Tokyo Underworld (19 page)

Finally, Blakemore had to donate toilets, build a new ticket office, and, to make sure the funds were being handled properly, hire a certified public accounting firm to come out to audit the books – with copies of the audit certificates being sent to each hamlet.

In the end, Blakemore gave up trying to keep track of how much it cost him. He kept at it, if only to prove it could actually be done.

It took several years, but the Yozawa River operation became a success. By the end of the 1960s, Blakemore had become something of a local celebrity and was even given a special award from the prime minister’s office for ‘helping to combat juvenile delinquency’.

As it turned out, there were so many GIs patronizing his fishing pond that the twin evils of crime and public mayhem in the
Tachikawa and Fuchu areas had declined dramatically. (And so, he was told at the award ceremony, had the VD rate. Said a sergeant from the Tachikawa Air Force Base who had attended the function, ‘Mr Blakemore, thanks to you our GIs have a chance to catch fish instead of VD.’)

To Blakemore, the moral of the story was clear. ‘If you have to go through all that trouble just to give something away,’ he would say to his new clients after telling them the tale, ‘you can imagine how hard it must be to sell something in Japan.’

It was yet another lesson not being taught at Harvard Business School.

There are those who came to Japan to immerse themselves in the culture and to find out what it was that made the Japanese tick. For these people the attractions were artistic and metaphysical in nature. They were drawn to the grace and dignity of Japanese calligraphy, the subtle beauty of a Japanese garden, the Zen suggestibility of Japanese art where empty spaces are just as important as the lines, and the inner harmony of Buddhist enlightenment attainable through meditation, among other such mystical enticements. Exposure to them was all the reward they sought in coming to Japan.

But the people of Nick Zappetti’s world were a different breed altogether. Few individuals in that dissolute cast of characters had even seen a Kabuki drama or sat through a tea ceremony. They had zero interest in elevated states of self-awareness and suffered no treacly yearnings whatsoever to comprehend the subtleties of
wa
(harmony). The thinking of people like the American Buddhist priest in Kyoto, a shaven-headed six-footer from Nebraska in orange robes, who talked of a ‘destiny that was decided 10,000 years ago’, was as incomprehensible to them as the books on
netsuke
authored by Tokyo attorney Raymond Bushell, who was assembling one of the world’s most formidable collections of the tiny figurines. Zappetti’s own appreciation of Japanese aesthetics ran to Copa hostesses who could satisfy him sexually with their toes while soaking with him in a hot bath or eat their fried eggs in the morning with chopsticks; to him, those were extraordinary acts of virtuosity – as were those of the nude performers in the live Shimbashi sex shows he occasionally attended, who somehow managed to keep their genitalia hidden from public view through the entire ‘show’. Now
that
, he liked to say, was Oriental art.

What Nick essentially wanted from Japan was what most other foreign men in Japan wanted, if the truth be told: to make money and bed women. And of course, in his case, have people point as he walked down the street and say, ‘There goes Mr Nicolas, the King of Roppongi’ or ‘That’s the Mafia Boss of Tokyo’. It was attention of the type he would never get back in East Harlem. Historically, he had far more in common with the Dutch seamen on the trading ships that came to Japan in the sixteenth century than the missionaries, teachers, traders, technocrats and students who came later.

In its own perverse way, his lifestyle was a singularly successful adaptation to life in a country that was as radically different from the United States as was his adopted homeland. Because of his simple straightforward priorities, he would never experience the disillusionment of those who searched for the soul of the Real Japan, only to find it had disappeared in the growing morass of pachinko shops, vending machines, fast-food stands, ‘pink salons’ and other icons of contemporary Japanese culture. Nor would he ever endure the bitter frustration of those who discovered that
gaijin
always meant outsider, no matter how hard they tried to assimilate. Zappetti simply didn’t care.

A further irony of his situation was that he would spend nearly his entire adult life in Japan without any formal training in the language or in doing business there, yet still he would fare better in the Japanese marketplace than other supposedly ‘more qualified’ individuals, including senior corporate go-getters and Ivy League MBAs.
His
success was based on raw intelligence, sheer energy and an instinctive understanding of the way people really did business – not to mention a willingness to break the law.

He would suffer his share of setbacks, including one of monumental proportions – a takeover that would go down in Roppongi history. What caused his problems, however, was less his disdain for domestic customs or his peculiarly American way of thinking that Japanese (along with everyone else) should strive to
emulate the United States in all things, but rather other more universal flaws like greed, arrogance … and lust.

He was married four times – thought to be a record in the annals of American-Japanese matrimony, and that would not prove helpful. Like thousands and thousands of other Western men who had been taken in perhaps by images of the submissive, docile female geisha doll as portrayed in movies like
Sayonara
and wed Japanese females, he found the reality of marital life not quite as advertised (as did, perhaps, the Japanese wives involved in such unions, who for their part had been equally deluded by the courtesy and gallantry American men showed during courtship, seeing in these foreign males liberation from the traditional bonds of female servitude that had been their lot).

Zappetti had married his first wife because she spoke fluent English, and because she was a practicing Catholic (one of the very few Christians in the country).

But there had been conflict almost from the beginning. His wife had been especially angered at the suggestion made by an Army officer, in one of several prenuptial interviews required by the US government, that her sole motivation for marrying an American was a desire to live in the United States and escape the poverty of Japan. Because of that, she decided she would
never
go there. And not once, in all the years that followed, did she ever set foot on US soil – not after both she and her husband had accumulated considerable wealth, not even after she had divorced him and reestablished her dental practice, which she had temporarily abandoned for the life of a housewife. She would travel all over the world, to Europe, to Southeast Asia, to Australia, but there was one country she steadfastly avoided. She would not even enter an American military club.

Of course, more troubling for her was her husband’s view of matrimony, which allowed him to adopt the male Japanese custom of taking mistresses, which, in addition to his criminal tendencies, was what prompted her to file for divorce. In June 1957, she was
awarded custody of their two children, along with the house in the suburbs and monthly support. It was an arrangement the children liked just fine because, they had let it be known, the fewer the people who knew about the foreign blood coursing through their veins the better. His eldest son, Vincent, fluent in both English and Japanese, had had his fill of being teased in school by his classmates. But then Zappetti discovered that his ex-wife had found herself a Japanese boyfriend and alarm bells went off. He was sure he knew what would happen if his wife married this man and had another child. A pure-blooded Japanese child in a house with two ‘half-breeds’ was, in his opinion, a certain recipe for disaster, for it was not difficult to guess where the next husband’s affections would lie. So he took the matter to the
katei saiban
(family court), where the presiding judge – a holdover from the earlier divorce proceedings named Kondo and a man who had become a regular customer at Nicola’s – awarded Zappetti custody.

Zappetti’s next stab at domesticity came in December 1964, when he married his cash register girl – a petite, determined and ambitious young woman named Yae Koizumi, the orphaned daughter of an old family in rural Maebashi. He had hired her when he opened for business because she had spoken the best English of the half-dozen girls he had interviewed from the labor office and because she had had the most poise as well. Although romance had somehow blossomed amid all the carnal distractions of the city, Zappetti’s second marriage, to the surprise of absolutely no one who knew him, did little to change his lifestyle. He left his bride behind the register and continued his nightly sexual prowling, his lone concession to matrimony the renting of a room at Riki Apartments for his liaisons with assorted young women.

Once a very agitated young lady came into the restaurant, approached the second Mrs Zappetti, and announced, ‘I’m pregnant and your husband is the one responsible.’

‘What are you talking to me for then,’ the new wife replied with studied indifference and the learned forbearance of many a Japanese
woman. ‘I didn’t get you pregnant. He did. Take your problem to him.’

To some observers, it seemed that Nick’s second wife viewed the marriage as more of a business opportunity than anything else. Their union produced no children and she devoted herself to running the restaurant and helping to oversee the empire of Nicola’s enterprises. If business
was
her main interest, however, her choice was understandable, given the strictures of the limited options available to women in the Japanese marketplace.

Despite the prevailing (and generally overdrawn) picture of a Japanese female as a domestic slave, it was and is the wife who controls the family purse strings, who takes the husband’s entire monthly paycheck and doles out an allowance, and who runs domestic affairs to such an extent that the bank and other sales organizations solicit
her
for business, not the husband. In the workplace, however, there was still much discrimination, especially on a corporate level.

Most women who had full-time jobs in respected corporations were expected to spend their days making tea and otherwise serving Japan’s corporate samurai – before resigning at a reasonably young age, so they could get down to the serious business of child rearing and running a household. The American term ‘career woman’, directly transliterated into Japanese, has only recently gained a purchase in the language.

Despite the great reforms of the postwar era – two out of every three women in modern postwar Japan worked at least part-time – Japan did not have an equal opportunity law until 1986, and even then it had little in the way of teeth. (As the century drew to a close, less than 3 percent of all management positions were held by women.)

Thus did many career-seeking Japanese females, looking for a place to demonstrate their capabilities, turn to foreign companies (not high on the list of desired places for Japanese male workers, whose pecking order started with the Ministry of Finance, MITI,
the Bank of Japan, Mitsui and Mitsubishi). And thus did the second Mrs Zappetti use Nicola’s as an outlet for her own career energies (and, as it turned out, the job offered almost unlimited opportunities for advancement – in family court, if nowhere else.)

Perhaps if Zappetti had somehow managed to stay married to Yae, his business affairs might have been far less tumultuous. But that would have been asking too much, especially after his encounter with a nineteen-year-old beauty pageant queen from Hokkaido.

Her name was Miyoko, and Nick had met her one day in 1968, on his way to his Hokkaido ranch, where he was now busy setting up a mink farm. It had been a warm spring afternoon in 1968, he was strolling down one of Sapporo’s distinctive wide thoroughfares, and suddenly there she was, right beside him, one of the most devastatingly beautiful women he had ever seen. It was the summer of love, of long stringy hair and beads, of social protest and antiwar demonstrations, but Miyoko was a glamorous throwback to another era. In her tight black dress, thick makeup and permed hair, she looked like she belonged on a Toho Movie Studios calendar.

Nick immediately said hello and Miyoko smiled in return. They walked together down the street, exchanging pleasantries, until they reached the train station, where she handed him her card, flashing him another smile, and went on her way. Several days later, after preliminary research in which he learned she had recently won a major Hokkaido beauty contest and still lived with her mother, he was sitting down with her over lunch at the Sapporo Royal Hotel, the leading Western-style hotel in the city. Before she was even finished with her soup, he had proposed marriage.

Nick had long been complaining to friends about wife number two, grumbling that she was more interested in the family business than in him. At age forty-five, he still cut an impressive figure. He was in reasonably good shape, always impeccably dressed, and had
a smattering of gray in his short cropped hair that lent him a certain air of distinction. With his wealth, he viewed himself an ideal catch for any girl and had begun thinking that perhaps it was time yet again to make some changes.

He told his new inamorata he was known as the King of Roppongi and that he was the richest
gaijin
in all of Japan. He owned seven or eight companies, he said, a slew of restaurants and houses all over the place. He had limos, yachts, sports cars. He couldn’t keep track of it all. He would share it with her, he said, if she would accompany him to a room he had booked and took what he called in Japanese the
Ii Ojosan Tesuto
(Nice Girl Test) – meaning the test to determine if she was still a virgin. He was Italian, he explained, and Italians only married virgins. It was a religious thing. Dating back centuries.

The outrageousness of what he proposed gave him not the slightest pause. His demands were no different to his mind than someone like Aristotle Onassis or Howard Hughes or Prince Charles might make. To such people the normal rules didn’t apply. And he was in the same class, of that he was convinced.