Confessions of a Yakuza (12 page)

You might wonder about the yakuza themselves—whether
they
wouldn’t give the police away like that in court. But they weren’t such fools. If they had done, they’d have paid for it afterward. The cops would have spread the word: “That one’s a sneaky bastard. He got two of our men transferred. So we don’t need to look the other way any more.” And they’d stake out the gambling joint and keep a twenty-four-hour check. That way the regulars would be too scared to come anywhere near the place, and it would just die a natural death. You see, if the police ever wanted to put the squeeze on them, the yakuza couldn’t have made a living. So, however rough their methods were—even if they half killed you—you never let on about it at the trial. And the cops, on their side, knew they were safe however much they put you through it, so they could afford to let themselves go.

With the yakuza, keeping your mouth shut when the screws were really on counted as a kind of medal. Not just with the other guys in your own mob, either: it was talked about by the police, who began to treat you as a proper yakuza, and in other gangs, too, so that someone who stuck it out got a reputation. But if you couldn’t take it and confessed, that got around in the same way. “Him?” people would say. “He
sounds
like the real thing, but inside he’s all soft, like a bit of rotten tofu.” You got a label put on you, and people avoided you. Once that happened, you were finished: you could stay a yakuza all your life, but you’d be down there at the bottom all the way.

I was well aware of all this, so I kept my lip buttoned, and the detectives got the message: I was the kind who’d never knuckle under. That suited me fine, and they put me down in their report as the one who’d set up the session.

Next, I was taken to court. The judge at my trial took a look at the police report and said “Is this correct?” and I said “Yes, sir, it’s correct,” and I was sentenced to three months in jail. The upshot of it all was that I went off to Sugamo prison feeling fairly proud of myself.

There’s a world of difference between today’s jails, which are meant to reform you, and the ones I knew, which were there to punish you. You’d done something wrong, and to pay for it you’d got to suffer: that was the general idea in the old days. Worst were the warders, who’d absolutely no human feelings, no sympathy. We’ve got absolute control over you, body and soul—that was their attitude to the prisoners.

The prison uniform was a red kimono. You know the color they paint the gateway to a Shinto shrine? It was that kind of red. You were lucky, though, if it was the proper color still—in most cases they were all washed out, and patched all over into the bargain. The cloth itself, too, was worn so thin you might have been wearing a mosquito net. I mean, if you looked you could see right through it....

It was the coldest time of year when I went in, so they gave me cotton underwear and socks. Apart from that, there was a single quilt to sleep on, with a blanket, and a box with a bowl for putting rice in, a bowl for beanpaste soup, and a metal plate.

I was put in a big cell holding twelve men. In those days they still had the prison boss system, so I got on my knees at the entrance to the cell, bowed right down, and gave a formal greeting. And one of the men who’d been there longest spoke up from the back: “You look pretty young, but you’ll find it’s not too bad here when you get used to it, so mind you keep on good terms with everybody....”

Anyhow, that was the way I went to jail.... But you know, I must have been a bit bigheaded or something, because there was a brawl the very first day I was in, and I got charged with “insubordination” and had a rough time of it.

As soon as I sat down in one corner of the cell, a hunched-up guy next to me started muttering things about me. He had a gray, dirty-looking complexion, and half his hair was white, though he couldn’t have been much over thirty. His teeth were a dark yellow and his breath smelled of bad eggs. I didn’t know what had pissed him off, but he pitched into me without warning.

“What’s your name, eh?” he began. “Your name, I said!” The way he said it was really mean. Seeing he was set on picking a fight right from the start, I naturally got worked up myself. Shunkichi had told me before I went in that it wasn’t done to ask too much about other prisoners’ affairs.

“You see,” Shunkichi said, “we’re different from ordinary criminals. For us, it’s an honor to go to jail. But the rest of the poor bastards have just slipped up somehow and been put through it by the police, then bullied by the courts, and finally locked up. That’s about it.

“So your ordinary offender wants to have a bit of peace and quiet, in jail at least. He wants to forget all the unpleasant things that happened outside and take it easy for a while. So it’s a rule inside that you don’t ask other people all kinds of things about what they did outside. If someone feels like talking about himself, it’s OK, but otherwise it’s better not to ask.”

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.

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.

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.