Speed Tribes: Days and Night's with Japan's Next Generation

PROLOGUE

I was born in Kobe, Japan, of an American-Jewish father and a Japanese mother. I grew up in Los Angeles and went to college in New York. In 1988, when I was twenty-three, I returned to Japan and landed a job covering trade agreements and visiting dignitaries for the English-language spin-off of Tokyo’s leading daily newspaper. I wound up staying in Tokyo for five years, moving from reporter to managing editor of a monthly city magazine and then finally free-lance writer.

This was the era of the bubble economy.

Tokyo from 1985 to 1991 saw what some believe was the greatest concentration of wealth in the history of the world. Between 1985 and 1989, Japan’s GNP grew 30 percent; the value of Japan’s assets increased 80 percent. The real estate value of Tokyo, the received wisdom had it, was greater than the real estate value of the entire United States plus the asset value of every company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The value of the Imperial Palace alone, about ten acres in downtown Tokyo, was greater than that of the entire state of California. Spurred by the overcentralizing of government bureaucracies and buildings in Tokyo and the city’s strict tenants’ rights laws, prices in good neighborhoods doubled every three years—every two years in the prime Marunouchi or Akasaka neighborhoods, if you were lucky enough to find someone willing to sell. A three-bedroom house on a twentieth of an acre an hour’s ride from Tokyo, which sold for $100,000 in 1979, sold for $1.5 million in 1989. A one-bedroom condominium in the tony Hiroo section of town with a view, parking space, and all mod cons: $2.5 million.

As real estate soared, investors took out cheap loans, using the endlessly escalating values of their properties as collateral, and bought into the rising stock market. Capital thus generated blew back into the real estate market. The baburu (bubble) inflated. With asset appreciation spreading like crabs in a whorehouse, anyone who went into the bubble days with some capital and an IQ over six was flush by the late eighties. Only idiots and foreigners didn’t get rich during the bubble, an equity warrants salesman for Japan’s largest securities house once confided to me.

Designer boutiques flourished, nouvelle cuisine restaurants opened daily, jewelry and gold vendors couldn’t keep up with demand. There was money everywhere and it had to be spent. Between 1985 and 1990, about $700 billion flowed abroad in exchange for Louis Vuitton steamer trunks and Rolex Oyster Perpetual watches bought in Paris or Geneva—or for flagship buildings and movie studios purchased in New York or Los Angeles.

You saw the money in the streets of Tokyo, glimpsed it in the rows of chauffeur-driven, double-parked black Lexuses, Benzes, BMWs, and Bentleys idling outside of posh Ginza or Roppongi watering holes. Felt it in the crush of consumers jockeying for position at the Tiffany counter in the Mitsukoshi department store. Heard about it from bar hostesses who described their customers taking them out for thousand-dollar, seven-course dinners. I remember watching a videotape of an NFL play-off game a friend had sent me from the United States. At one point there was a slick commercial in which a silver, gull-wing Mercedes sports car from the fifties rotated on a pedestal while an auctioneer took bids, photographers snapped pictures, and potential buyers oohed and aahed at the fine piece of machinery on display. The gist of the commercial was that Mercedes-Benz made very exquisite, very expensive cars, which eventually, if you kept them for forty years, became objets d’art that were highly sought after by collectors. In the lot across the street from my cramped Tokyo apartment, three of those gull-winged collector’s items were parked.

In December 1989, the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Nikkei Index peaked at 38,915.87. In less than two and a half years it would be down 60 percent, with trading volume off close to 80 percent. Real estate plummeted as much as 50 percent. If you could find a bidder. In other words, everything in the country was suddenly worth half of what it had been two years earlier. And by 1993 the market hadn’t yet recovered. Scandals also frightened investors away. Nomura Securities, Japan’s largest brokerage house, was caught compensating preferred clients for stock losses and engaging in other chicanery.

In addition, the highly publicized Japanese purchases in America, such as Mitsubishi Estate’s acquisition of Rockefeller Center, in which it overpaid by as much as $400 million, were certified disasters. The thing about the Rockefeller Center situation is that it’s one case out of dozens. There are too many to mention, a Mitsubishi Estate executive told me.

The bubble had burst.

In 1991 I was dating a twenty-year-old English woman. Nina had short, cropped, blond hair and the pale, blemish-free skin Japanese men were supposed to be very fond of. For five hours a night, six nights a week she poured drinks for, batted eyelashes at, and made small talk with Japanese businessmen at a popular Roppongi hostess bar. Occasionally, she would have dinner with a customer. For her services as a hostess she was paid handsomely, ¥7,000 ($64) an hour, plus whatever she could coax in tips from her clients, usually about $200 a night. Nina made over $10,000 a month. I saw her late at night, at the earliest around one, usually later: two, three, or four in the morning. Sometimes she would keep me waiting until dawn at El Macombo or Deja Vu or Gas Panic or any of the other dingy bars where hostesses went after work. I knew this going into the relationship: if our affair was to work, no jealousy was allowed.

But then I saw the new four-carat diamond pendant dangling from her neck sparkling brightly in the streetlight’s white light. It was two A.M. and I was standing just inside the saloon doors of Sunset Strip, a bar on Roppongi Dori between Nishi Azabu and Roppongi Crossing in central Tokyo. We had arranged to meet there after she finished her night’s work. As Nina climbed from the tan leather seats of a dark blue Bentley convertible, the pompadoured owner, in a yellow-and-green tropical print shirt, and I exchanged glances, his laced with contempt and mine with jealousy. The smirking owner was three years younger than his twenty-two-year-old, black-suited driver. The driver was three years younger than me.

When I saw that four-karat diamond—big and hard enough to cut glass, flesh, soul, or whatever you put in its path—I felt a pang of jealousy and anger and resentment first toward the smug, Bentley-owning, real estate-dealing, expense account-wielding Japanese guy who had given it to her and then toward Nina herself. When she entered the bar I told her I wanted to leave and she shrugged and said, Fine, perhaps sensing my bad mood but unaware that I was about to break the unspoken no-jealousy-allowed rule.

Six-lane Roppongi Dori stank of fruity and fishy garbage that had been cooking and fermenting in the tropical July heat. The two-tiered elevated expressway that divides central Tokyo loomed overhead, the whir and rush of traffic audible from where we stood seventy feet below. The surface streets were empty save the occasional taxi cruising for a fare.

Nina walked ahead of me. She was wearing a tight, short black dress made from some kind of cotton, probably with a little polyester or Lycra spandex woven in for elasticity. Moschino? Alaia? Gaultier? She was in, as usual, flat shoes; she didn’t want to appear taller than her Japanese customers. She wore a Cartier tank watch with a black lizard band (another gift from a wealthy customer) and carried a small black purse barely capacious enough for a lipstick.

We passed a shuttered vegetable shop, a small business hotel, and a convenience store before she turned to me and said, in her Cockney accent, And what the fuck’s wrong with you?

And in the nanosecond before we were going to have it out—fight? break up? slap each other? go back to my place and make love? or just realize we didn’t like each other very much—a loud, throaty chorus of engine growls, like chain saws through megaphones, came up behind me. A motorcycle gang of twenty-five Japanese kids with tightly curled, permed hair and mirrored sunglasses, dressed in the green aviator suits of kamikaze pilots, roared past. From their bikes flew Rising Sun flags.

The gang rode slow and loud, taking up all three westbound lanes of Roppongi Dori. Their small-engine bikes had been modified beyond recognition with chrome handlebars, decorative mirrors, fiberglass packing, and triple-header tail pipes that increased exhaust noise to ear-splitting volume. They looked at Nina, in her short, sexy skirt, and me and revved their motors, waved their flags, hit their four-trumpet horns, swerved from side to side and made sparks by striking the pavement with their kickstands. A few of the bikers cat-called or gave us the finger. Most of them just stared impassively and gunned their fantastically loud machines. One, a well-muscled youth with impressive tattoos of intertwining dragons and snakes, rode shirtless, and when he looked at me he grinned. A gold tooth flashed.

They were bosozoku out for a Saturday night run. On the backs of their kamikaze uniforms were ancient Chinese characters of a style I had never seen before.

At that moment, with the cycles roaring and the hostess beside me, I realized that the Japan I had been writing about as a reporter and magazine editor had nothing to do with the Japan I was living, breathing, smelling, and seeing firsthand. In the flurry of having to bat out stories about microchip dumping, trade disputes, or twenty-dollar cups of coffee, I had overlooked the gritty, sexy, real Japan: the dazzling variety of new youth subcultures and rich pop cultures emerging as a result of the bubble economy prosperity. Speed tribes, a literal translation of bosozoku, is the term I have come to use in referring to all these new subcultures. They are not the Japan that a foreign journalist riding an expense account uncovers when interviewing a deputy minister of finance. Nor are they the quaint picture-postcard Japan of tea ceremonies, sumo wrestlers, rock gardens, and Kabuki. The twenty-five million Japanese between the ages of fifteen and thirty bear little resemblance to the twelve-hour-day salarymen or kimono-clad geisha familiar to westerners; they are a far cry from their generational predecessors, the shinjinrui, the Japanese baby-boomers. The speed tribes, the children of the industrialists, executives, and laborers who built Japan, Inc., are as accustomed to hamburgers as onigiri (rice balls), to Guns N’ Roses as ikebana (flower arranging), and are often more adept at folding a bindle of cocaine or heroin than creasing an origami crane.

Standing there, with the pretty blond hostess frowning at me and the motorcycle gang giving me the finger, I decided my Japan would be life in the bars, at the nightclubs, and on the streets. I had never read about this Japan in Time, Fortune, or the Wall Street Journal. I would hang out with these kids and write their stories.

Nina and I didn’t break up that night. Our particular bubble burst a few weeks later, and when we split up the reason wasn’t expensive gifts from rich Japanese guys or my jealousy or the debilitating late hours we kept. What finally did us in was an argument about money. I borrowed fifty thousand yen, about four hundred dollars at the time, and was a little slow paying her back. That annoyed her so she dumped me.

And began dating the guy in the Bentley.

I

IZUMI

THE MONEY-DRINKERS

Mitsunori Izumi, twenty-nine, sat on an imitation leather chair in the Wakao Wrecking Crew offices, sipping Bron brand cough syrup from a brown bottle and trying not to stare at the big, square Hino Truck Company clock on the wall directly opposite him. He had caught a cold five days ago when he fell asleep in the front seat of his air-conditioned Nissan Sylvia while parked outside a Shimbashi mah-jongg parlor waiting for his kumi-cho (gang boss) to finish gambling and drinking. When Izumi awakened at seven that morning Kumi-cho had already gone; he hadn’t even bothered to wake Izumi and dismiss him.

The cold became a bad cough and he read in the papers about something going around called the Korean Flu. He bought the codeine-laced cough syrup so he wouldn’t have to give up smoking for even a day. And the codeine soothed his nerves.

The seventy-eight-year-old grandmother of the proprietor of the Wakao Wrecking Crew brought in a pot of green tea and a dish of sweet bean cakes. Izumi smiled up at her, his crooked teeth showing beneath thick lips and a twice-broken nose. Over his narrow, dark eyes his black hair was cut close to his scalp. He thanked the old lady profusely and nibbled one of the bean cakes out of politeness.

Outside the offices, an ‘87 Honda with a bashed-in front end made a crunching sound as Wakao let it drop from the tow winch. The small parking area around the office was crowded with battered, rusting auto hulks hauled there by Wakao or one of the tsukaiipa (errand boys). If no one claimed the wreck for two months it would be chopped and sold for parts.

Izumi, dressed in tan golf pants, a no-name polo shirt, and imitation Gucci loafers, took another slug of the cough syrup, shivering slightly as the heavy, brown fluid slid down his throat. He was waiting for an errand boy to come back with a rental car. One of his girlfriends had taken his BMW, another was driving his Nissan Sylvia up to Saitama to visit her mother. He couldn’t rent a car himself because he had left his licenses and credit cards—all forgeries—in the Nissan. He had an important meeting across town with his kumi-cho and didn’t want to be late.

He capped the cough syrup bottle and dug a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. He lit one with his gold Dunhill lighter and snapped it shut with a click.

Wakao entered, wearing a dirty green jumpsuit.

Where’s the punk? Izumi asked.

Wakao shrugged and lit a cigarette. He’ll be back, he said, exhaling.

Izumi looked up at the red-and-blue Hino clock. Four-thirty.

In another two hours, maybe three, he would be back in the trenches threatening to bust heads collecting money for his gumi—Yakuza gang. The thought of it all—or was it the codeine in the cough syrup?—nauseated him.

Tokyo, a metropolitan area with a population of over twenty-five million, is the richest market in the world for young entrepreneurs eager to interest the public in new consumer goods and equally rich for hustlers eager to bilk the public through games of chance, drugs, or extortion. Mitsunori Izumi is a rank-and-file soldier in the sixty-member Kobayashi-kai, an organized crime family directly under the Tsuguta-kumi, a two-thousand-member Yakuza syndicate, one of the nine reputed to control Tokyo rackets. Izumi runs three off-track betting operations called Nomu-kaypa (money-drinkers). His setup is little more than a few telephones and account books in three small Fukagawa apartments in Tokyo’s old downtown. His income largely comes from his percentage of what the money-drinkers can imbibe. Izumi’s three money-drinkers man the phones all day Monday through Sunday, taking bets on races at any of ten major racetracks scattered throughout Japan.

Izumi’s accounts, like most Yakuza-run money-drinkers, are based on a point system. A gambler sets up an account via a face-to-face meeting with Izumi, often referred by higher-ups in the family. Izumi awards the gambler twenty points a day with which to wager. Each point has a different value, depending on the bettor. Some gamblers have ¥20,000 ($182) points, others ¥2,000 ($18) points. Only the bettor and Izumi know how much each point is worth. It’s a polite way of setting limits—and of simultaneously making the bookmaking process smoother for insiders and inscrutable to authorities. Before each race, Izumi’s three money-drinkers fax him lists of bettors and the points they have put down. (After faxing the bets, the money-drinkers burn the original slips. They use very delicate paper, much like toilet paper in consistency, so that it can be swallowed if the police start banging on the door.) Izumi then figures whether he can cover the bets himself or if he will need to lay some off through his kumi-cho at headquarters. For that service, among others, Izumi pays 20 percent of his earnings in tribute.

But money-drinkers and horse players comprise only a fraction of the Yakuza’s $35 billion annual income.

The name Yakuza means eight-nine-three, a losing hand in an old card game. The traditional Yakuza businesses, besides gambling, are extortion, narcotics trafficking, prostitution, and protection. (Izumi also runs drugs for the family, small amounts of shabu—methamphetamine—and marijuana.) One of their well-known extortion rackets is the sokaiya; hoods buy one share of blue-chip stock and announce their intention to attend that company’s annual shareholders meeting and ask embarrassing questions or create a disturbance. This tactic deliberately plays on the japanese distaste for confrontation. Corporate boards will buy off sokaiya and even pay them protection money to ward off other sokaiya. According to a recent National Police Agency survey, nearly one-third of two thousand companies that responded admitted they still pay sokaiya annual amounts of up to ¥100 million ($910,000).

However, in recent years the Yakuza have taken their own seats on the boards of major corporations. During the time of the bubble economy, no one could resist the easy money to be made in real estate and stock market speculation and gang bosses became major shareholders in legitimate corporations. At the time of his death, Susumu Ishii, former chairman of the Inagawa-kai, one of Japan’s leading crime syndicates, owned 2.9 million shares of Tokyu Corporation, 1.85 million shares of Nippon Steel, 1 million shares of Mitsui Kinzoku, and .5 million shares of Nomura Securities. Reportedly, he had his sights set on a takeover bid of the Tokyu Corporation, a major department store-railway conglomerate. The value of Ishii’s shares was well into the billions of dollars.

This is the ultimate type of intellectual violence practiced by the Yakuza, says a spokesman for the National Police Agency. The money made illegally through traditional methods—gambling and protection—can now be legitimized through buying shares on the stock exchange.

Despite new laws intended to curb the Yakuza by declaring their very organizations, not just their criminal activities, illegal, organized crime continues to thrive in Japan. Japanese politicians have traditionally been reluctant to crack down on the Yakuza because of the clout they wield in running labor unions and delivering votes. A seat in the lower house of Japan’s Diet, the primary legislative body in Japan, can be decided by a few thousand votes. And in those districts where the Yakuza are known to have a heavy interest, large numbers of suspicious, timely absentee ballots have swayed elections. In 1986, an unusual surge in the number of absentee ballots cast in the No. 1 district of Ehime Prefecture decided the fate of that election; 23,500 absentee ballots were cast, 18,000 more than in the previous election. Absentee ballots accounted for 10 percent of the total turnout. Says a former Dietman of the 1986 ballot, Several thousand yen were paid to the gangsters for each vote. The strategy was very effective.

Yakuza connections with the uyoku, fanatic ultra-rightist fringe parties, are another instrument for exploiting and intimidating Japanese politicians. A U.S. Embassy official in Tokyo described the right-wing movements as so intertwined with organized crime it’s hard to take them seriously as political movements. Yet no member of the Liberal Democratic Party, Japan’s powerful conservative party, would deliberately risk alienating the uyoku. Even Shin Kanemaru, a conservative politician with a long history of anti-Communist rhetoric and legislation, was stabbed by a right-wing fanatic who was irate after Kanemaru’s talk of normalizing ties with North Korea. Even more ominous was the 1989 shooting of Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima by Seiki Juku, a right-wing organization with Yakuza ties. That group had said they found Motoshima’s criticism of the emperor as a grave problem. He had to be stopped.

Yakuza influence extends to the highest reaches of Japanese government through billionaire kingmakers like Ryoichi Sasakawa, a former war criminal who runs Japan’s jet-boat racing industry—one of the most lucrative gambling rackets in Japan. Sasakawa has bragged publicly that he was a drinking partner of Kazuo Taoka, the head of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest crime syndicate. He was also instrumental in bringing to power Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi in 1957, nine years after Kishi was imprisoned for war crimes. The youngest member of the Kishi cabinet was Yasuhiro Nakasone, who would later become prime minster with the support of Sasakawa and fellow ultra-rightist Yoshio Kodama, who did time with Sasakawa in Sugamo prison after World War II. (Sasakawa has also proclaimed himself the world’s richest fascist.)

Such activities—fixing elections, assassinating politicians, or taking over corporations—take place in the stratosphere of the criminal world. But on the streets, where Izumi hustles, the Yakuza rule by direct threat, violence, and a fierce sense of loyalty that is drilled into each gang member the same way a master teaches a dog where not to piss: by smacking the mutt around.

Most of these kids, Izumi explains of young, would-be gangsters, are morons. Practically the dumbest of society. High school dropouts. You give them money, they’ll lose it gambling. You give them a job, they’ll screw it up. You give them a woman, they’ll knock her up. Of every ten who come to me wanting to join, only one has a chance of making it.

The Yakuza world is fiercely hierarchical. Above Izumi is Kenzo Araki, his kumi-cho who left him asleep in his car last weekend, one of eight capos in the Kobayashi-kai. At the top of Kobayashi-kai is the oyabun (godfather) Ryunosuke Okada, a slender fifty-eight-year-old who made his reputation beating up Communists and radicals in the fifties and then running strikebreaking crews in the sixties. Izumi meets his kumi-cho two or three times a week. Izumi meets his oyabun at least twice a year: on New Year’s and again on Respect for the Aged Day. On both occasions he presents envelopes bulging with ¥10,000 ($90) notes; these gifts do not constitute part of his regular 20 percent obligation. He also sees his oyabun at Yakuza funerals, immensely profitable affairs where each mourner gives money to the widow, who then shares the windfall with her husband’s gang.

Above the oyabun is a chubby man Izumi only met once who represents the Tsuguta-kumi, the syndicate of which Kobayashi-kai is just one component.

And above Tsuguta-kumi are the gods. Izumi once saw an exquisitely engraved chart of the Yamaguchi-gumi printed on a parchment scroll. His oyabun and kumi-cho were listed as one of the subfamilies of Tsuguta-kumi. Above them had been only the name of a powerful capo of the Yamaguchi-gumi, whom Izumi has heard of but never met personally.

Beneath Izumi are his crew, Wakao and Tanaka, and then the money-drinkers and below them the errand boys. At the bottom of the formal hierarchy are the chimpira (literal translation: little pricks), punks who hang around the Wakao Wrecking Crew office, which doubles as Izumi’s office, or the coffee shop across the street, where Izumi sometimes spends the afternoon watching the televised horse races from Fukushima and Nakayama. The kids wear their hair in the tight-curl style popularized by the Yakuza and sport imitation gold jewelry and knockoff Rolex watches. They sometimes ask Izumi to show them his tattoos, the Chinese-style lion on his chest or the ornate geisha on his back. (The painful ritual of body-tattooing is a rite of initiation aspired to by chimpira. A full-body, six-color, intricate tattoo with the gang kanji—the Japanese character—on the chest will take a year of installments that feel, according to Izumi, like being whipped slowly. The tattoos, along with the chopping off of the pinky finger as an act of atonement, are perhaps the two most widely recognized Yakuza trademarks.)

Giving paid work to chimpira and other social outcasts is perhaps the Yakuza’s greatest social service. If we didn’t pay these guys, Izumi says of the Yakuza’s role as a kind of criminal welfare system, who knows what trouble they would be making for everyone?

It is ironic that in the Yakuza—which professes to the same values of racial purity as its allied right-wing groups—Koreans, Chinese, and burakumin (Japan’s untouchable class) all have risen to greater heights than is generally possible in the legit world. Hisayuki Machii, a Japanese national of Korean descent, reigned as one of the most powerful gangsters in Japan, running the lucrative Tokyo docks for much of the sixties.

Izumi himself started as a motorcycle gang delinquent. By the time he was sixteen he had done four months at a youth detention facility in Saitama for stealing car stereos. He made his connection with the Yakuza by selling off equalizers, amplifiers, compact disc players, and LED car televisions to Yakuza members who then resold them to secondhand-electronics dealers.

When he was twenty-one the police arrested Izumi for car theft and detained him for eighteen days. Under the Japanese criminal justice system, police are allowed to hold a suspect for twenty-one days before pressing charges or letting him confer with a lawyer.

Izumi actually broke down during interrogation, a rough process in police hands, and confessed everything he knew. The judge gave Izumi six months, and when he was released, Kumi-cho was there, waiting at the Kosuge Prison gates. But rather than threatening him, the Kobayashi-kai asked him to join.

When they have you in for questioning, Izumi says of his interrogation, the toughest guy in the world is going to talk to the police. Everybody knows that. It’s like the Yakuza’s dirty little secret. And the secret of the police is that they rarely act on the information they get.

Izumi, for the past two years, has spent most of his working hours counting, adding, and making sure his money-drinkers are covered. And making sure, even after 20 percent goes to the organization, he could still pay the rent on four apartments, float Wakao and Tanaka, and keep his three girlfriends comfortable.

Forget tough guys. Izumi liked money-drinkers. Quiet. Steady. Reliable. Good earners. Tough guys were like the punk he had sent to get the rental car. Sometimes they just didn’t come back.

Izumi and Wakao rode in the tow truck through