Tokyo Vice (43 page)

Sekiguchi was forty-eight years old. Thinking back on it, I’d known him and his family for almost fourteen years. He took his last breath at 3:45 P.M. on a rainy day toward the end of August. The whole family and I had returned to Japan and were staying with my mother-in-law. It had been good for the kids—they were becoming very skilled at English, and now they needed to brush up on their Japanese.

The day before we were supposed to return to the United States, around August 29, while we were all eating Chinese food, Sekiguchi’s wife called and told me he’d passed away. I wanted to cancel the flight and to be there for the funeral.

I made everyone, except the kids, very angry. I had a heated argument with Sunao and my mother-in-law. They were both of the opinion that I should go to the wake, assuming there was one, and just visit the family the next time I was in Japan. I didn’t agree. You wouldn’t think that a weird Jewish kid and an organized crime cop ten years older than him would have become such good friends, but over the course of so many years, that’s what had happened. I wanted to stay, but
Sunao was not having that. I asked Sunao if she could take the kids home by herself. I’d escort her to Narita and have someone meet her at the airport in America and drive everyone home, but I was accused of putting my selfish need over the needs of my family.

We left the Chinese restaurant after eating and went back to Sunao’s home. I had to at least see the Sekiguchi family and pay my respects to the dead. At 10 P.M., I found myself in a taxi heading in the rain toward the Sekiguchi house in desolate Konan. Sunao came with me. We weren’t talking to each other. The rain was coming down so hard the taxi had to stop once or twice along the way. The taxi fare came to almost $250.

A midnight run to the Sekiguchi home. It felt like old times, but it wasn’t. I was wearing a black suit I had with me and had borrowed a black tie from Sunao’s mother.

I know that funerals and wakes are meaningless rituals, but not for the ones left behind. I’d promised Sekiguchi that when he died I would go to his funeral and pay my respects; that I would wear a real suit; and that I would try to wear matching socks. I owed him a stick of incense at least. You would think that people would understand that sometimes promises are binding even after death. It’s one of the few regrets I have in my life: I had promised to go to his funeral, and I didn’t.

His body was already home by the time I got there. It wasn’t laid out in Buddhist fashion, which is typical in Japan. He was going to have a Shinto funeral. When I arrived, his body was on a futon in the living room, Shinto style. I didn’t know anything about Shinto rituals. It was a new experience.

Sekiguchi had taught me more about reporting, interrogation, honor, and trust than anyone else I had ever known. I kind of considered him a second father. I had taken my Beni to see him before I took her to my own parents. Even in death, Sekiguchi still had something to teach me about Japan.

It was weird to see him laid out on the tatami floor like that. They took the white cloth off his face and let me see his expression. He looked as if he were smiling. He had that same shit-eating grin that he used to have when he would dangle tidbits of information in front of me or crack a bad joke or when I’d lost yet another bet to him.

He’d been in a lot of pain over the previous months. Even intravenous dosages of morphine weren’t doing the trick. The cancer was
all over his body. For a while he’d been going to the Ariake Cancer Institute in Odaiba, about three hours from his home in Saitama. He was an outpatient, so after being blasted with chemicals and radiation, he’d made the trek back to Saitama by train, sometimes during the rush hour, when there were no seats.

I insisted on paying for him to stay at a hotel, Grand Pacific Le Daiba, which was close to the hospital, after his treatments. He needed to rest before going home. Of course, he protested and refused. He couldn’t accept a gift like that. As a cop—and he was still working, unbelievably—he didn’t want to take anything from me, nothing of monetary value. I told him I was working for a company that owned the hotel and I got the room comped.

It was a lie, of course. I think he knew that it was a lie and that I knew that he knew. But it was necessary. It allowed him to take the gift, and I wanted him to have it. We do that in Japan. There is the public image,
tatemae
, the facade that must be maintained, and then there is what’s really going on. The tatemae was that he was just borrowing a room. It worked for him and for me.
“Uso mo hoben”
—lies are also skillful means—is a proverb that comes from a Buddhist sutra.

In that Buddhist sutra, there’s a story about a bunch of children playing in a house. The house is on fire; it’s very dangerous, and if the kids don’t get out, they’ll burn to death. However, the kids won’t leave the house because they’re having too much fun. People are yelling for them to leave, but they won’t, and the door is locked from the inside. Someone tells the children that if they come outside there’s delicious candy waiting for them. It’s a lie, but it gets the kids out of the house and thus they are saved.

Uso mo hoben
. Sometimes, yeah.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the power to get him out of the house. All I could do for him was keep him a little more comfortable as it burned down.

I knew how to pay my respects at a Buddhist funeral, but I was at a loss this time. I followed the protocol as Mrs. Sekiguchi laid it out for me, giving him water and bowing. I laid a cigarette on the table near his head with the food.

It wasn’t the cigarettes that had given him cancer; it was betrayal. Another cop on the police force had leaked damaging information about him to a newspaper a few years back. He was a colleague of Sekiguchi’s but resented Sekiguchi’s success.

Sekiguchi’s “crimes” were uncuffing a yakuza and feeding him a
bowl of ramen before taking the guy into the police station to be arrested. Sekiguchi had also broken up a near prison riot by pulling a yakuza out of the holding cells and letting him have a smoke. All these things were violations of police protocol. The cop who had it in for Sekiguchi fed this to a reporter at the
Mainichi Shinbun
. It was published, and then all the newspapers followed the story up. He was “a bad cop,” after all.

He was stripped of his detective position, demoted, reprimanded, and put on traffic duty. He spent a couple years there in limbo. It ate at him. That’s probably when he got cancer. I think that was the real cause. It was a combination of betrayal, humiliation, and then frustration.

He had asked me to do some things a few months before he died. I kept most of those promises. I promised him I’d check on his family and his daughters periodically. I still do. It’s hard to believe they’re both women now. I look at them, and I still see the six-year-old girl and the nine-year-old girl who tried to convince me that I couldn’t be Jewish because every single Jew had been killed in World War II, just as they’d learned in school. The younger one had wanted to take me to school as an exhibit for show-and-tell.

Sekiguchi lived well. He died well, too. He had looked good the last time I’d seen him; that’s when I’d been sure he was going to die. Most people seem to get better right before the end: the half crazy become lucid, the cancer patient looks healthy. He spoke with his family the day before he died, and he had positive things to say to them; they had a good conversation. He left the world at peace with himself and his family. That’s what Mrs. Sekiguchi told me, and I was glad to hear it.

In Buddhism, after forty-nine days, you are reborn, but in Shinto-ism, after fifty days, you become a deity, according to the Sekiguchi family. I looked at him and thought, I really hope that works out.

It’s always good to have a god on your side.

I knew I was in trouble. I knew I had put my family in jeopardy. Helena was still missing.

I can still remember seeing that smile on Sekiguchi’s face. It looked as if he was pretending to sleep. In my imagination, I could hear him talking to me. I wanted him to tell me what to do. I wanted to hear his
words: “Jake, sometimes you have to pull back to fight back. Ask yourself, what time is it now?”

Well, God knows I was sick of getting my ass kicked. Pulling back didn’t seem like an option anymore. Maybe it was time to fight back. It seemed better than the alternative.

Helena’s disappearance did something to me. If I had known what had happened to her, it would have been better. Not knowing was agonizing.

I needed to learn more about Tadamasa Goto, how much power he had, who his allies and his enemies were. Shibata’s passing away was a big blow to me, Sekiguchi’s even bigger.

Here’s what I had gathered about Goto:

He had spearheaded the Yamaguchi-gumi infiltration of Tokyo and owned more than a hundred front companies. His personal wealth was estimated at more than half a billion dollars. At one time, he was even the largest single shareholder of Japan Airlines.

His claim to infamy was alledgedly ordering a hit on the esteemed Japanese film director Juzo Itami in May 1992. Itami had directed a film called
Minbo no onna
, which, unlike all previous yakuza films in Japan, portrayed the yakuza as money-grubbing, ill-mannered louts, not noble outlaws. Goto was not pleased with the film and especially disturbed by the implications that yakuza did not live up to their threats. On May 22, five members of his organization attacked Itami in the parking lot in front of his house, slashing his left cheek and his neck, inflicting serious injuries upon him.

Itami became a vocal supporter of the new anti–organized crime laws the Japanese government put in place that year and a general pain in the ass to organized crime. He was a living symbol of what the yakuza really did, not what they pretended to do. He allegedly killed himself a few years later by jumping from a tall building.

I collected hundreds of pages of material on the Goto-gumi. I used every trick I had learned while working for the
Yomiuri
. I had to make some moral compromises to get them, but I needed to know my enemy. What became very useful to me was a top secret report that the National Police Agency, with the aid of police organizations all over Japan, compiled about Tadamasa Goto and his organization in 2001. A very valuable source gave it to me in exchange for services rendered.

The report also noted that another characteristic of his organization was “intimidation of the mass media,” also stating that “using the organization name (and powers), members will seriously and relentlessly threaten whoever is responsible for unfavorable coverage.”

Suffice it to say, by 2006, even before I had hooked up with Shibata, I suspected that not only Goto but three other of his associates had received liver transplants at UCLA.

Shibata’s giving me Mio’s name was huge, but in a way, the person who helped me the most was Tadamasa Goto himself. Goto’s methods of keeping order within his organization had made enemies in his inner circle. The NPA report described his method of keeping control in vivid detail:

Because of Goto’s ruthless techniques, one of his soldiers, who had been forced to cripple a friend, approached me. He didn’t like me very much, but he hated Goto more. He wasn’t my only source in the organization, but he was the most reliable.

In November 2006, we had a meeting very far from Tokyo, and he told me something that took me completely off guard. Goto had been able to enter the United States because the FBI had let him in.

The FBI.

He gave me the approximate dates, and he told me the name of the person who had arranged it: Jim Moynihan, the legal attaché (de facto FBI representative) at the U.S. Embassy in Japan.

I knew Jim. He was a friend and a mentor. I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew it was true. And now I understood why Goto wouldn’t like it if I wrote that story: he’d sold his friends out to get clearance to enter the United States. It was a pretty clear-cut deal. He’d given authorities the names of some of the key gang bosses, documents, and lists of front companies, and even pointed them toward the financial institutions the Yamaguchi-gumi was using to launder money in the United States. Even in the mild-mannered world of the yakuza, ratting out your comrades would not be taken well. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that could get you expelled from the organization or even killed.

In December 2006, I had dinner with Jim and asked him, as politely as I could over some cold Guinness, why the hell he would make a deal with that man.

Jim told me as much as he could. It made sense. He didn’t give me all the details, but he gave me enough. On the record.