Tokyo Underworld (7 page)

In Tokyo’s Ueno Park, what was described as a ‘black mountain’ of wrestling, enthusiasts had assembled on an incline in front of a truck-mounted TV set. Many had climbed trees, rocks and lampposts to get a better view, and several were so overcome with excitement at Rikidozan’s performance that they fell off their perches, incurring serious injury and causing ambulances to shuttle back and forth from the park to the nearest hospital for much of the evening.

At other squares in Tokyo and across the archipelago, the story was the same: vast seas of delirious people weeping with joy at the extraordinary spectacle. It was estimated that between 10 million and 14 million people watched the match that night, and although it had actually ended in a one-all draw, the effect was that of a World Cup victory for the home team. It was the lead story in all the morning newspapers. Public enrapturement with the wrestler was summed up in the words of media magnate and NTV owner Matsutaro Shoriki: ‘Rikidozan, by his pro wrestling in which he sent the big white men flying, has restored pride to the Japanese and given them new courage.’

It was a critical moment for Japan. Japan’s best boxer was a bantamweight, and their baseball players, to quote one
sportswriter, ‘looked like pygmies when up against the touring US major leaguers’. But Rikidozan had stood on equal ground with the foreigner. It was as if the Pacific War had just been refought – and, this time, won. Overnight, Japan had a new national hero. The next evening, interest was even higher. Coffee shops and restaurants with TV sets sold overpriced admission tickets, while entire neighborhoods squeezed into the homes of those fortunate enough to own one of the new magic boxes. When the telecast of the match began, taxis virtually vanished from the city. It was estimated that there were 24 million viewers nationwide that night – more than
one-third
of the entire population. Prior to the opening gong, an NTV announcer took time to make this unusual announcement to the nation: ‘A word to those people watching on street corners and in front of train stations and department stores. Please don’t push. And will those people who have climbed up trees, telephone poles, and other high places, please come down before you hurt yourself?’

The main event this time was a non-title sixty-one-minute exhibition between Rikidozan and Ben Sharpe, which proved to be even more pleasing. Riki bravely endured a quarter-hour’s worth of illegal blows and heinous fouls, then finally exploded in a raging flurry of karate chops to send his foe to the canvas, down for the count of three and the first fall. When the final gong sounded, Rikidozan had emerged victorious, two falls to one. For people who had had precious little else to cheer about, the ecstasy was almost unbearable.

By March 1, when the Sharpes’ nationwide tour was over and Rikidozan had racked up several more victories, a full-blown national craze was under way, the economic and social consequences of which would be enormous. There was a mad rush to buy TV sets to watch Rikidozan starring in the hastily assembled program,
Mitsubishi Faitoman Awa
(Mitsubishi Fightman Hour), Japan’s version of the Friday night fights, and the rate of cuts, bruises and broken bones among primary-school children jumped
dramatically as young boys around the country took to imitating Rikidozan wrestling. There were reports of viewers watching at home becoming so distraught when a foreign wrestler committed a foul that they smashed their own sets in anger. A number of viewers even died of heart attacks induced by the shock of watching the ferocious images. But in the span of less than two weeks, a decade of public sycophancy of the Americans had officially come to an end.

If anyone noticed that the matches had been somewhat choreographed (which, in fact, they were) he or she was not saying, which was just fine with the promoters. The matches were in fact scripted, rehearsed and staged with the full cooperation of the Americans, who were extremely well compensated for their trouble. If the neophyte Japanese public as yet lacked a full recognition of that fact, then so be it. It was better to focus on the therapeutic benefits of a Japanese victory. For that was where the money lay.

Competitive professional wrestling groups began springing up all over the place, along with pro wrestling magazines. Suddenly there was a great demand for
gaijin
foils. Not everyone could afford to bring over a high-profile performer like Primo Carnera, ‘The Walking Italian Alp’, or the ‘Mexican Giant’ Jesse Ortega. Thus, Japanese promoters looked to the most cost-effective available source, the 30,000 Westerners living in the city. There they picked up the 5′9″, 220-pound Nicola Zappetti with an offer of $500 a match – more than a year’s salary for a Japanese company worker (despite the fact that he knew all of four wrestling holds, which he had learned in the Marines) – and another ex-marine, John MacFarland III. MacFarland was a 6′4″, 250-pound war hero from Omaha, Nebraska, who had done stints in Tokyo with the Occupation forces and later as an employee of an American construction firm at Johnson Air Force Base. Unable to forget the good life in Japan, he had returned to Tokyo in September 1955 to seek his future and found it in pro wrestling, even though he knew next to nothing about it, either.

The promoter handed Zappetti and MacFarland each a pair of trunks and a packet full of $100 bills and gave them a list of three basic rules to follow.

1.   Try to stay in the ring for 30–40 minutes.

2.   Don’t think of what you’re doing as a sport. Think of yourself as an actor.

3.   Don’t ever try to win.

The Americans performed in what amounted to modern-day morality plays, playing a role the Japanese called
inchiki gaijin resura
(literally, cheating foreign wrestler). From the outset of each match, they would commit foul after foul using knuckle-dusters against their smaller, lighter Japanese opponents, who, of course, did not know the meaning of the word treachery. Finally, however, enough would be enough. In a climactic burst of righteous anger, Japanese fighting spirit would prevail and the morally inferior American heel would be vanquished.

It was the pattern established for all pro wrestling matches in Japan involving Americans, and sociologists were quick to see analogies to other forms of entertainment. Wrote one Japanese university professor:

To the viewing public, Japanese matches with the barbaric Americans resembled nothing so much as a battle between the cowboys and the Indians, battles which they had seen so much of in American westerns (like
Stagecoach
, immensely popular in Japan.)

The Indians in Hollywood movies were invariably the bad guys while the cowboys – the white man – by contrast, were morally in the right, free of malice and ultimately emerged victorious. That was the appeal of such films to American moviegoers. It reinforced their perception of themselves as superior beings. And in reverse form, that was the appeal of professional wrestling to the Japanese.

The Rikidozan disease affected every segment of society, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, educated and illiterate. The comments of Machiko Kondo, a United Nations officer, born and raised in Tokyo, about the ‘Riki effect’ on her father, were typical:

My father was an engineer. He was highly intelligent and liked intellectual TV shows: professorial debates on NHK, lectures on science and so forth. He liked to discuss German philosophy: Goethe, Hegel, and others. He was very serious minded and looked down on things that weren’t intellectual.

But he became another person when professional wrestling came on, especially Japanese versus American. Something came over him. He would shoot his fist in the air, yell, jump up and down, get all excited. It was really strange. I could never understand why an intelligent person like him could watch Rikidozan so much.

To him, I guess Riki was like Robin Hood.

It soon became evident that what the public wanted to see was big, Godzilla-sized Americans cut down to size, the bigger and badder, the better. And thus economics dictated that Zappetti’s career sputter to a halt. MacFarland’s, on the other hand, went in the other direction. Adopting the moniker ‘Gorgeous Mac’, and billed also by his promoter as ‘The Wild Bull of Nebraska’, MacFarland was a great hit in defeat. He performed before large crowds on TV, appeared in magazine interviews and quickly became well known. In early January 1956, he called a press conference to announce that he was forming his own wrestling group to capitalize on his success and also to announce his engagement to the daughter of a major
zaibatsu
family, an ardent pro wrestling fan. This was not as unusual as it might sound, given the Alice-in-Wonderland existence
gaijin
in Japan led at the time.

Although surveys consistently showed that two-thirds of the
Japanese populace wanted nothing to do with foreigners, that still left a third who did, and they weren’t especially picky, given the relatively limited supply and the growing postwar need for Japan to become more familiar with the rest of the world. There were thousands of semiliterate Westerners making a living teaching English in language schools and universities, homely military wives able to parlay blonde hair and big breasts into careers as models and movie actresses in Tokyo and countless other examples of career success exceeding qualifications. Demand exceeded supply. And thus MacFarland, a man with no ring experience who had become well known in Japan simply because he was American, big and conveniently available to wrestle – and lose – on TV, was on the verge of marrying into one of the wealthiest families in the entire country. Western foreigners could do things like that in those days because the Japanese simply didn’t know any better.

Unbeknownst to anyone, however, MacFarland had serious problems. He was in Japan illegally, having entered on a sixty-day tourist visa that had run out weeks earlier. His US passport had also expired. And he was broke, despite his substantial earnings. He had not paid his hotel bill in weeks – it stood at well over a million yen – and he had accumulated other debts as well. He also suffered from bouts of manic depression and for six months in 1948 had been confined to Long Beach Veterans Mental Hospital, during which time he had received shock insulin treatment to cure his sudden fits of violent rage. Gorgeous Mac naturally kept that part of his curriculum vitae confidential – as he did other aspects of his personal life, like his exotic sexual preferences. He liked young Japanese men as well as women and he used the Hotel New York, which Zappetti still ran, for secret afternoon trysts.

Aware of Zappetti’s criminal background, MacFarland asked for advice in making some quick cash. He needed a lot of money fast, he said one afternoon in a hushed voice, and he did not care how he got it. Zappetti replied that he would be willing to help out – even participate if MacFarland was in the market for a partner – because he was in a bit of a cash crisis himself.

‘Where you staying?’ asked Nick.

‘Imperial,’ came the reply.

‘What’s the most valuable thing they got there?’

‘Diamonds,’ he said, after some thought, ‘in the arcade.’

‘Good. Then let’s steal them.’

And thus was hatched a plan for a robbery so bizarre that Tokyoites still talk about it.

The Imperial Hotel was the crown jewel of Tokyo. Designed by the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, it had opened in 1923, the year of the great Kanto earthquake, a calamity it had survived intact when every building around it collapsed into rubble. Hailed as a miracle of architecture, it was a wide, low-slung, red brick and oya stone edifice that ‘floated’ on pilings and boasted a lotus pond in front of the main entrance. From the outside, it looked more like an Aztec temple than a Japanese hotel (in fact, Wright had originally intended the design for a Latin American site). During the GHQ years, high-ranking military officers had stayed there, and by the mid-1950s it was generally acknowledged as the Greatest Hotel in Asia. Anybody who was anyone stayed there, from US senators to Hollywood movie stars. Its musty, mausoleum-like lobby was the most popular meeting place in town.

The Diamond Shop in the hotel arcade sometimes made private showings of gems in the guest rooms – something the budding jewel thieves were banking on. Zappetti had devised a scheme whereby MacFarland would call a representative from the diamond arcade to his room for a private exhibition. He would flash open a suitcase full of cash – real money on top, newspaper clippings underneath – to ‘prove’ he was able to pay. Then MacFarland would serve drinks to celebrate the purchase – a glass of orange juice apiece, both of which would be laced with knockout drops. Within minutes after downing the concoction, both MacFarland and the salesman would be unconscious on the floor, whereupon
Zappetti, hiding in an adjoining room, would emerge to make off with the diamonds
and
the suitcase. MacFarland would be sure to wake up last and – for added effect – accuse the salesman of engineering the theft.

Zappetti thought it was a brilliant plan.

But then MacFarland decided he wanted a gun.

‘What the hell do you need a gun for?’ Zappetti asked, stupefied. ‘You’re as big as Godzilla. If there’s trouble, you just bash the guy’s head in. We’re going to knock him out with pills anyway. You don’t need no gun. That’s crazy.’

MacFarland was adamant. ‘I gotta have a gun,’ he kept saying.

The combination of MacFarland and a pistol was frightening to contemplate, because while Zappetti thought MacFarland intelligent and rational enough most of the time, he had already caught a disturbing glimpse of MacFarland’s psychologically challenged side. Zappetti had been driving the big wrestler across the Sumida River from the Hotel New York into the city center one afternoon when the Wild Bull from Nebraska suddenly snapped. He began slamming the door repeatedly with his elbow, punching the dashboard with his fists as hard as he could – bam! bam! bam! – yelling and screaming like a madman. Then, just as suddenly, like a freight train that had passed, the attack was over. MacFarland had sat back, massaged his bloodied knuckles and brooded in silence for the rest of the trip. That was when Zappetti realized his new friend was not always playing with a full deck. It was only later he found out about Mac’s extended stay at the Long Beach Mental Hospital.