from ear to chin merely for refusing to bow his head as he passed by.
The Tosei-kai was symbolic of what had happened to the Tokyo organized crime scene. The old
tekiya
had fallen by the wayside as the street stalls gradually disappeared, and a new type of gangster had assumed control, drawn from the vast pool of jobless and homeless young men who filled the streets in the aftermath of the war. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they had formed new groups and moved heavily into the methamphetamine trade and prostitution (both of which had become illegal after the war). They carved out their own protection and gambling rings (taking several millions of dollars a day in bets on professional baseball games alone) and invented new moneymaking schemes like corporate extortion in the form of gang-sponsored magazines. ‘Reporters’ for the mob-run magazine
Ginza Nippo
, for example, dug up embarrassing information on the private lives of company presidents, then solicited money for ‘advertising space’ from their subjects
not
to publish it in their journal.
They kept offices, open twenty-four hours a day, in which they conducted their more legitimate activities, like debt collecting, wore gang badges openly on their lapels, and carried name cards showing titles or ranks such as ‘captain’ or ‘elder brother’ or ‘young associate’. They also drove big American cars and aped the dress and manner of characters in American gangster movies. Instead of samurai long swords, they used guns obtained from American GIs.
Not surprisingly, the retired bosses of the postwar outdoor markets looked disapprovingly on the new generation, referring to them by the contemptuous term
gurentai
(a loose equivalent of ‘juvenile delinquents’). When the first American-style ‘hit’, or shooting for hire, took place in Japan – the attack in 1958 on an infamous greenmailer (financial corporate takeover artist) named Hideki Yokoi as he sat in his downtown office – they, and the public at large, were overwhelmingly critical of the method employed.
‘Wearing American gangster clothes is one thing,’ fumed one aging mobster in the
Shukan Tokyo
(
Weekly Tokyo
) magazine, in an article entitled ‘The Fire-Spitting Colt’, ‘but adopting the American custom of using professional hit men? How low can the Japanese gangster fall?’ (The honorable way to settle a dispute, as everyone knew, was to grab a sword, purify it by spitting sake on it, and face the enemy man to man, not sneak up on him with a gun from some dingy back stairwell.)
Such criticisms did absolutely no good, however. The New Breed was there to stay and arcane distinctions such as
tekiya
and
bakuto
were fading away; the word ‘yakuza’ was being applied to all gangsters, and the term
boryokudan
, which literally means ‘violence group’, was used for the gangs themselves.
A Tosei-kai captain named Matsubara was perhaps the quintessential Tokyo yakuza. A thickset, powerfully built man with a face that looked as though it had been hit by a truck, he invariably made his entrance wearing dark sunglasses, a fedora pulled down over his eyes, and a trench coat – one or more gun handles protruding from the pockets.
One night as the well-equipped TSK captain was ordering a drink at the bar, Zappetti asked, ‘Matsubara, how many guns you actually got on you?’
Matsubara pulled out four revolvers – two .32s and two .38s – and laid them on the counter one by one, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
These then were but a few of the diverse people who met nightly at the crossroads of East and West that was Nicola’s – people who would write some of the more colorful, and dramatic and darker, chapters of the city’s history.
UNDERGROUND EMPIRE
The underground economy denounced by Kades in 1947 was alive and growing, and many of its key players could be found at Nicola’s. Foremost among them was a squat, bristle-headed,humorless man named Yoshio
The Tosei-kai was symbolic of what had happened to the Tokyo organized crime scene. The old
tekiya
had fallen by the wayside as the street stalls gradually disappeared, and a new type of gangster had assumed control, drawn from the vast pool of jobless and homeless young men who filled the streets in the aftermath of the war. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they had formed new groups and moved heavily into the methamphetamine trade and prostitution (both of which had become illegal after the war). They carved out their own protection and gambling rings (taking several millions of dollars a day in bets on professional baseball games alone) and invented new moneymaking schemes like corporate extortion in the form of gang-sponsored magazines. ‘Reporters’ for the mob-run magazine
Ginza Nippo
, for example, dug up embarrassing information on the private lives of company presidents, then solicited money for ‘advertising space’ from their subjects
not
to publish it in their journal.
They kept offices, open twenty-four hours a day, in which they conducted their more legitimate activities, like debt collecting, wore gang badges openly on their lapels, and carried name cards showing titles or ranks such as ‘captain’ or ‘elder brother’ or ‘young associate’. They also drove big American cars and aped the dress and manner of characters in American gangster movies. Instead of samurai long swords, they used guns obtained from American GIs.
Not surprisingly, the retired bosses of the postwar outdoor markets looked disapprovingly on the new generation, referring to them by the contemptuous term
gurentai
(a loose equivalent of ‘juvenile delinquents’). When the first American-style ‘hit’, or shooting for hire, took place in Japan – the attack in 1958 on an infamous greenmailer (financial corporate takeover artist) named Hideki Yokoi as he sat in his downtown office – they, and the public at large, were overwhelmingly critical of the method employed.
‘Wearing American gangster clothes is one thing,’ fumed one aging mobster in the
Shukan Tokyo
(
Weekly Tokyo
) magazine, in an article entitled ‘The Fire-Spitting Colt’, ‘but adopting the American custom of using professional hit men? How low can the Japanese gangster fall?’ (The honorable way to settle a dispute, as everyone knew, was to grab a sword, purify it by spitting sake on it, and face the enemy man to man, not sneak up on him with a gun from some dingy back stairwell.)
Such criticisms did absolutely no good, however. The New Breed was there to stay and arcane distinctions such as
tekiya
and
bakuto
were fading away; the word ‘yakuza’ was being applied to all gangsters, and the term
boryokudan
, which literally means ‘violence group’, was used for the gangs themselves.
A Tosei-kai captain named Matsubara was perhaps the quintessential Tokyo yakuza. A thickset, powerfully built man with a face that looked as though it had been hit by a truck, he invariably made his entrance wearing dark sunglasses, a fedora pulled down over his eyes, and a trench coat – one or more gun handles protruding from the pockets.
One night as the well-equipped TSK captain was ordering a drink at the bar, Zappetti asked, ‘Matsubara, how many guns you actually got on you?’
Matsubara pulled out four revolvers – two .32s and two .38s – and laid them on the counter one by one, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
These then were but a few of the diverse people who met nightly at the crossroads of East and West that was Nicola’s – people who would write some of the more colorful, and dramatic and darker, chapters of the city’s history.
UNDERGROUND EMPIRE
The underground economy denounced by Kades in 1947 was alive and growing, and many of its key players could be found at Nicola’s. Foremost among them was a squat, bristle-headed,humorless man named Yoshio
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