Confessions of a Yakuza (23 page)

As he was talking, I took a good look at his scarred face, and thought to myself that it takes all kinds to make a world.

Anyway, that’s not the end of the story. One day not long before the beginning of the war, the same girl suddenly showed up at my place again. I asked her what the hell she was doing there, and she said she wanted me to give her a job—like that, right out of the blue. “If I stay at home I think they’ll sell me off again,” she says, “so I’ve run away.”

I asked her a bit more about it, and it seemed her father was a real bastard; I even began to feel I’d have run away
myself
if I’d been in her shoes. As it happened, my wife, Omon, turned up just then and asked what was happening. Omon had a house she used as a school to teach dancing in; she had about ten pupils, and was doing pretty well.

“Listen, why don’t you send her to work at my place?” she said.

“But you’ve got a maid already, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, “but she’s such a slut, I’ve been thinking I could do with another one as well.”

Then she said straight out to the girl: “I’m not easy to please, and I may be a bit of a nag, but if you don’t mind that, will you come and try it?”

The girl wasn’t in any position to pick and choose. So that decided it: she went to work at Omon’s house.

This was the Okyo that was so helpful to me later on. Seeing that I’d been to bed with her at Komonjiro, I had my doubts about the arrangement, but it didn’t seem to bother Omon at all.

About two years before the war, I took over as head of the Dewaya. Strictly speaking, Muramatsu was still boss, but he’d ruined his health with drugs and was in and out of the hospital, so I was left in charge. The trouble was, though, that by then Japan had got itself bogged down in the war with China, business in general was in a slump, and we were feeling the pinch on our side, too.

I told you before—maybe I didn’t—that our headquarters was at 1-1 Shinhata-cho, Asakusa. That meant it was slap bang in the middle of the entertainment district, and our territory was one of the best. Even so, good territory doesn’t mean you can afford to sit around and take things easy. As they say, every stream has its depths and shallows, and our business is no different. What it boils down to is that you can’t win at gambling, or bring in a lot of players, just by willing it. You wonder sometimes why, when you’ve got a perfectly good gambling joint, everybody goes elsewhere; but it’s not something you can explain logically.

And it’s just as likely to go the other way, too. I mean, that the right kind of customers can pour in even though you’re not putting yourself out to attract them. When that happens, your popularity attracts more people still, and you find yourself doing a roaring trade. Looking back on it now, I can see that the period when I first joined the Dewaya was one of the very best—the money was just rolling in. But maybe I ought to tell you something at least about where the money went to.

In my time, twenty percent was deducted from the day’s earnings right at the start. Suppose that on one evening there was an income—by today’s reckoning—of ten million yen, we’d set two million aside. Then the boss would take sixty percent of the remainder, and divide the rest among the other men. What about the twenty percent deducted at the beginning, you’ll say. Well, first there was the money that went to pay allowances to anyone in jail. Then there were the everyday expenses—they came out of the twenty percent as well.

But what about the sixty percent that went to the boss? It looks like a hefty profit. It wasn’t as simple as all that, though: it wasn’t as if it went into his pocket and stayed there for him to do what he liked with.

The first thing to remember is that in that trade people, all kinds of them, flock around wherever there’s money. It’s like having ticks—there are just too many of them for you to shake them all off, however much you try. You find yourself with ten or twenty hangers-on, for a start. These aren’t people you’ve asked to stay with you—they’re mostly young gamblers. And they don’t bring any cash with them, either; no, they’ve drifted over because they’ve heard you were doing well, and so you have to give them something to play with.

If you ask why we do that, it’s because among gamblers there’s always been a sort of mutual aid system. Well, I don’t know whether you could really call it a
system
. Anyway, say you’ve got ten brothers—ten gambling bosses who’ve all made a solemn promise to help each other out. Well, it never happens, under any circumstances, that all the gangs are going strong at the same time. If thirty percent are doing fine and thirty percent are getting by, then you can be sure that the other forty will be doing practically no business at all. And that’s at normal times, too; when I became the boss in Asakusa, business as a whole was more or less at a standstill, and you could have counted the number of gambling joints making good money in Tokyo on the fingers of one hand. I’d say about a third at most were just struggling along. The rest were “open for no business,” as we used to say.

Now, once the customers stop coming, there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t make a river flow backwards, and it’s the same with them. That’s a pretty serious matter, however you look at it—particularly if you’ve got a lot of men you’re responsible for. You’re stuck. So what you do is farm some of your guys out with another boss who’s doing better. They don’t stay there at night, but they hang around during the games, and the boss gives them some pocket money to gamble and buy food with. It wouldn’t be right, of course, to dump dozens of them on one single joint, so you divide them up among several. Even so, if there are several bosses in trouble at the same time, the number of guys put out to pasture goes up accordingly, and it gets difficult to look after them all.

With gambling, you never know when you’re going to lose your players; just because things are going well at the moment doesn’t mean it’s going to be the same in a few years’ time. So there was a kind of rule that bosses who were doing OK should look after those who weren’t. It was quite common for someone who had, say, thirty men of his own to be feeding as many as twice that number. It was tough, but if you couldn’t do that much you might as well have quit. There’s a yakuza saying that you should be willing to risk your life to give a brother a meal and a night’s shelter. In actual practice, though, there’s much more to it than that: even at normal times, we were always helping each other out, and whenever some real trouble cropped up we’d make any sacrifice to meet our obligations to each other.

In movies and novels, the yakuza are always reaching for a sword or a gun, but that’s just bullshit. Professionals were different in those days. Their job, the job they depended on for a living, was to shake the dice and give their customers a good time, which meant it was actually quite rare for them to quarrel. There were bosses who didn’t see eye to eye, of course, but if they’d started carving each other up just because they didn’t get on well, the police would have clamped down on them, and their business would have folded. So in a way you could say we were more accommodating generally than ordinary people.

Anyway, what about other expenses? Well, there were things like presents at funerals and when people were sick. These set you back quite a bit. If the boss of some gang or other died, you had to send along a gift of money, on a scale that matched the connection you’d had with him. Or if his wife, say, or a close relative died, you still had to fork out a fairly large amount. Even when some youngster from a brother’s gang had finished a spell in jail, it meant another little envelope with cash inside.

The professional outfits all had a kind of ranking inside their own world, and it was up to you to give an amount suited to your own status, too. It wouldn’t do to have people saying among themselves: “Look at this miserable little bit the Dewaya have sent—and them always pretending to be so grand.” So naturally you tried to make a good showing.

On top of all these business obligations, there were also the local shop and restaurant owners to cope with. It happened all the time in an area like ours: one of them would turn up and say, “Boss—I’m opening a new place at such-and-such an address. I hope you’ll watch out for us.” And you could hardly ignore it. So you put a bit of money in an envelope and sent one of those big wreathes of artificial flowers they set up in front of any new premises. Then, on the day they actually opened, you’d take along seven or eight of your men to drink to their success and get them off to a good start. You gave tips to the staff, and you went around the customers saying you hoped they’d patronize the place; then, when you thought the right time had come, you thanked the owner and made yourself scarce. But you stayed in touch. And anything like a funeral or a birth meant another wreath or an envelope from the boss—it all added up.

None of our income, though, came from these establishments; apart from some “protection” money, everything we earned was through organized gambling. Anybody who messed around with anything outside that wasn’t a real yakuza. Of course, there were always people who
called
themselves yakuza—pimps, for instance, who hung around the red-light districts—but we wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole.

People often confused us with the
tekiya
, too, who looked after any kind of outdoor entertainment. There was a
tekiya
boss two doors away from us called Fukuda Tengai. Whenever a circus, say, turned up, the owner would drop in to pay his respects, and Fukuda would get what they called a “cushion charge.” This was half the fee they charged each person for the cushions they set out in the circus tents. But, though we were neighbors, he operated independently, and we just left him to it.

The sort of entertainment the yakuza
were
connected with was anything performed under a roof—inside a building, that is. If some place where they usually showed movies or had strip shows decided to put on a play or a recital of some kind, the manager and the head of the troupe would come along and ask for our support. We’d wish them luck, of course, but we’d also give them a little consideration wrapped up in paper. At my place, it was Kamezo who looked after everything in that line. He was a cheerful fellow, and so long as they buttered him up a bit, he was more than willing. “Right,” he’d say. “From what day to what day, was it? OK, I’ll take care of everything personally; if there’s anything that bothers you, just let me know.” Anybody in the entertainment world who was going to put on something in Asakusa knew there wouldn’t be any trouble if he had the Dewaya’s backing.

You might wonder, then, what was in it for us. Well, they didn’t pay for our support in money so much as in kind. We did it like this. If the International Theater, for example —which was on our turf—had a new show running for a month, the manager would pop in and say something like: “We’re due to open tomorrow—and everything’s going smoothly, thanks. We’ve set the twenty-ninth and thirtieth aside as your days, so we hope you’ll come to see us then and get the money for your expenses.” What this actually meant was that they’d give the returns for those two days to the Dewaya; if admission fees for the two days came to, say, three million in today’s money, we pocketed the lot. It was the same not just in Asakusa but in every territory.

This sounds like good money for doing next to nothing. But no boss worth his salt would ever have let it go at that. He’d accept the days’ takings, but then—seeing as he was a sort of short-term promoter—he’d call all the performers together, along with the ticket collectors and stagehands, thank them, and give them all a tip. This was usually more than their normal wages for the two days. Now, if attendance was poor, you still had to give them a decent amount; and if the takings weren’t enough to cover it, you had to dig into your own pockets. So it wasn’t a bad deal at all the manager was making....

Anyway, what with all these customs and obligations and looking after people and keeping up appearances, the boss of a yakuza gang was bound hand and foot, and however much money came in he never really had enough.

Where the running of the gambling joints themselves was concerned, there were all kinds of carefully worked out arrangements between the different bosses. For example, places not too far apart would always schedule their sessions at slightly different times. There wasn’t exactly a fixed time-table, but supposing there were separate joints operating in Uguisudani, Shitaya, and Asakusa, they’d arrange it so that a keen player could take in all three of them. And sometimes one boss would drop in at another place for a game. I say “for a game,” but it wasn’t just that: he’d do what was called “working the tray”—the “tray” being where the dice were tipped out. And to “work it”—this isn’t so easy to explain—meant doing various things to push the game along and get the players really turned on.

Pace is important. A gambling joint depends on the house cut. Suppose the guy running the place—the
domoto
—gets a five percent share of the takings on each game, by the end of the evening he might make five million for himself if they play a hundred rounds. If play goes slowly, though, and there are only fifty rounds, then his income is cut by half. Now, games can get bogged down when the bookie calls “Place your bets!” and somebody starts racking his brains about what to do—it’s his money, after all, and he wants to win. At times like that, a boss from another place can help. He’ll slap down a wad of money as if it was so much old newspaper and say something like: “Here—which side d’you say is still short? I’ll bet on whichever you like. What’s all the delay for? You can think about it as long as you like, but you’ll never win by thinking!” That’s his way of getting the game unstuck—and he’ll push through another twenty-five rounds where otherwise it would have stopped at twenty, and your earnings go up accordingly. It’s like the men carrying the portable shrine at a festival—they work themselves and everybody else up by shouting “
wasshoi-wasshoi
” until there’s a proper festival mood. Once the mood’s there, everything’s fine: the games race along, and even if the customers lose money, they’ll say to you as they leave: “Thanks, I really enjoyed today’s session.”