The Last Yakuza: life and death in the Japanese underworld

Main characters and organizations

(in order of appearance)

Note: At the end of each entry is a letter indicating the yakuza group or social group that the individual is affiliated or associated with:

I: Inagawa-kai; Y: Yamaguchi-gumi; S: Sumiyoshi-kai; K: Kyokuto-kai; and P: Police

The yakuza

Inagawa-kai: founded in 1948. Japan’s third-largest yakuza group, originally a federation of gamblers, once the ruling yakuza group in eastern Japan.

Yokosuka-Ikka: once one of the most powerful factions in the Inagawa-kai crime family.

Makoto Saigo (aka Tsunami): born after the war to a Japanese American woman. A juvenile delinquent, motorcycle gang member, and right-wing group leader, he rises up in the Inagawa-kai. (I)

Fujimori: Saigo’s former band member during the days when they played rock and roll together. (I)

Takahiko Inoue (aka The Buddha): The former bodyguard of Susumu Ishii and an executive of the Yokosuka-kka faction. Also later a Zen Buddhist priest. (I)

Hideo Hishiyama: a crafty underboss in the Inagawa-kai, and Saigo’s first oyabun (father figure). (I)

Susumu Ishii: The brilliant second-generation leader of the Inagawa-kai who took the group into the financial sector, sometimes called The Father of the Economic Yakuza. (I)

Hiroshi Miyamoto: a loyal soldier to the Inagawa-kai second-generation boss Susumu Ishii. (I)

Kakuji Inagawa, also known as Seijo Inagawa: the wise founder of the Inagawa-kai who earned tremendous influence and respect in postwar Japan. (I)

Daisaku Hanzawa: a loose cannon under Saigo with serious drug problems. (I)

Coach: Nobuyuki Kanazawa, a former professional baseball player turned yakuza. A major executive in the Inagawa-kai who would later become the head of the Yokosuka-Ikka. (I)

Kenji Mizoguchi: one of Saigo’s most loyal and dependable soldiers over the course of his criminal career. (I)

Kazuo Kawasaki aka Purple: The third-generation head of a tekiya (street merchant) yakuza group that became part of the Inagawa-kai. Eccentric, hypersexual, and Saigo’s older brother in the yakuza world. (I)

The Preacher: a high-ranking Inagawa-kai yakuza boss who also claimed to be a Christian. (I)

Yoshio Tsunoda: a close friend of Coach and the fourth-generation leader of the Inagawa-kai. (I)

Chihio Inagawa: The son of the founder of the Inagawa-kai, Japan’s third-largest organized crime family. He was the third-generation leader. (I)

Jo Yabe: A low-ranking Inagawa-kai member with a drug problem. (I)

Kyokuto-kai: a yakuza group, originally tekiya, founded before the war in Tokyo. Infamous for peddling methamphetamines. (K)

Kinbara: a bad-tempered boss in the Kyokuto-kai, head of the Kinbara-gumi, and rival for Saigo’s turf. (K)

Tosei-kai, a predominantly Korean Japanese yakuza group that rose to power in postwar Tokyo. Now known as the Toa-kai.

Hisayuki Machii: aka The Bull. The leader of the Tosei-kai.

The Sumiyoshi-kai: a federation of Kanto yakuza groups, it is Japan’s second-largest yakuza organization. (S)

The Yamaguchi-gumi: founded in 1915, Japan’s largest organized crime group, and likened to Goldman Sachs with guns.

Kazuo Taoka: the charismatic third-generation leader of the Yamaguchi-gumi. Born March 28, 1913. (Shares the same birthday as the author.) (Y)

Masaru Takumi: a top leader of the Yamaguchi-gumi known for his financial wizardry and strong political and economic connections. (Y)

Cops and colleagues

Detective Lucky: a reasonable and crafty organized crime control division police officer. (P)

Junichiro Koizumi: former prime minister of Japan whose grandfather had also been a yakuza and had friendly ties to the Inagawa-kai. (I)

Detective Midorigawa aka Greenriver: A rule-breaking cop in the organized crime control division who came to form a sort of friendship with Saigo. (P)

Barbarian: A rapper, former marijuana dealer, and eventual friend of Saigo. (I)

Yuriko: Saigo’s second wife.

Takashi Muraki: a corrupt cop on the Kanagawa prefecture police force who would shake down yakuza when it suited him. (P)

Aum Shinrikyo: A doomsday cult that spread nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, killing several and injuring thousands. They earned money for their operations by producing methamphetamines and other drugs, and selling them wholesale to the Yamaguchi-gumi, especially to the Goto-Gumi.

Shoko Asahara: The leader of the doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo. (See above.)

PROLOGUE

July 2008

There were three of us in the room. Me, Makoto Saigo, and, having come along for the ride, Tomohiko Suzuki.

Saigo, pronounced like sigh of relief, and go, as in get up and go, was a former yakuza who had once lorded over 150 soldiers as the boss of a subset of the Inagawa-kai, which is the third-largest organized crime group in Japan.

Tomohiko Suzuki was one of the best yakuza writers in Japan and a former editor of the yakuza fan magazine Jitsuwa Bull. Suzuki seemed more like yakuza than the people he wrote about. He sat on the floor; Saigo sat on the red faux-leather sofa; and I sat on the chair across from him. Between us was a small, round table, a chabu-dai, great for a tea ceremony and not bad as a coffee table or a place to put an ashtray.

The living room was silent. It felt like someone had turned down the sound on the whole world. It was cold for June. The rain had been pouring since morning, with a strong wind. It rattled the amado (rain shutters), and I could hear the rain splattering on the windowsill. And in that raindrop-punctuated silence, I thought about the circumstances that had brought us together.

I was in a bit of a tight spot. I’d managed to piss off one of the most vicious crime bosses in Japan, Tadamasa Goto, a Yamaguchi-gumi consigliore. The Yamaguchi-gumi is Japan’s largest crime group, with 39,000 members. How I had pissed him off is a long story, and one I’ve told elsewhere.* Let’s just say that I dug up some dirt about the man in question that proved he had traded favors with the feds in the United States, for his own benefit and to the detriment of his organization.

[* In Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.]

For the moment, I had the protection of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, excluding one corrupt cop working for Goto. I had a tacit alliance with one member of the Yamaguchi-gumi. I didn’t feel that the odds were in my favor. Still, I had an ace in the hole—I just needed to keep myself alive long enough play it.

I had to write an article that would get Goto off my back. Once the story was public, I would be a much harder target to hit.

I was stuck in Japan for two months trying to figure out a way to get the story out. I didn’t want him following me home to the United States and having him use his connections to take me—and possibly my wife and two children—out.

To be honest, I was kind of hoping that if I could get the story written, his own people would kill him. It seemed like a reasonable bet. Nobody likes a rat, especially the yakuza. In Japan’s case, the word for a rat is dog. Either way, the yakuza took a dim view of one of their own cooperating with law enforcement.

I contacted Suzuki, because if anyone could help me get a detailed story into print, it would be him. I also needed him to put me in touch with Saigo, whom we both knew. I knew things hadn’t gone well for him in recent years—he’d either left or been kicked out of the Inagawa-kai. I wasn’t sure what had happened there. I did know he was looking for work and that he had a one-year-old son. I needed a bodyguard, and I wanted to hire him to protect me.

Before I asked Saigo to work for me or with me, I wanted to be absolutely sure I could trust him. I had known him casually for many years. His nickname was Tsunami. He was called Tsunami because he was like an unstoppable force of nature, relentless and violent, and nobody could predict when he would come and launch a rain of destruction. However, in the underworld, you never know someone entirely. That’s just how it is.

I contacted the only man in the underworld I sort of trusted. It wasn’t easy to reach him. I had to go to a pay phone and then call one of his front companies, leave a message, wait for the message to get to him, and then pick up the phone when he called. He would call from a public pay phone, and, thanks to the miracles of Japanese technology, my phone would tell me as much when he called.

He called just before midnight the same day I reached out to him. I explained the situation, and I gave him the name.

"Ah, Saigo. I knew him well. He’s a kyodai [practically brother]to one of our own—not my faction, though. His oyabun is a stand-up guy. So is he."

He sounded perfect. But my advisor had a word of caution.

He’s very stubborn. Won’t listen to reason, and when he decides he’s in the right and loses his temper, he plows down anything in his way.

It sounded good to me. If Saigo really was a storm incarnate, that could make me a mini-Raijin, the Japanese god of thunder and lightning. It would be an improvement over feeling like a tangerine placed on a Buddhist altar for the dead.

Saigo had come to the house with Suzuki dressed in a black suit that had seen better days; it was a funeral suit, as best I could tell. He was huge for a Japanese man, his hair slicked back, and tattoos flashing past the cuff of his whitish shirt. He was polite and quiet. His eyes looked sunken, as though the sockets had been punched back and stayed there, but even in his late forties you could still feel a raw power coming from him.

I asked Saigo to protect me, and pulled the rough draft of the story out of my bag, ignoring Suzuki’s unsubtle signals to put the thing back immediately. Saigo took a long time to read it, going over it word by word, his finger touching each character as though he was reading Braille.

The snake knows the way of the serpent. Ja no michi wa hebi.

That is one of my favorite Japanese proverbs. It is also like its counterpart: treat poison with poison. I figured the best way to get through this entire problem with the Goto-gumi was to hire another yakuza—even a former yakuza from an opposing group. It couldn’t hurt, and it might help.

The big question was, would Saigo take the job.

He put down the manuscript and looked me in the eyes.

I think you have a serious problem. I hope you’ve realized that yourself. You’ve pissed off Goto Tadamasa. Let me tell you something—I know Goto. He’s not like other yakuza.

How’s he different? I asked.

He’s an asshole; an arrogant, double-dealing asshole. He used to be one of ours, an Inagawa-kai member, but jumped ship to the Yamaguchi-gumi. I know him. Saigo pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open, and scrolled through the directory. There it was: Goto Tadamasa and his number.

Goto killed people, or had them killed—ordinary people, civilians — and he didn’t flinch. That’s not how the yakuza are supposed to operate, Saigo said. "Katagi ni meiwaku o kakenai. (Don’t cause trouble to ordinary people.") That used to be the rule. Goto got to where he was, and had amassed the money he had made, because he never paid attention to that rule. Maybe he defined the future of the yakuza. It all seemed to come down to money these days.

Jake-san, how much is this story worth to you? Because there’s a good chance that, before you publish it or even after, I’ll get killed protecting you, and then Goto will kill you.

I had thought about just getting the hell out of Japan, but I’d always be looking behind me. There was more to it than that. It wasn’t just a story anymore. It had become personal. Maybe it was a vendetta. I hesitated to say such melodramatic crap, but I couldn’t grasp better words.

It’s worth my entire life.

Well, Saigo said, rolling the words out of his mouth, then I guess it’s worth my life as well.

With that, he agreed to be my bodyguard. He was willing to risk dying for me — but he wanted to know what I was willing to do for him in return. It wouldn’t have mattered what I offered in return. He’d already made up his mind. His question to me was largely a formality.

What would you like me to do? I asked.

Let me think about what I want for a second, he said, almost in a whisper.

He lit up his cigarettes, Short Hopes, inhaled, and closed his eyes, deep in thought. His huge hands made the cigarette look like a matchstick. He held his tobacco in a way that made it hard to notice he was missing the first two joints of his pinkie.

Actually, missing would be the wrong word. As I learned later, he’d amputated it in the yakuza tradition of paying penance. I didn’t know why he’d done it, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask. Not today.

He sat back on the couch, and I got a better look at his face. He had a crew cut and a beard that was speckled with gray hair. Not only his eye sockets, but his cheeks were sunken, and his skin had an unhealthy gray pallor. He looked like the living dead. That wouldn’t be bad, I thought. You can’t kill a zombie; they keep on coming. He would be the perfect bodyguard.

When it’s all done, you write my biography. I’m proud to have been a yakuza, and I want my son to know who I was and what I did. I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see him grow up.

I hesitated. I needed him to be my bodyguard, but I wasn’t willing to become a yakuza cheerleader. It wasn’t worth it.

I’m not going to write something glorifying the yakuza, I said. If I were to write it, it would have to cover everything.

His answer surprised me.

I’d expect nothing less.

And, with that, our lives were bound together, but I wouldn’t find out Saigo’s real reasons for taking the job until much later.

PART I

LEARNING THE TRADE

修行

CHAPTER ONE

A half-American yakuza

Saigo’s mother, Josephine Kato, grew up in Seattle in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940, the United States and Japan seemed to be heading towards war. Anti-Japanese sentiment was tangible all around her, and as a nisei (a child born to Japanese parents in a different country), Josephine felt that, if war broke out, she and her family would be imprisoned. They decided to return to Japan, where they would be safe.

Her older brother, James Y. Kato, joined the U.S. Army, where he served as a code-breaker until the end of the war. For a few years, he even held a position at General Headquarters (GHQ), the offices of the occupation government in postwar Japan. GHQ included a staff of several hundred U.S. civil servants as well as the military personnel. Some of these staffers effectively wrote the first draft of the Japanese Constitution, which the Diet (Japan’s parliament and the equivalent of the U.S. congress) then ratified after a few amendments. He never discussed what he really did at GHQ.

When she went back to Japan with her family, she did not renounce her American citizenship, which technically makes her son, Makoto Saigo, the son of an American (though it’s unlikely he would easily get American citizenship now).

After the war, which she doesn’t like to talk about, Josephine met Saigo’s father, Hitoshi Saigo. It wasn’t an arranged marriage, which was usual at the time, but ren-ai kekkon — a marriage of love. It wasn’t a match made in heaven because, at her core, Josephine was an American. Mr Saigo was by no means a typical Japanese man, but he wasn’t quite internationalized either.

He was certainly not a rabid Japanese national.

Growing up, Mr Saigo wanted to become a police officer, partly because his father had been one, but also because, I wanted to make the world a better place; a safer place. I wanted to do something good.

World War II interfered with that. He joined the army without much of a choice, and volunteered to be a kamikaze — technically known as Tokotai, special attack forces. He didn’t actually have a desire to die.

I knew we couldn’t win the war. America was going to crush us. Anyone could see that. When I’d hear my commander tell us that Japan would fight until every single Japanese died for the emperor, I thought it was crazy. How can you win a war if there is no one left alive to savor the victory?

While there were a number of Japanese who believed the emperor was divine and were gung-ho about fighting to the death, he wasn’t one of them.

Mr Saigo was a practical man. He had a stoic understanding of the world that he often succinctly expressed by quoting this Japanese proverb: You can spend your whole life laughing, or spend your whole life crying. Either way, you only have one life.

I figured I’d die in the war. So, if death is inevitable, isn’t it a lot cooler to raise your hand and volunteer to die as a kamikaze rather than just be more cannon fodder? When the time came to volunteer, he raised his hand and smiled. Perhaps some of that cheery fatalism was passed along to his son.

When the war ended, Mr Saigo was enrolled in the Navy Fighter Pilot Training Program in Tsuchiura. In another year, he would have been dead. He wasn’t sorry that the war ended, or that Japan had been defeated.

He promptly enrolled in the postwar police force, where he received the training necessary to pursue his dream of becoming a police officer and possibly a detective. However, the specter of the military cast a shadow over his plans.

On the day of his graduation in the summer of 1950, after several years of training, he and a group of other would-be graduates were called to one side. Their commander told them they had a special mission for them. They were going to be a special kind of police officer in the newly formed National Police Reserve.

Everyone was puzzled. One cadet raised his hand and asked, What’s the ‘National Police Reserve?’

The commander sucked in air dramatically. It’s the army. The new army.

The cadets were floored. An army? Hadn’t Japan’s army been decimated? Japan wasn’t supposed to have an army.

One cadet raised the issue. MacArthur banned the army.

The commander replied, Well, he changed his mind. That’s the way it is. If any of you don’t want to be part of it, you can quit now.

About 20 percent of them did. Mr Saigo did not. He had come too far to pull back now. Maybe things would change.

GHQ officially created the National Police Reserve on August 10, 1950. It would later become Japan’s de facto army, the Japan Self-Defense Forces. According to documents uncovered by the Sankei newspaper in 2014, GHQ agreed to its creation due to fears of communism and the riots by Korean Japanese.

A large number of Koreans had moved to Japan during its colonial period (1895–1945) and stayed even after the war. Some of those who stayed had been dragged to Japan as forced labor for the war effort. In 1948, the ministry of education sent an official letter to the Osaka government to close down the Korean schools, which taught Korean language and culture. The Koreans responded with extreme anger and violent protests.

On April 24, 7,000 people, mostly Koreans, surrounded the Osaka prefectural headquarters. In Kobe, protesters swarmed the Hyogo headquarters and held the governor in virtual captivity, demanding he overturn the decision to close the schools. The occupying forces declared a state of emergency in the Kobe area. Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger was dispatched from GHQ to deal with the problem, and issued an official condemnation of the riots. GHQ learned that some of the protestors were communists, giving some weight to Japan’s request to have a stronger police force, which Prime Minister Yoshida had repeatedly requested.*

[* The Koreans in Japan were in some ways responsible for Japan rebuilding its army. They would later go on to power Japan’s second army: the yakuza. Unlike the rest of Japan, which harbored racism towards Korea and Korean Japanese, and still does, the yakuza were very much a meritocracy.]

Mr Saigo knew none of this — all he knew was that he signed up to be a cop, and instead found he had somehow volunteered to be in the army again. He imagined that, since he had already escaped death on the battlefield once, he might not be able to escape it again in the foreseen war with Russia.

He was sent to Hokkaido. After four years of Spartan practice, learning military arts and strategy, it was clear that his division was going to become part of the new Japanese army. They would never be cops.

Yet, for all practical purposes, they were organized like the police force and dressed like the police force. The only difference was that they didn’t have the right to arrest anyone.

The training was brutal. The climate was cold and hostile. He had to learn to fire shotguns and machine guns, scale walls, and do everything a SWAT team member had to do.

He managed to get transferred to Camp Fuji, where life was easier, and there, on his occasional R & R, he met Josephine.

At first, he thought she was a little crazy and intimidating. At a height of 174 centimeters, Josephine was a giant among the Japanese women at the time, but Mr Saigo decided to rise to the challenge.

He was still a civil servant, so, after pulling some strings and knocking on a few doors, he managed to leave the military and join the Bank of Japan. Shortly afterwards, Mr Saigo and Josephine decided to get married. Both of their families were opposed. Josephine’s family wanted her to marry an American, and Saigo’s family was puzzled that he was marrying this giant of a woman who was clearly more American than Japanese — and very far from being the ideal superficial, subservient Japanese wife.

It wasn’t quite domestic bliss, but it wasn’t bad. They were happy. They moved to Machida City, a large suburb within Tokyo. Josephine gave birth to three children. Makoto Saigo was the first. He was born two days after Christmas, on December 27, 1960.

Every morning, Josephine would make an American breakfast for the family. This didn’t go over well with Dad, who always wanted fish, rice, seaweed, and miso soup. Mom would only occasionally make a Japanese breakfast. As a result, young Saigo was bad at using his chopsticks. Seeing him make clumsy attempts to eat rice with chopsticks drove his father crazy.

Makoto, he would say, That is no way to eat rice. You have to hold the chopsticks like this. He’d then demonstrate.

Josephine would counter him, saying, If you have a knife and a fork and a spoon, you don’t need chopsticks.

Saigo would then agree with her retort. Yeah, Dad, who needs chopsticks?

Infuriated, Saigo’s dad would then slap him on the head and say, You’re in Japan. We eat with chopsticks here and, if you’re going to live here, you better learn to eat properly.

In Josephine’s mind, however, eating properly was oatmeal, eggs, bacon, toast, and hamburgers. The quintessential American diet. Her son agreed with her on that. The typical Japanese breakfast: rice, fish, dried seaweed, and miso soup? Saigo didn’t like that at all.

Well, it turned out that, by eating American-style, Saigo grew in leaps and bounds. He towered over his classmates like a bear among deer. And perhaps because of his height or the way his mother spoke to him in front of the neighbors, when Saigo went to elementary school, the other kids meanly called him gaijin, which means foreigner.

The long form of the word is gaikokujin, coming from the words for outside, country, and person. The abbreviated form was sometimes taken to mean not human (outside person), and was derogatory. It’s certainly a word that makes an individual feel alienated in Japanese society. It’s not a coincidence that over 30 percent of the yakuza are non-Japanese. Many of them are now third- or fourth-generation Korean Japanese. The current head of the Inagawa-kai, Jiro Kiyota , is a Korean Japanese man who has never been nationalized.

If you asked Saigo whether being treated as a foreigner in his younger years attracted him to the yakuza or made him a rebel, he would tell you that you were overthinking it. He insisted that the reason he became a yakuza was because he didn’t like school, he didn’t like straitlaced Japanese society, and it was much more fun to be an outlaw than it was to be a salaryman.

As he was growing up, he decided he liked being called an American. After all, his mother was an American, and America had won the war.

His father was surprisingly pro-American as well. His dad would often tell him, America saved us from ourselves. They defeated us, but they showed us great mercy and helped rebuild this country. If we had been faster at building an atomic bomb, we might’ve won the war. I doubt we would’ve been this merciful.

Of course, Saigo did not understand what his father had meant about Japan building an atomic bomb. However, years later, when in prison, he read a newspaper article about Japan’s secret atomic bomb program, and realized that his father was exceptionally well informed. He had great respect for his father.

But, like most Japanese children, his father was an absentee dad. At the time, that was the Japanese way of raising children for many households. While everyone had a mom and dad, the families were essentially single-mother households. Saigo saw much more of his mother than he ever did his father, and simply accepted that as the way things were. His father left the house early, came home late, and sometimes worked weekends. When Saigo saw him, it was usually at breakfast. His father didn’t show him much affection or attention. His idea of educating Saigo was to pound sense into his son’s head by using his fist or an open palm.

His parents fought often, but the fights were more comical than vicious. Josephine and Hitoshi would often quarrel during breakfast about any number of things. They quarreled about the war, school, Japan’s place in the world, about the emperor, and about breakfast itself. They were both ethnically Japanese and had a common language; but, culturally, Josephine was a liberated American woman, and Hitoshi (Mr Saigo) was a staid Japanese man.

When they argued in Japanese, the stymied and flustered Josephine would always return to English mode, slam her hands on the table, and scream "No!"

Hitoshi, not being very good at English, would then usually give up.

Once he asked her what she thought of the emperor, and her reply was, The U.S. president is greater. That wasn’t really the question, and the answer didn’t exactly charm her husband.

They argued over about what to call each other. Japanese people usually refer to one another by their family name, followed by an honorific. Japan is a vertical society in nature, and the language reflects that. To speak it properly, you have to determine where you and the person you are addressing are in relation to each other in the social power grid. The way you conjugate your verbs and adjectives is important for showing politeness, and how you address people is particularly important.

San is the most familiar honorific suffix to people in the West, and it’s relatively neutral. Sama is more formal. Males will refer to their close friends, equals, or inferiors with kun and, sometimes, chan. Chan used to be a more feminine honorific. Women use san, sama, and kun as well, but chan is the term of endearment that women use to address each other. They sometimes use chan for men and boys, too. A mixture of sama and chan, which is pronounced "chama, can also be used by either gender, but only in a joking way. Within a company, the position of the supervisor can be used in place of a name. For example, Toshiaki Kato, division head of tractor parts" might just be called kacho (division head) by his subordinates. If there was another division head from a different department present at the meeting, Toshiaki Kato might be called Kato Kacho to clarify the situation. Some new recruits might even attach honorifics to the job title, resulting in phrases such as Kato Kacho-Sama, which older Japanese would tell you is being too polite, and thus rude.

In the world of the yakuza, the head of the group is often just called Kumi-cho. Cho means the top. The leader is also called oyabun, which literally means father-figure. If you are on very friendly terms with your boss, you can even call him oyaji — which in English is close to the old man or Pops.

One of the worst things you can do is call someone by their name with no honorific at all, which is known as yobisute aka throwing away the honorific.

Josephine liked to be called Josephine and just that. No honorific needed. Hitoshi felt she should use her Japanese name, Kazuko. He wanted to call her Kazuko-chan. Josephine didn’t like that. At first, she just called him Hitoshi, but over time this unusual term of endearment began to feel unnatural to him. They began to argue about it. Finally, they settled on Me and You. Josephine called him You. He called her Me. It didn’t quite make sense, but it worked. And when it didn’t work, they used first names. When they were very, very, very angry with each other, they’d politely refer to each other by their last names with a sama attached.

If the two started bandying about Saigo-sama and Kato-sama, it meant the cold war had broken out.

At the height of one of their worst arguments, Josephine lost her cool and called her husband Jap. This almost resulted in blows. He spat back, "Hikokumin! — Japanese slang for a non-native national, but Josephine wasn’t bothered in the least. She coldly replied, Yes, I am. I’m an American. I may look Japanese, but inside I’m an American."

And so was her son. In spirit, at least.

Japan places a great deal of importance on the individual harmonizing with the group. Japanese people are bound by a countless number of rules about what is proper behavior.

To an American like Josephine, who was Japanese only in appearance, Japan seemed very uptight and rigid. Modes of speech changed depending on whether you were addressing a man or a woman; someone older or younger; a social inferior or superior; or a close friend or an acquaintance. Even the prestigiousness of a profession had an influence over how you spoke and acted towards another. A doctor was given the title sensei, but a construction worker could simply be referred to as You over there.

There was an informal dress code that came with one’s place in society. White-collar workers wore white dress shirts, dark, unpatterned navy-blue suits, dark ties, and dark shoes. Construction workers dressed in special slacks, two-toed shoes, and often sported the same haircuts. School children all wore the same uniforms, making it impossible to distinguish who was wealthy and who was poor. From the first days of school, Japanese people were taught not to go their own way, but to act as others did and to get along with their classmates; to share chores, responsibility, and the same values.

There was even a right way and a wrong way to bow, and the depth of the bow depended up on both the time and place of the bow and whom you were addressing.

Japan is all about wa — the ideal of social harmony. Everyone plays the roles they are assigned to on the great stage that is Japan. Everyone is a performer, and everyone is an audience member — each watching and performing for the other. It requires everyone to say their lines at the proper time and in the correct way.

Well, the spirit of wa also known as Yamatodamashii (the soul of a Japanese person), wasn’t engrained in his mother, and it wasn’t engrained in him. He couldn’t see the point of shutting up and submitting for the greater peace of the group. In a society where you gotta have wa, he wasn’t interested; but he wasn’t interested in being an American either.*

[* On that note, Robert Whiting’s book You Gotta Have Wa, while ostensibly about Japanese baseball, is a wonderful microcosm of Japanese society in general.]

Josephine tried to teach her son some English, but gave up when she realized he had no interest in learning the language. Maybe it was because he was sometimes embarrassed to be called an American or being treated like a foreigner, or maybe he was just lazy. Even Saigo can’t remember his reasons, but he does wish he’d paid more attention.

If he’d learned English, maybe he could have done other things. He might have excelled in at least one class, but he didn’t. It turns out that his areas of expertise were less to do with school, and more to do with crime.

CHAPTER TWO

Driving past the point of no return at full speed

By April 1975, Saigo was a confirmed juvenile delinquent. His only skills were playing the guitar and winning fights. At the age of fourteen, he passed the exam to get into Tokyo Machida High School. By the third day of his first year, his troublemaking, frequent fights with classmates, bad attitude, and maybe even his bad-ass haircut resulted in him being given an ultimatum: leave on his own, or get kicked out within a week.

During this time, he had two loves: music and motorcycles. Gaido aka The Evil Path was a legendary rock band, and he was one of the original members.

In the 1970s, Gaido had a huge following of delinquent youth, young yakuza, and motorcycle gangs. Their songs and lyrics were extremely controversial for their day. Songs such as Yellow Monkey ridiculed modern Japan, and their neo-punk version of Japanese right-wing anthems inflamed conservatives as well. One of the songs that Saigo helped write, Kaori, was a hidden ode to smoking pot. Kaori, in Japanese, is a woman’s name, but it also means scent. The lyrics noting that Kaori will always give you away referred to the strong smell of marijuana. Songs like this and their general attitude made them the rebel rockers of their time. At their best, they sounded like the Sex