

Here’s a way to understand the state of mind of a big boss: If you’ve lived in Japan long enough, you get used to taxi drivers automatically opening and closing the door for you, as is common here, with a push of the button near the driver’s wheel. In Japan, you almost never open the taxi door yourself or close it yourself. However, when you go back to the United States and get out of a taxi without bothering to close the door after you pay, you’ll find that taxi drivers get very angry. That’s probably the closest we’ll get to experience what it’s like to have been a yakuza boss and then no longer be one.  The things you expect others to do for you are not done and it can take some adjusting.

Yakuza bosses don’t retire very well.  Maybe, it’s very hard to get used to being ordinary again. The standard retirement plan still seems to be a bullet in the head, self-administered. Or at least made to look that way.  Pulling the trigger may be the last thing a yakuza boss is ever expected to do for themselves. Personally, I think I’d rather prefer to learn how to press buttons for myself but then again, I’m not a yakuza boss nor have ever been one.

Addendum to the Elevator Story:

All three of us got out the elevator together. Mochizuki-san, got out first, then Mr. Greenriver, then myself. However, Mr. Greenriver soon took the lead and walked at a brisk pace right into the glass door of the lobby, bumping into it, and almost falling over. He wasn’t upset; he just laughed. “Usually,” he said, “the foot-soliders open the door for me. Forgot about that.” At this point I was laughing and Mochizuki was laughing at him as well.

Of course, Mr. Greenriver then did not proceed to open the door. So I did. And then the car door for him and I got in last. It’s important to know your place in the vertical society.

The National Police Agency announced today an immediate ban on designated organized crime groups and their activities in conjunction with the establishment of Japan’s version of the RICO act, the criminal conspiracy laws/kyobozai（共謀罪).  The Criminal Conspiracy Laws were passed in an extraordinary session of the Diet, where the newly ruling Democratic Party of Japan showed amazing and surprising leadership after a series of incidents in which organized crime groups targeted regular civilians in neo-terrorist acts.

The crackdown begins. With the passage of Japan's first comprehensive criminal conspiracy laws, the yakuza (Japanese mafia) were essentially outlawed today.

Prime Minister Hatoyama, addressing the assembled members, proclaimed, “The days that this country coddled organized crime members as if we were children with a Hello! Kitty doll are finally over. No longer will we tolerate collusion, cooperation and the appeasement of organized crime groups, these so called yakuza, these gokudo. We will not let them manipulate our stock markets, jack up land prices, evict the old and feeble from their homes to make way for unneeded new real estate developments. We will not let them exploit transient labor nor profit off of sex trafficking and drugs. We will no longer allow them to have a nine-fingered, sometimes eight-fingered grasp on the steering wheels of power in this country. We will remove them from this country as painstakingly as a laser removes the tattoo from the skin of those foolish enough to have decorated themselves permanently in their youthful folly. With laser-like precision, we will root them out, and eliminate them from the national body–as if they were not just tattoos but cancerous growths.” Hatoyama’s speech was greeted with a standing ovation, with only a smattering of muted protest about his wild use of mixed metaphors.

In Kobe city, the police in a daring raid seized the headquarters of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest crime group with 40,000 members, and arrested over a hundred top members of the same group on charges of racketeering, criminal conspiracy, destruction of property, extortion, and general nuisance prohibitory ordinances.  The Yamaguchi-gumi headquarters will be razed next year and turned into Kobe’s largest open air park. In honor of the film director, Itami Juzo, who was attacked by Yamaguchi-gumi members  in 1992 after directing the dark comedy MINBO NO ONNA, and died under mysterious circumstances—the new park will be called Itami Juzo Koen.

In Tokyo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Department (TMPD) raided the Ginza located offices of the Sumiyoshikai (Japan’s second largest crime group, with 12,000 members) and also the Inagawakai (Japan’s third largest crime group, 10,000) headquarters located directly across from the Ritz-Carlton Tokyo. The same day, the current acting head of the Sumiyoshikai announced plans to dismantle the organization and retire to Las Vegas.  The Inagawakai announced plans to cease all criminal activities and restructure the group as a political think-tank in an alliance with Fyuji Group’s newspaper, Bankei Shinbun.

Jodan Akushitsuna, acting general director of the National Police Agency, in a hastily arranged press conference at the National Police Agency headquarters in Kasumigaseki speaking to the Japanese press, explained, “Japan is not a third-world country and there’s no excuse for allowing organized crime groups to exist as quasi-legal entities. We know who they are, where they are and what they do. Their activities do not benefit the people of Japan. And even if you could argue that they are like a second police force, keeping street crime low–we only need one police force. We just need to do our jobs better. Today is the beginning of the end of the boryokudan (violent groups) in Japan. We gave them fair warning–we banned the publication and distribution of their fanzines. They should have known what was next.  We are willing and able to work with those who leave organized crime and help them find honest jobs in Japan’s service sector and entertainment industry. But make no mistake, and I say this to all those still remaining in yakuza organizations–walk out or be carried out. The choice is up to you.”

It’s not known what impact the dissolution of Japan’s underworld will have on the economy–with 86,000 yakuza now essentially out of a job. The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare predicts that unemployment is expected to rise as rapidly as the price of methamphetamines. The Ministry of Trade and Industry predicts that sales of Hawaiian shirts, traditional Japanese swords, smuggled Russian firearms, and sweatsuits are expected to plummet.  The public security of Japan may also be at risk.  The power vacuum created by the dissolution of the Japanese mafia aka yakuza, may allow foreign gangs to roam the streets terrorizing the gentle people of this small island country.  In addition to this, a summary provision of the new criminal conspiracy laws, effectively bans both the sale and possession of child pornography, as well as games in which the rape and sexual humiliation of underage girls and boys is depicted.  Japan’s Entertainment Trade Association (JETA) immediately launched a petition protesting this crackdown on artistic freedom but their protests have been more or less ignored in the chaos after the laws went into effect today.

Masatada Guroto, formerly of the Guroto-gumi, and once one of the most powerful crime bosses in Japan, upon hearing the news of the crackdown reportedly said to NHK, “That’s the way it goes.  The yakuza have basically been taken over by a bunch of Koreans, anyway. It’s no fun for us Japanese yakuza anymore.”  The North Korean Japanese Association has demanded a retraction. In other news, Sega Entertainment announced that in light of the new laws that they would be ceasing production of GOKUDO BOI 8, which was scheduled to be released in the US as YAKUZA WARRIOR 7, in 2011.

(compiled from Kyogo News Service and Asahi Shinpun reports)

Sub-editor’s note: Now that Japan has cracked down on organized crime, banned the yakuza, and banned the possession of child pornography , I feel that writing about these subjects is no longer fruitful or useful. As of April 2nd, 2010, we will be closing this blog. Sarah Noorbakhsh, who has done an amazing job of running the web-site and turning it into something we are all proud of here, will be moving on to a position in PR at Toyoda International in Nagoya, and is currently reading a lot about Japanese cars. I am at a loss as to what I should do but for the time being have taken a job in PR as well. I’m now  a part-time blogger at the Mini Moni tribute website, Retro Mini Moni. I don’t know a lot about Japanese pop-culture but I’m willing to learn.

* happy April Fools Day! It’ll be a cold day in hell when the Japanese government bans either of these things. @<@

Taku Hachiro is probably the most unlikely sex symbol in the world. A talento known for his personification of the ultimate otaku stereotype, this Shizuoka native’s long stringy hair, portly figure and gopher-like posture might make him better suited for the back corner of a video arcade than ads for the sex industry. But for over a year he has been promoting deai [hook-up] sites in manga magazines. In today’s poor economy, peddlers of pleasure will do anything to attract new customers, including taking on an otaku image.

Otaku have been booming in the popular consciousness since 2005, when Fuji TV aired its prime time drama Densha Otoko, a beauty and the beast romance starring an otaku. Women’s magazines raved about how the show championed otaku as new potential partners for middle-aged career women, but otaku remained incredulous. That same year, Toru Honda wrote Dempa Otoko, a manifesto calling for otaku to abandon “love” for human females and embrace “moe” for two-dimensional characters. His book sold 33,000 copies in three months, and fans planted signs in Akihabara reading, “Real Otaku Don’t Desire Real Women.”

But Honda is the voice of an extreme minority.

“We may have sworn off dating, but that does not mean we don’t have sex,” says Hiroyuki Egami, 23, a prominent voice among himote, a catchall for otaku types unpopular with the ladies. By Egami’s estimation, paying for sex is easier and more honest than wining and dining women to prove oneself a worthy mate.

Those who share Egami’s assessment may head to one of dozens of cosplay cabaret or image clubs found in Shinjuku, Shibuya and Ikebukuro. While many just use the terms of otaku culture such as moe to make a splash, some take pains to attract a demographic deeply involved with media images of the opposite sex.

“Pure-cos” in Shibuya caters to all of the fantasy wishes of its customers by offering close to one hundred costumes based on famous anime heroines. Employees are expected to talk the talk as well; on its hiring page, Pure-cos warns potential employees that customers will expect them to talk and converse about their favorite anime and manga. Staff are rewarded with all the manga they can read during breaks and coupons for the local Mandarake store.

The shift to more physical pleasures is also apparent in Akihabara. The omnipresent maids used to just pour tea, but the boom surrounding Densha Otoko has put cafes in fierce competition and encouraged a diversification of services. Royal Milk, for example, offers its customers “soul care,” 60 minutes of one-on-one talk time with a maid for 9,000 yen. With a market of lonely men that ripe it was only a matter of time before talk shifted to sex.

The area in front of The Radio Kaikan used to be called Maid Row for all the costumed girls passing out fliers there. However, adverts for maid escorts—costumed girls who play the part of a temporary girlfriend–began to outnumber those for cafes, and authorities chased the maids off the street in June 2007.

Today, many men shopping in Akihabara have one or even two maids escorts by their side. They pay 1,000 yen per 10 minutes for the company and compliments on computer-buying skills. Maid escorts ostensibly work between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m., the operating hours of most stores in the area, but local authorities warn of “maid enjo” prostitution after dark.

It remains to be seen how purely “otaku” any of this is. Even as clubs using the otaku vernacular are on the rise, the major buzz in the community surrounds games such as Love Plus and Dream C Club. In the former, players can use their Nintendo DS to interact in real-time with a virtual girlfriend. The latter is a virtual hostess club, which simulates an ultra-real experience down to the overpriced drinks. Real money is exchanged for virtual currency to enjoy an array of services. While otaku imagery in the mizu shoubai world may be on the rise, it seems that otaku still prefer to pay for the not so real thing.

http://www.moe-tokyo.net/

http://www.pure-cos.com/system/comic/comic.html

Editor’s note:  The Otaku subculture is one that I’m no expert on and the definition of otaku is as varied and changing as the autumn sky. And often otaku have a very poor sense of humor about how they are portrayed or defined, as do self-proclaimed experts on otaku culture. So be it.  The first time I ever heard the word and vaguely understood what it meant was in 1999.  I was still on the police beat then and there had been a series of muggings in Akihibara, aka Akiba–the electronics district.  Wayward youth were targeting the cash-bearing teenagers who came to Akiba to load up on manga, games, dolls and other otaku lucre, and luring them into allies with promises of rare manga and such, only to beat the crap out of them and steal everything the poor victims had.  The youth gangs doing this coined a term for the practice, a take on 親父狩り (oyaji-gari–literally: hunting middle-aged men) which was a popular term for beating up old drunken salarymen and stealing their wallets–used by both the kids doing it and the cops investigating incidents.  The kids detained by the Manseibashi police referred to their misadventures as オタク狩り(otaku-gari/hunting otaku) . The term quickly became a new part of the criminal vocabulary.  Every few years, the story I originally wrote on it gets recycled and reported as if it were a new phenomenon. Well there is nothing new under the sun.  Of course, speaking of otaku, there was also the infamous Akiba-kun, a former otaku who went to work for Japan’s largest organized crime group, the Yamaguchi-gumi, running the programs and databases for the 1,000 store loan sharking operation that the Goryokai managed from 2002-2004.  I wonder where he is now? Maybe running businesses in Akihabara?

For more on Otaku culture please check  out The Otaku Encyclopedia by Patrick Galbraith and also the tour book/audio guide to Akihabara by Patrick and Max Hodges. Whether you agree that the books are “authoritative” or not, they are good reads for novices like myself.  I should also say that I’m planning to do the narration for the revised Kabukicho tour with Mr. Hodges, so I’m not unbiased in my fondness of the Akihbara guide. It is fun and informative, at least I think so. (Jake Adelstein, assistant editor)

Tonight I suddenly understood a mystery which had been eating at me for the last four years.

As a high school exchange student in Nagoya I witnessed an event which left me rattled.  I was returning from a field trip with my class. We were across the street from Nagoya-station, waiting to cross to the station’s entrance when all of a sudden a burly man came, and for lack of any artistic phrase, literally kidnapped a middle aged salary man standing in front of me, grabbing him and pulling him away. Nobody did anything. Everyone stood where they were. Mind you, there were at least 30 people watching all of  this; high school students and adults on their way to work.

As this was four years ago, I was not yet fluent and felt incapable of expressing my disbelief in anything but English. I am ashamed that I was also one of the people momentarily paralyzed. But thankfully the shock wore off within seconds. Unfortunately, by that time the man was hauling off that salary man down the sidewalk to an alleyway. A fellow student and I quickly yelled at our teacher (sensei)  to do something. She refused.  Just then we remembered there was a koban (police box) across the street in Nagoya station. We ran to the koban and tried to give as coherent an explanation as possible recounting what we had witnessed. The policewoman thanked us, but we never learned what happened.

Back at school  I was furious no one had done anything. I yelled at people and expressed my disgust at all that had transpired that morning. I then turned to my sensei and asked her why she did nothing. She said, “He was probably yakuza. I don’t want to get involved!” At that time I knew nothing other then yakuza were Japan’s equivilent of the mob. Moreover, I did not know just how powerful the yakuza were and what the roles they played in Japanese society were. I was ignorant at best. Therefore I could not comprehend her answer. I could only see her and the other adults at the crime scene as having failed as ethical people.  And even though I read your book back in December, my realization that my sensei had true fears of all too real consequences for getting involved did not occur to me until tonight when I read your January 27th blog entry.  To this day I am still rattled by these memories.

I never told my parents what had happened. What was I supposed to say? “Oh, the day was good, but by the way a man standing next to me was abducted, and no one did anything to stop it.” I suppose it is because I felt guilty of not having done more at the time. It’s a shame that has bored a hole into me which I do not know what to do with.

Personally, I think that Sam did far more than most people would do in a similar situation. It’s not a bright idea to play hero when a yakuza is beating the crap out of someone but going to the police or calling 110 (the Japanese equivalent of 911) is certainly worth doing.  Whether the police will do anything is another issue.

For many years in Japan, the yakuza could do whatever they wanted; they were above the law–they were, in a sense, invisible. In certain places, they still are. We have received several letters from people with similar stories. The worst of the yakuza are the ones that have no qualms about attacking civilians, although the unwritten rule has always been “we don’t bother ordinary people” (かたぎにめいわくをかけない／堅気に迷惑をかけない）.  And lately some factions  don’t seem to be afraid of the police either.

The Kodokai has always been the most belligerent of Yamaguchi-gumi factions. Traditionally, relations between the police and the yakuza were civil. Police detectives visited the offices of organized crime members and had reasonably polite exchanges of information. When major crimes occurred, the yakuza groups involved would  would turn over the criminal over someone to take the rap, or someone willing to take the fall for the crime, and the person would make a full confession.

Contrary to traditional patterns, the Kodokai will not let police into their offices, their members are ordered to not make confessions, thus they do not confess and do not cooperate with law enforcement in any way, and their antagonism to the police is abnormal for organized crime groups in Japan.

When  In 2009, it became widely known that the Kodokai was collecting information on the police officers and detectives assigned to investigate them–photographing their families, tailing them to their homes, and illegally obtaining records of their car registration. The National Police Agency decided that action was warranted. Since 2006, local police officers have known that the Kodokai engaged in such practices but the NPA did not make an issue of it until recently. In 2007, while speaking to the FBI and the National Police Agency as a guest lecturer at the FBI Seattle bureau office, I mentioned the Kodokai harassment of the police and caused several NPA officers to turn green as their FBI counterparts grilled them as to  ”Why the f*ck do you let those guys get away with it?”  The NPA representatives didn’t have a good answer.

On September 29th, 2009, the NPA sent out a directive to police headquarters nationwide to concentrate their efforts on dismantling and policing not the Yamaguchi-gumi itself, but specifically the Kodokai. In a meeting the same day of organized crime division chiefs from across Japan, Ando Takaharu, the Commissioner General of the NPA stated: “The Kodokai has powered up their antagonistic stance towards law enforcement. They are the driving force behind the Yamaguchi-gumi,”  and suggested that crippling them would weaken the Yamaguchi-gumi. This remains to be seen.

Since the NPA announcement, the Yamaguchi has begun trying to cultivate a more positive image, giving the media better access to their annual rice-cake making party at headquarters, and doing things like distributing cash gifts to the local neighborhood children in Kobe in late December of 2009 as “New Year’s gifts” (otoshidama) from “Uncle Takayama”. This has been reported with a mixture of scorn and bemusement by the mainstream press.  The police, in particular, have not been amused. For many people, when the yakuza commit violent crimes in front of them, they simply pretend not to see it. A legitimate fear of retaliation and the lack of a witness protection program helps keep the yakuza invisible and keep the public “blind.” But these days, for the police at least, the yakuza aren’t invisible anymore. It may take some time for the general public to see them as well.

“He who is present at a wrongdoing and does not lift a hand to prevent it–he is as guilty as the wrongdoers.” —Apache Indian saying.

Tokyo Vice: The Australian Edition

If you have a few minutes and are interested in some of what didn’t make the book and some of what happened afterwords, give the interview a listen. Thanks to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for asking some good questions. Thanks to Scribe Publications for that wonderfully “unique” cover. Ahem.

The accompanying article is below:

Tokyo Vice – a journalist in a crime underworld
By Robbie Buck

Imagine how tough it is to go to another country and try to eke out a career for yourself, especially if it’s a country with a different language and a vastly different culture, and then imagine if your job involved immersing yourself in the seediest and most crime-ridden parts of that country, only to have your life threatened on many occasion.
This picture is what American journalist Jake Adelstein’s life was like after having become the only reporter from the US to be admitted to the insular Tokyo metropolitan police press club and his harrowing experiences have been catalogues in his book Tokyo Vice: A Western reporter on the police beat in Japan.
He relates his relationship with yakuza bosses, including an ex-yakuza who is Adelstein’s bodyguard and driver so, “it’s kind of nice not having to drive, [so] there’s a good thing about having people want to kill you, sometimes,” he jokes.
Seriously, though, he points out that he had protection but, “the most scary thing is wondering who will they go after next.”
Things certainly do work differently in Japan and Adelstein notes that a key part of being a reporter on his round was visiting police at their homes, “you knock on the door, bring some Japanese sweets and have a chat over tea – that kind of give and take between police and reporters is part of information exchange [and] when you become a better reporter you bring the cops information they want and if it turns into a good case, you get the scoop.”
Adelstein had various sources for his book, though, and, “I don’t know how much of what some of my sources had told me were true,” but all he has been told makes for a murky picture of a dangerous world.
In fact, “there were some positive aspects of the reporting,” he modestly admits, as some of his work helped the Japanese Government look at human trafficking in that country.
He is now involved with a non-profit organisation that combats human trafficking in Japan and he is writing a new book called The Last Yakuza, a kind of biography of his bodyguard.

You can light a cigarette with this bullet or just cause a heap of trouble.

20 minutes and five police cars later–a detective came up to the car, motioned the gang boss to get out. The detective had on white gloves and had the bullet in his hand.
“Mr. X, is this your bullet?”
“It’s not a bullet; it’s a lighter.”
“So you say.”
Mr. X noticed the white gloves the detective had on, which are usually only for crime scenes.
“What’s with the gloves?”

“Evidence. We don’t want to obscure your fingerprints on this bullet. You’re going down for violations of the Firearms and Ammunitions Law, pal…understand? Some serious jail time.”
Mr. X, says he was getting a little bit worried. The cop stared him in the face, and then the cop took a pack of Lark cigarettes out of his coat and handed a cigarette to Mr. X. Mr. X took the cigarette and put it in his mouth and the cop lit it with the bullet shaped lighter, laughing.
“Mr. X, pretty cool! I’ve never seen a lighter like this. Do you know where I can get one?”
“I could ask.”
“Yeah, let me know. By the way, you know we’re still going to seize this. Just to be sure. Gonna have to have forensics look at it.”
“Be my guest.”
And with that, Mr. X got back in his car and was allowed to leave.
Guns and weapons are taken very seriously in Japan, and bullet-shaped lighters are probably not a source of levity. When I heard this story, I thought I was going to have to go prostate myself in front of Mr. X again and was hoping not to hit my forehead too hard on the ground, but he told me he was more amused than upset. And he asked me to get him two more of the bullet-shaped lighters.

The Tokyo Managed Subway System May Soon Run 24/7

At the same time, merchants in Kabukicho, the former red-light district of Tokyo, located in Shinjuku are pushing to allow the area to be designated a special region where all businesses can stay open 24 hours a day. Currently, host and hostess clubs are forced to shutter their windows at one am. They are circumventing the laws by transforming the places into “girl’s bars” or “boy’s clubs” after hours, with stand up counters where customers can order drinks,–which makes them “bars” instead of cabarets, technically. Tokyo has a fair amount of latitude in how they run their own subway system, and while the 都営地下鉄 (toeichikatesu) routes are limited, if they run 24 hours a night there is a good chance they will become the last resort of the night owls and newly arrived passengers at Haneda. Longer hours should translate into more employment for the locals–and the cops as well.

Once upon a time, a famous yakuza journalist named Mizoguchi Atsushi, wrote some articles about a Yamaguchigumi (Japan’s largest organized crime group) faction. They are known as the Yamakengumi. These articles made the Yamakengumi very angry. So some thugs were sent to dispatch him. They couldn’t find him, so they stabbed his son. The same thing happened in the past with a man in the Seijo area who angered the Goto-gumi and fled–in his absentia, his wife was stabbed so severely that it was a miracle she didn’t die.  It’s still an open case.

Let’s get back to Mizoguchi. According to someone who knows about these turn of events, Mizoguchi became frantically worried about his family. And he also became very worried that he was going to be killed himself.  A yakuza boss made an effort to reassure, telling him to calm down.  This is what he allegedly said to Mizoguchi. “Calm down. Be a  man. Don’t worry, nobody is going to kill you. Not now.  It would be too obvious. We’ll have to wait five, ten,maybe fifteen years before doing it. So relax. For the next five years at least–no one will touch you.” Somehow, I don’t think he found that reassuring.

In March of 2008, I was at the trial of Goto Tadamasa on property forgery related charges. He was found not guilty. The original investigation started with looking into the brutal murder in broad daylight of a real estate negotiator named Nozaki, if memory serves me well.  The Goto trial collapsed when the central witness for the defense balked at the last minute.  I knew one of the cops waiting outside in the hall, and asked him what he thought of the verdict.  He had the following to say:

“The guy who was going be on the witness stand–it’s a shame he backed down. Because in a year or two, when enough time has gone by–he’ll vanish. If he’d taken the stand, he probably would have ended up dead anyway, but at least it would have been death with honor.  You can’t outrun the yakuza–you just make them chase you even harder when you turn your back.  You probably won’t win if you fight them either. But you might have a better chance.”

If you piss off certain yakuza groups, you’re never going to win the war–you may win a battle.  But eventually, you’ll lose. The only way you could win is to drive so hard that the entire faction is disbanded and that someone at the top of the organization decides you’re more trouble than you’re worth. You have to be a huge troublemaker to get that kind of free pass.

I know an ex-yakuza who used to be a loan shark and a collector as well. His point of pride was that he never bothered the family of the debtor, never leaned on them to collect the interest, never called up the mark in the middle of the night and woke up his kids, never stuffed a dead animal in their mailbox, never kidnapped family members or lovers of the debtor–no matter how much money was owed. “A man’s debts are his own problem.  If he owes me and won’t pay, I’ll take it out on him–not innocent people. If you have a fight with your mistress, you don’t beat up her brother. I’m not saying you beat up the woman either, you know.  I’m saying it’s dishonorable to pick on people who aren’t involved. There are no fair fights, of course, but there are honorable fights. No real yakuza is going to go after the friends or family of their enemy. Collateral damage as is unacceptable.  That’s how it should be.”

Well, how things should be and how they are, are never the same.  Maybe the old-school yakuza lived up to those ideals of “an honorable fight” but if that time ever existed, it’s the ancient past for most of them. You might think you’re only risking your personal safety when you get in their way but that’s terribly naive. Because when they realize that you aren’t afraid to get hurt or maybe even killed for doing what you think is the right thing, they’ll look for different leverage.  Maybe, they’ll leave you alone for a while because they are afraid that hurting you will anger the cops–and turn public opinion against them. But they won’t forgive and forget.

I should state things a little better here.  I don’t really think there’s anyone who isn’t afraid of physical pain or death. I sure hell as am. But there are some people still crazy enough to take the risk.  That’s when you put people in danger.  Why do you think the Kodokai, the strongest faction of the Yamaguchi-gumi, follows detectives to their homes, takes down their license plate numbers, and photographs members of their family? The message is very simple. Here it is:

“Nothing is just business. Everything is personal. If you bring the war to us, we’ll bring the war to you–right where you live. So don’t fuck with us.”  And they only have to demonstrate that once for people to get the point.  Expose how they make their money,  get some of them arrested, pass on information to the police about their criminal activities–whether it’s human trafficking or  just illegal gambling–and you will quickly learn how intolerant the noble yakuza can be.

No matter how tough you imagine yourself to be, the intangible pain you’ll feel when someone is hurt because of what you did, even if you were doing the right thing, will hurt like nothing you can imagine. It feels like an internal injury and it doesn’t get better. Unless you’re a sociopath, and then you don’t care about anyone else but yourself.  Maybe sociopaths make the best journalists in the world in that sense. They certainly are well-adapted to be yakuza.  A yakuza doesn’t even have to lay a finger on you to hurt you, he just has to let you know that he’s willing to hurt the people you care about. That’s enough. Sometimes, the fear of that happening is worse than when it really does happen. It keeps you up at night—it makes you want to avoid close relationships, it makes you lonely as hell, and it makes you vulnerable.  It can also make you a little crazy.

If they back up what they say, they can force you into a position where you feel the responsible thing to do is kill yourself.  I knew one man who I think was goaded into doing it, for fear of what would happen to his little boy if he didn’t.  That works perfectly for them–get your enemy to kill himself and you’ll never go to jail for murder. A perfect crime.

Takeshita Saburo, one of the yakuza to receive a liver transplant at UCLA, used to have a signature line when he was shaking down a deadbeat. He’d beat on their door, of their home, in the middle of the night, and yell, “Time to pay up.  I’ll make you a deal.  Just bring down your little daughter so I can cut off her face. Then we’ll be even.” Sometimes, he’s tap a knife on the door, which would emphasize the point, especially if it was a metal door.  Metal on metal, especially if you scratch on it with a knife–it’s an unpleasant sound.

But here’s the corollary on this: almost everyone has someone they love. Even gangsters. So when push comes to shove, here’s what you have to do. You have to figure out who is the top dog, you have to find out who he loves, and you have to demonstrate him that those people are vulnerable. The more of them you know, the stronger your position. He can’t watch them all.  And you have to let him know that you are willing to hurt them, by any means possible, if it comes to that. You also need to be able to show that even if you’re obliterated, there are good odds someone else will do the job for you.  And the most difficult thing to do of all, is that you may have to demonstrate that. At least once. It isn’t a good feeling, so I’ve heard.  It hardens a person. It takes you down to there level. It makes you play God and do triage with other people’s lives. You have to decide, if that’s the case, “the pain of person X is less significant than the possible pain or death of my friend.”  So what do you do?

There are no rules to gokudo chess.  It’s a betting game.  You don’t have a choice in what you might lose–they often believe they do.  They expect that YOU will fight fair. Once you’ve sat down at the table with a dishonorable player, you’re locked in until you reach a stalemate or only one of you is left standing. There is a referee but you can’t count on him. You have to win at all costs and that requires excellent strategy, sometimes physical intimidation, psychological warfare, and sometimes you have to cheat. The best way to do that is to know what your opponent doesn’t want to lose. And if he doesn’t mind losing everything, then you need to know what he fears.  Fear is more powerful than love for some people.

I keep thinking my chess game is over but then just when I’m ready to walk away from the table, it seems like someone else wants to play. I never liked chess very much. And being forced to play, makes you think more and more about waiting until the referee leaves the room, and beating your opponent to death with the chess board. That would be a total victory.  No more rematches.

I’ve gotten some letters that lambaste me for putting people in danger, including my family, and a number of morally questionable things I did. Well,  I did what I had to do and I believe in my work as an investigative journalist and with some NGOs. Of course, I’m not happy to put people in uncomfortable situations.  But if everyone runs, than the whole world gets taken over by the bad guys.  And then nobody wins. There are people who deal with organized crime issues in Japan that move their families out of the country. They don’t quit their jobs. I admire that.  I might not be a great father but I don’t want to teach my kids that when the bullies of the world come calling that the honorable thing is to capitulate.

An honorable victory is the ideal. Sometimes that isn’t possible.  Hopefully, gentle reader, you’ll never find yourself in this position–but if you have to deal with someone willing to hurt your friends or lovers or family, because they can’t get at you–you have to show them that you can do the same thing–and that may stop them. And that’s an unpleasant lesson to learn.

Best to avoid that part of life’s education, when humanly possible.

When I was a young reporter, circa 1995, I made an appointment with a Sumiyoshikai (住吉会)boss, Kaneko Naoya, at his office in Minami-Ginza at 7pm.  I showed up at 7:20. And Kaneko was pissed. Unreasonably so, or so I thought.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said apologizing.

“Why were you late?”

“I had some work to do.”

“Why didn’t you call?”

“I guess I should have.”

“No, ‘I guess I should have’ isn’t good enough. You should have at least called.  And you should have been here when you said you would be here in the first place.”

I bowed my head and apologized again.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were so busy.”

“I’m not busy,” he laughed. “That’s not the point.”

“Then why are you so pissed?”

“Because you promised you would be here at 7pm.”

“Is it such a big deal? It was a little promise. (大した約束でもないでしょう)”.

He was silent for a second and then stared me in the eyes, and said, “There are no small promises. You need to learn this now if you’re going to be a good reporter and if you’re going to walk in and out of our world. If you’re going to be a man. Trust is built on little promises and it can all be lost by failure to live up to them.  All promises are important. Do you know the saying, 武士に二言はない–bushi ni nigon wa nai? *Literally—A samurai does not have a second word.

I said I wasn’t familiar with the proverb and asked him what it meant.

“It means this: a samurai values his honor, his good faith more than anything and once he has given his word, once he has made a promise he always keeps that promise. If you say it, you do it.  I’m not saying I’m a samurai but this is what an honorable man does. If you didn’t think you could have been here exactly at 7pm you shouldn’t have said that you would. “

I was a little pissed when I heard this, the way anyone is when he or she gets lectured. I thought he was just being a cantankerous old bastard or giving me crap because he could.

“I’ll say it again—I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep my promise.”

“Could not or did not? Which is it?”

And before I opened my big yap one more time, I thought about it again. I’d spent too much time at a bookstore on the way there.  I stopped to have a can of coffee. I could have been there on time—I wasn’t. For him, my answer was going to be critical in his decision if he could really trust me. I could feel that.

“Did not. I’m sorry I did not come here on time. I do not have an excuse. I will try not to do it again.

(二回と同じ失敗しないよう頑張ります.).”

He offered me a cup of tea and smiled.

“That was almost the right answer. Don’t try, just do it.

（惜しかったな。がんばるんじゃないよ。やるんだよ。約束を守るんです。）

He then very politely explained to me why I should pay attention to his words.

“When you’re a yakuza or a reporter or a cop, people count on you to keep your word, to do what you’ve said you’ll do.  In our business, sometimes we got to war—over turf, over money, over a meaningless quarrel. But that’s part of the business. If we’re going to bump heads with the Kokusuikai and one of my soldiers says that he’ll be at his post at seven pm sharp and he’s not there—what do you think will happen? Maybe the guy he’s supposed to back up will have to go in alone—maybe his buddy will get killed.  Maybe we’ll lose the chance to make the strike. Apologies don’t cut it. You’re a reporter, you have deadlines.  If you don’t meet your deadline—what happens? Can you just blow it off? Do you think your editor will just say, ‘no problem, we’ll just leave part of the paper blank.’  I don’t think so. You can get fired for things like that.  I don’t know how it is in America, and maybe I don’t know how it is for the civilians but for us, a man’s word is the most important thing in the world.  You need to learn not to promise things lightly and to know the difference between promises you can’t keep and promises you don’t keep.  Nine times out of ten, the failure to keep a promise is in yourself, not something you can blame on the world.”

I nodded once more but I think I smirked a little and he raised his finger and pointed at me quite forcefully and said, “And when you break a promise, you need to show in your attitude that you are sincerely sorry. And you should try to make amends.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“I’d like you to listen to what I’ve told you and take it to heart.  If people don’t think they can trust you, you will never be a good reporter. You have to show them that they can trust you. Every little promise you keep, every time you’re punctual, every time you do something that you said you would do—you build trust. And every missed appointment, every favor you forget, every loan you fail to repay, every time you say you’ll call and don’t—these things add up.  You do some things right.  But you still don’t get it. Think about what I’m saying. And we’ll call it even.”

Kaneko passed away years ago and I’m still not batting a hundred on keeping my promises. I still fail to keep them but I try my best to uphold them and when I can’t do it, I try to make amends as best as I can.  Lately, I’ve been so bombarded with work and other things, that I have a very hard time keeping up to date or writing back to everyone who’s read the book and is kind enough to send me a letter.  I haven’t promised I’d respond to each person but I do a feel a duty to do it—it seems like the bare minimum of required politeness.

Honor is a hard currency to trade in.  There are promises and debts that can lock you down and not let you go.  In the thick of a scary time in my life, I promised Mochizuki-san, ex-yakuza boss, my friend, bodyguard and driver—that no matter what happened I would look after him and his family. And he promised that he’d lay down his life for me if he had to, and that if he failed to do his job, he’d find the person who took me out and kill him.  Sure, it’s pretty melodramatic crap but that’s how it went.  I meant what I said and he meant what he said. It can be a cumbersome thing.

Sometimes, I’d like to leave Japan and not come back but I owe the man and his family. And until I’m reasonably sure that he, his wife and their son are taken care of, I can’t leave.  When he had to move out of his apartment on short notice, I put up the money for his moving expenses. When his car broke down, I bought him another one. I’m not wealthy but these things are essential and I scrambled each time to find the money so I could keep what I see is part of my promise to him. He has severe diabetes and that means that a minor injury can set in motion a chain of events that might result in him losing his hands or his feet. Necrosis. He’s in the hospital today. He bought a new pair of shoes and they didn’t fit well and in a short time, his foot was severely infected. It’s touch and go whether they’ll amputate or not. I’m hoping they won’t have to do it.  But even then, I’ll still take care of him. I’ll find work for him, even if he can’t walk.

It’s the same way with the Polaris Project Japan. I said I’d be a director on the board and that I would take on certain duties. Honestly, I want out of that as well, sometimes.  Valuable things come out of the work but it’s hard.  Last week, the information brought to us about a homosexual pedophile ring that makes child pornography was so horrible and unpleasant that it made me physically ill. The informant wanted us to validate the evidence before going to the cops,  and he showed it to us. Horrible, horrible, horrible. Some of what we deal with gives me flashbacks that keep me up for days. However, I said I’d do it and I’m not going to back out just because in retrospect that promise is slightly detrimental to my mental health or I didn’t quite see what I would get myself into.

God knows, there are some promises that I have colossally failed to uphold. My marriage vows would be up there. I could argue that I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but I don’t have a good excuse. No one put a gun to my head. I could argue that I’m not solely at fault but so what? It doesn’t matter. All I can do is make amends for that—I’ll be paying them off financially, emotionally, and in many other ways for the rest of my life. And I should.   Not all promises are stated either. There are some promises that are understood. Journalists have an unstated promise that they will protect their sources. The sources don’t have to protect the journalist. And I can’t say I expect them to do it.  Promises are often unilateral. And sometimes honor.

As a journalist, I have a promise to protect my sources and my friends and family. I have gone to extraordinary lengths to do that and I have done some terrible things in the process. I don’t regret keeping that promise. I only regret the times I have been unable to do it. Those are the things that haunt me.

The thing is that the damages people can suffer are immense, when you fail to do your job and honor your word as a journalist.  If you blow a cop source, he might be disciplined, fired, or since technically they could be seen as  violating the government worker confidentiality laws–they might even go to jail.  If you don’t conceal a yakuza source–they might be expelled temporarily from their organization, banished for life, or just vanish, completely.   If you are careless with government sources, they might be demoted, fired or harassed for the rest of their careers.  Sometimes, to protect a source you have to kill a story. I’ve done it before. But I’d rather lose the story than lose what little honor I have left.  There will always be other news. People only have one life.

Even when we realize that we’ve made shortsighted, foolish, or difficult promises–it’s doesn’t nullify the promise. If we could retroactively change every promise we didn’t like or wish we hadn’t made—a vow wouldn’t mean anything at all. Of course, it’s hard to learn to not make those promises in the first place. Maybe that’s even harder than keeping a promise, learning the gravitas of our words. But when you break them, no matter how foolish they might have been–if you don’t at least regret it and ponder it, you haven’t yet learned anything. And ultimately that lack of regret makes a person untrustworthy and prone to do it again. People remember every missed appointment, every casually promised thing not delivered, or book not returned. Just as they remember every little favor you have done, or kindness you have bestowed upon them, or little promise to them that you kept.  These all add up when we judge a person and ourselves and how others judge us as well.  And if they don’t, they should.

I don’t have many close friends and it’s probably because I hold people to the same standards that I try to live up to. Maybe that’s not fair.  I don’t know. But the people who are my close friends, are invariably very good about keeping their word.  They don’t forget. They pay their debts. Alien Cop (as I still think of him) may be a little shady, but if he says for example, “Oh, I have a good book about the new revisions of the organized crime laws. I’ll bring it to you next time we go drinking”—well, he will bring it. I almost never have to remind him. If he says he’ll do it, he does it.  If he says, “I’ll call you back tomorrow”—he calls. It’s not a big deal, but over time, his pattern of behavior has established that he is trustworthy.  I don’t really believe that there are no small promises but each one has considerable weight.

The keeping your word thing has a lot to do with leadership, I think. There are hundreds of crappy books written about leadership.  I haven’t read many that impressed me. I’m not a leader. I work best alone with a small group of people. And I also believe if you have people following you, then you should know where the hell you are going. I have a terrible sense of direction, the proverbial sense and the literal sense, what the Japanese would call a方向音痴 (hook-onchi). Well, actually, I’m not bad navigating on horseback and out in the wild but unfortunately I don’t really have the space for a horse here.

However, I’ll defer to what  Shibata-kumicho once told me  about what it means to be a yakuza boss. I’ve internalized the words so well, that I forget they are not my own.

“If you are a leader, the people who follow you have to know that you are as good as your word and that you won’t leave them stranded behind and that if you did, you’d make every effort in the world come back for them. Or that at the very least, you wouldn’t forget about them—that you’d agonize over the decision. Otherwise, no one will follow you. The measure of a man is the promises he’s kept and the promises he hasn’t. In the end, that all we have. Our honor, our memories and the decisions we’ve made.”

I’m not a cop, or a samurai, or a yakuza but I admire some of their ideals. Maybe, I’ll come close to living up to them someday.

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