word got around that such an exalted personage had given Nicola’s his stamp of approval, the failed jewel thief had it made, and the autos parked outside grew so numerous they began to block the normal flow of traffic.
Still another famous guest was one Rikidozan, the wrestling champion and national hero and unquestionably the foremost cultural icon of his time. As already seen, his wrestling show,
Mitsubishi Faitoman Awa
(The Mitsubishi Fightman Hour), was so popular it had single-handedly launched the TV era in Japan; sales of TV sets had skyrocketed from the 1954 plateau of 17,000 to more than 4,500,000 by 1959. One of his matches – a draw with NWA champion Lou Thesz before 27,000 fans at Tokyo’s outdoor Korakuen Stadium in 1956 – had attracted the largest crowd ever to watch a wrestling event in Japan and had earned a Japanese Nielsen rating of 87 percent, a domestic record that would be surpassed only by the carriage-drawn wedding procession of the Crown Prince and Princess through the heart of Tokyo. The master of a vast business empire that included a seven-story wrestling arena, one of Japan’s first bowling alleys, a large Western-style apartment complex (‘Riki Apartments’ in Akasaka, located behind Hardy Barracks), and a nearby nightclub where the top jazz musicians in the country played, Rikidozan came with a wide range of acquaintances. These ranged from government bigwigs who served on the board of the Japan Professional Wrestling Association to famous novelists like the young Shintaro Ishihara (a future parliamentarian who, perhaps inspired by Rikidozan, would later become Japan’s leading American basher, verbally body slamming the United States in a best-selling 1990 book called
The Japan That Can Say No
) and exotic wrestlers likethe bearded 600-pound Haystack Calhoun, who needed a flatbed truck to transport him around Tokyo. An avatar of Japanese virtue before the kleig lights, Rikidozan was far less restrained in private. He would stand at the bar downing double shots of bourbon and practicing out loud the insults he had picked up from American friends in his heavily accented English:
kokusakka, sonnabeechi, kommi basutado
, and so forth. He liked to grab well-wishers by the genitalia, convulsing in merriment at the ensuing yelps of pain. On occasion, he would be so overcome by his own exuberance that he would start doing a sumo wrestler’s thrusting drill, slamming the pillars that supported the second-floor dining area so violently with his hands that the entire restaurant shook, causing plaster to fall from the ceiling.
Also on the scene and especially hard to miss among the free diners was a notorious Tokyo gang boss named Hisayuki Machii, a mean-looking, 6′2″, 200 pounder, who was always in the company of his bodyguard – a mere 110-pound
taekwando
expert (one of the few bodyguards in town half the size of his employer) who conducted his own preliminary security check, one as thorough as that ever done by the Crown Prince’s Palace Guard, before allowing the boss to enter. Outside a dozen armed men would stand watch.
Machii’s gang, the Tosei-kai, a 1500-member postwar band of mostly Korean thugs, had just won a ruthless war with the pure-blooded Sumiyoshi-kai, a prewar gambling gang that dated back to the Meiji era, for control of the booming West Ginza and its dense thicket of bars, cabarets and pachinko shops. They ran protection rackets and loan collection services and even ‘leased’ operating rights to a Korean pickpocket group. As it turned out, the Tosei-kai also promoted many of Rikidozan’s matches.
Although Machii was generally the picture of propriety – he invariably handed out 10,000-yen tips, the equivalent of a month’s wages, to waiters – his men were not. Any rival gangster who walked through the West Ginza without paying his respects wasliterally taking his life in his hands. A Tosei-kai foot soldier once slashed the face of a gang boss from Shibuya
Still another famous guest was one Rikidozan, the wrestling champion and national hero and unquestionably the foremost cultural icon of his time. As already seen, his wrestling show,
Mitsubishi Faitoman Awa
(The Mitsubishi Fightman Hour), was so popular it had single-handedly launched the TV era in Japan; sales of TV sets had skyrocketed from the 1954 plateau of 17,000 to more than 4,500,000 by 1959. One of his matches – a draw with NWA champion Lou Thesz before 27,000 fans at Tokyo’s outdoor Korakuen Stadium in 1956 – had attracted the largest crowd ever to watch a wrestling event in Japan and had earned a Japanese Nielsen rating of 87 percent, a domestic record that would be surpassed only by the carriage-drawn wedding procession of the Crown Prince and Princess through the heart of Tokyo. The master of a vast business empire that included a seven-story wrestling arena, one of Japan’s first bowling alleys, a large Western-style apartment complex (‘Riki Apartments’ in Akasaka, located behind Hardy Barracks), and a nearby nightclub where the top jazz musicians in the country played, Rikidozan came with a wide range of acquaintances. These ranged from government bigwigs who served on the board of the Japan Professional Wrestling Association to famous novelists like the young Shintaro Ishihara (a future parliamentarian who, perhaps inspired by Rikidozan, would later become Japan’s leading American basher, verbally body slamming the United States in a best-selling 1990 book called
The Japan That Can Say No
) and exotic wrestlers likethe bearded 600-pound Haystack Calhoun, who needed a flatbed truck to transport him around Tokyo. An avatar of Japanese virtue before the kleig lights, Rikidozan was far less restrained in private. He would stand at the bar downing double shots of bourbon and practicing out loud the insults he had picked up from American friends in his heavily accented English:
kokusakka, sonnabeechi, kommi basutado
, and so forth. He liked to grab well-wishers by the genitalia, convulsing in merriment at the ensuing yelps of pain. On occasion, he would be so overcome by his own exuberance that he would start doing a sumo wrestler’s thrusting drill, slamming the pillars that supported the second-floor dining area so violently with his hands that the entire restaurant shook, causing plaster to fall from the ceiling.
Also on the scene and especially hard to miss among the free diners was a notorious Tokyo gang boss named Hisayuki Machii, a mean-looking, 6′2″, 200 pounder, who was always in the company of his bodyguard – a mere 110-pound
taekwando
expert (one of the few bodyguards in town half the size of his employer) who conducted his own preliminary security check, one as thorough as that ever done by the Crown Prince’s Palace Guard, before allowing the boss to enter. Outside a dozen armed men would stand watch.
Machii’s gang, the Tosei-kai, a 1500-member postwar band of mostly Korean thugs, had just won a ruthless war with the pure-blooded Sumiyoshi-kai, a prewar gambling gang that dated back to the Meiji era, for control of the booming West Ginza and its dense thicket of bars, cabarets and pachinko shops. They ran protection rackets and loan collection services and even ‘leased’ operating rights to a Korean pickpocket group. As it turned out, the Tosei-kai also promoted many of Rikidozan’s matches.
Although Machii was generally the picture of propriety – he invariably handed out 10,000-yen tips, the equivalent of a month’s wages, to waiters – his men were not. Any rival gangster who walked through the West Ginza without paying his respects wasliterally taking his life in his hands. A Tosei-kai foot soldier once slashed the face of a gang boss from Shibuya
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