When Hishiyama took Saigo and two others to pay respects to Coach, Saigo noticed that the house had Western flooring, not tatami. In the living room, when Hishiyama and company put their hands on the ground and bowed to Coach, only Saigo kept his hands on his knees and did a consequently slightly shallow bow.

  Coach was offended by this. He did not address Saigo directly, but instead yelled at Hishiyama. Hishiyama apologized profusely.

  Saigo, who was still slightly befuddled due to his long time in prison, and nervous about meeting a senior yakuza, interrupted without thinking. There wasn’t a tatami mat there, and he had been told to put his hands on the tatami and then bow. “This isn’t tatami; it’s just a floor.”

  Coach slapped him with full force on the side of his head, knocking him sideways like a broken Japanese daruma doll. He ordered Hishiyama to educate “this kid” better. Saigo had spoken out of turn and had been rude.

  Saigo righted himself, and bowed deeply and correctly to Coach. Hishiyama apologized again, prostrating himself in front of Coach along with Saigo, again and again until they hastily left.

  Saigo thought to himself that Coach was an asshole and that Hishiyama had no spine.

  Things had changed since he’d been gone. That was only natural. He had a couple of new soldiers under him now. One who particularly interested him was Akira Mizoguchi. Mizoguchi had been kicked out of Japan’s most respected college, Tokyo University, in his third year, and was easily the most erudite guy in the group. His other nickname, Ikijibiki, meant “the living dictionary,” but Saigo never used that nickname when addressing him.

  Mizoguchi’s father was a very high-ranking boss in the Inagawa-kai — ranked much higher than Saigo. After deciding he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, Mizoguchi was placed under Saigo’s command in order to avoid favoritism.

  Saigo felt he owed his own parents a visit for all the support they had given him while he had been in jail. He went to their house on a Sunday night, had drinks with his father — something neither of them really did much — and blissfully passed out in the guest room.

  He woke up Monday morning, surprised to see his father still home at 10.00 am. As he was eating his breakfast of toast, eggs, and bacon while his dad picked at his warm rice and cold fish, Saigo looked at the time. It was now 11.00 am. His father should have been at work by now.

  As it turned out, Saigo’s arrest had triggered a series of events that resulted in his father being forced to retire from his job at the Bank of Japan. Saigo was stunned.

  The Bank of Japan used to do an annual investigation of its workers to make sure that no one was subject to conflicts of interest that could result in financial malfeasance. The initial hiring process weeded out most of the bad apples, but times changed, and so did people. The standard checks included making sure that none of the employees had borrowed excessive amounts of money from loan sharks, or even from the semi-legal consumer loan companies — which could legally charge as much as 29 percent interest.

  Marital problems, scandals, arrests — any of these things could get someone fired. Saigo’s father worked in the division that handled the printing of money, so the checks there were the tightest. The bank conducted its own investigations, even sending people to the employee’s neighborhood.

  Mr Saigo’s neighbors had shocking news for the investigators: Saigo’s son was a hot-rodder, and had been arrested for drug use. The internal-controls department called him in for a hearing, and asked him if the rumors were true. Mr Saigo, being a very honest man, answered in the affirmative. He told them his son used methamphetamines and was a member of the yakuza. He believed that when his son got out of jail, he would turn over a new leaf and be a better man.

  His supervisors hadn’t known at all about his son’s organized crime connections. They’d just wanted to know if it was true that his son was in prison. Mr Saigo’s explanatory answer only made matters worse.

  He was called into the office and told politely that he would normally be fired, because having a criminal in the family was grounds for dismissal. However, since he was so close to retirement, they would let him leave the company instead, if he did so immediately. In return, they promised him his full pension. He took the offer.

  Saigo felt terrible. It was one thing to take responsibility for his crimes and go to jail, but he hadn’t foreseen how this would affect his family.

  He felt guilty, so Saigo started looking for ways to employ his father.

  He called up one of his danbe, and asked him for a loan and to sell some of his land to Saigo. With an investment equivalent to $200,000, he set up a car-repair and painting service. They specialized in foreign cars. He gave the company to his father to run, along with his cousin Taro. His dad now had a job.

  Saigo had been a mechanic and car repairman for someone else before — but now it was him running the business (although the day-to-day management was entrusted to his father). It was a niche business. Saigo immediately let every yakuza know that he was running a new company that would take care of any damages to their much-prized automobiles at reasonable (for yakuza) prices.

  At the time, the yakuza were so flush with money, and so many of them had foreign cars that needed special care, that business boomed. During Japan’s economic bubble, money flowed. The bubble lasted from 1986 to 1991. Everyone had too much money, and the yakuza were making sure to get a piece of it. In many ways, they not only profited from the bubble, but helped create it. They would pay exorbitant amounts for repairing small defects in a car — a scratch on the body, scuffs on the hubcaps, a stain in the upholstery, a fleck of peeled paint. They wanted their cars looking brand new at all times.

  His dad had a job, and Saigo felt much better.

  Mr Saigo paid great attention to detail, and his politeness, demeanor, and sincerity made him well liked by customers. Dealers in foreign cars who didn’t want to work with angry yakuza started sending their clients to Saigo’s shop.

  Two or three months after being released from jail, Saigo met Hiroko. They were introduced to each other through a non-yakuza friend they had in common. She was three years older than him, and, unfortunately, due to the norms of Japanese society, her age would have most likely kept her from finding a husband. Saigo had promised his first wife he wouldn’t remarry, even though there wasn’t really any logic to the promise. Still, he had given his word, so he wouldn’t remarry. At the same time, he felt lonely. She understood his circumstances, and they decided to date anyway.

  She was good-natured, always smiling, motherly, and patient. She was able to put up with Saigo’s bad temper and yakuza life. They soon moved in together.

  Unfortunately, Saigo didn’t have much time for her or his family. He was busy getting back to work. A few months after turning over the car-painting business to his father, Saigo went to visit him. When his father answered the door, he was wearing a worn-out suit, looking haggard and unhappy. His mother was silent as well.

  Saigo sat himself down in front of the low-set table called a kotatsu they had in the front room, and caught up with his father. Saigo smoked a cigarette and asked his father why he hadn’t bought a new suit yet.

  His father responded that he didn’t have the money. Saigo was puzzled. His father was supposedly making 400,000 yen a month. That was a lot of money.

  “Your cousin hasn’t been paying me,” Mr Saigo said. “So I don’t have any money.”

  Saigo was furious. His cousin Taro had joined the Saigo-gumi right before Saigo went to prison, and had taken to the gangster life like a fish to water. The problem was that he wanted to look the part in every way, and was willing to dip into the company’s coffers to fund the transformation. He bought a Lincoln Continental, fancy suits, and a gold-plated Rolex. He did all this with the money that he was supposed to be putting into the business.

  His father knew that Saigo would probably be angry about this, and thus had refrained from saying anything earlier. Saigo once joked that if his father was ever shot, the first thing he would do, if he even went to the hospital, would be to apologize to the nurses for getting blood on the floor.

  Saigo immediately fired his cousin from the gang and from the company. His father continued to run the auto-repair and painting business, and he began doing Saigo’s books as well. The organization grew to such a size that Saigo couldn’t remember everyone’s names anymore. He thought about making flashcards, but never got around to it; so, when his father did the books, Saigo began to assign numbers to the individual soldiers by the order in which they joined: Soldier 1, Soldier 2, and so on. This helped Saigo immensely. Numbers were easier for him to remember than names. If you’re going to run an organized crime group, it helps to have someone who is a good organizer, and he was lucky his father was exactly that.

  Business did so well that Saigo got an unexpected visit at his office from Kinbara. Kinbara came with only his driver and his bodyguard. It was a surprisingly cordial visit. Kinbara had come to remind Saigo that he still owed him about $60,000 — money that Saigo had borrowed to spend time in Japan’s seedy sex parlors — and now that Saigo’s business was doing well, wasn’t it about time to pay him back?

  Saigo asked for a little more time. The company was just starting, and $60,000 was a lot of money. Kinbara agreed to wait.

  Since Saigo grew up in Machida and knew many of the residents, he asked for local support, and the local merchants welcomed him back. He was able to get his yakuza business back on track pretty quickly as a result. It also helped that, while Saigo was in prison, Yamada had done an excellent job of managing the business and maintaining good relations with the local people. He had really kept the revenue flowing. His network of old friends helped, too. His shatei (younger brothers) from the local motorcycle gang became his emissaries — sort of like salespeople.

  The town still had a problem with youth gangs and street crime. Saigo wouldn’t work for free, but he could guarantee that people wouldn’t be mugged, and that customers visiting the seedier parts of the city wouldn’t be accosted or harassed by blackmailers, conniving journalists, private detectives, or streetwalkers.

  If there was graffiti on the walls, he’d find who did it and have his men teach them a lesson. If there was a bout of purse-snatching in an area, the purse-snatcher would be himself snatched off the street and have his legs broken. If there was a problem, he’d fix it, and his pro-active handling of problems made the area safer for everyone.

  Saigo also did smaller jobs, such as keeping the peace in the areas full of love hotels. Love hotels are for couples, illicit or legitimate, to get some privacy and have sex; that’s why the rent is usually charged in two-hour slots. Some have all-night services available. The love hotel owners were having problems with the street gangs. They had problems with unruly customers who’d leave without paying. They had problems with vagrants who would accost customers leaving and beg for money, or make vague threats if they weren’t paid off. The love hotel owners asked another local yakuza boss to put Saigo in charge of security, and then said they would pay him 20 million yen for the service.

  Part of the reason that cops couldn’t crack down on yakuza was that the cops had a policy of “no intervention in civilian affairs.” So if the yakuza were shaking down debtors, loan-sharking, or receiving “voluntary donations” — well, that wasn’t a problem. After all, the yakuza were still passing themelves off as humanitarian organizations. The major yakuza organizations had solid political connections, and there was enough money to go around for everybody.

  During this time, the National Police Agency estimated that the income of all the yakuza in Japan from illegal and semi-legal activity was about 1.3 trillion yen.* However, many yakuza experts at the time felt they were grossly misrepresenting how much money the organizations were bringing in and their revenue streams. For one, the amount of revenue credited as coming from the sale of methamphetamines (34.8 percent) was exaggerated. The rest of the money came from gambling (17 percent), protection money (9 percent), debt collection and civil affairs (7 percent), and extortion from companies (3 percent). Legitimate operations accounted for 20 percent of the income, although 10 percent of those operations came from yakuza-run companies. And on top of that, the official numbers were seriously underestimating the financial power the yakuza held. A former National Police Agency bureaucrat suggested that the real income of the yakuza at the time was seven times the estimate put forth by the NPA, and that the amount of money coming from corporate coffers, willingly and unwillingly, was astronomical.

  [* They made this estimate once in the National Police Agency white paper in 1989. At the time, 1.3 trillion yen was equal to just over $10 billion. In today’s money (2022), adjusting for inflation, it would be around $23.6 billion. ]

  Saigo’s group was bringing cash to his office in bags.

  Things were going well for Saigo, and he finally had enough money to go to Kinbara’s office and pay him back.

  When Saigo and his crew arrived at Kinbara’s office, it created quite a commotion. Everyone assumed that Saigo had come to “o-rei mairi” (pay his respects) — which is yakuza slang for taking revenge. In the normal world, it means to formally come by and say thank you.

  Saigo walked up to Takeda, who was blocking the door, with his hand in his coat as though he was ready to reach for a gun, and nodded to him. Saigo held up both hands, and had one of his soldiers bring a small bag forward and show it to Takeda. It was full of 10,000-yen bills.

  “That’s what I owe your boss. I’d like to pay it back myself.”

  He walked into Kinbara’s office, where Kinbara was standing up behind his desk, glaring in Saigo’s direction. Saigo gently plopped the bag full of cash on the desk.

  “Go ahead, count it. There’s 6 million yen in there. I owed you money. I paid my dues, with some interest, and now we’re even.”

  Kinbara took the bag, took out the money, and counted it. He nodded. “Tell me something, Saigo-kun. Did you really blow all this money on getting blown?” Kinbara never knew what to make of that story. In his entire life, he had never met any yakuza who spent tens of millions of yen at soaplands. “Was it really so good?”

  “Well, yes, it was,’ Saigo told him.

  “You are so stupid.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tattoos hide fear

  There were a number of things that Saigo wanted to do now that he was a free man and back on his feet, and the first on his list was get a proper tattoo, like a real yakuza. Of course, he wanted to cover up his blue ass as well. It turned out that his time in prison was like going to a three-year exhibition of tattoo art. Everyone showered together, and he had a chance to see the best and worst of traditional tattoos — thousands. He was particularly enamored of the tattoos of two yakuza he met there, one from the Yamaguchi-gumi and one from his own clan. They had gotten their tattoos done in Numazu City in the Shizuoka prefecture. He decided he would follow in their footsteps, and asked one of them for an introduction to that tattoo master. Many famous tattoo artists only accepted new clients after proper introductions.

  Tattoos are as Japanese as sushi and samurai. The yakuza have their own word for tattoos: gaman — endurance. When done the traditional way, the tattoos are expensive, time-consuming, and painful.

  The Japanese take great pride in endurance. Gaman was the favorite word of Seijo Inagawa, the founder of the Inagawa-kai, and he didn’t mean tattoos. Bearing the unbearable, that was the mark of a man. Japanese men take great pride in their ability to endure suffering. It’s the culture in which seppuku, suicide by ritual disembowelment, was considered a noble way to die, provided that you did it right and showed no expression of discomfort or pain as you slowly and methodically cut open your stomach.

  There is even a word for the activities in which males compete to show who is tougher: gaman kurabe, literally “comparing endurance.” This is why drinking contests in Japan among university students can turn deadly, and sometimes do — no one wants to give up and show he or she is the weaker. Jokingly, some yakuza refer to comparing their tattoos to those of other yakuza as gaman kurabe, but they are well aware that it is a pun of sorts.

  The tattoos also illustrate what are considered the other great virtues in the Japanese underworld: loyalty, patience, commitment, and persistence. A full-body tattoo can take up to 500 hours to be completed, and the yakuza receiving the tattoo is expected to stay with the same tattoo artisan until the end of the process. Of course, the process never really ends. There is always some coloring to be added, some shading to be done, outlines to be defined — and as the tattoos fade slightly with time, some retouching. The level of commitment the tattoos show to the organization can be easily gauged; if you have the name and crest of your gang tattooed into your skin, it makes switching allegiances next to impossible.

  There is one other meaning attached to the tattoos that some yakuza don’t even consciously recognize: they are symbols of wealth. A full-body tattoo, or even one that simply covers the upper body, can cost thousands of dollars — it’s the equivalent of turning your skin into an ostentatious solid-gold Rolex. The yakuza brandishing the elaborate tapestry on his upper body is also telling those around him that he has money to burn.

  Japan has a long history of tattooing; it has over the course of the centuries been for decoration, for punishment, for ritual, and also to show membership of tight-knit social groups. Tattoos have never been and will never be solely the province of the yakuza — although for many Japanese, and Westerners as well, Japanese traditional tattoos and the yakuza are inextricably linked.

  The Chinese historical record San-Kuo Chih (Account of Three Kingdoms), compiled sometime before 300 AD, notes that the denizens of the Kingdom of Wa (Japan) were sometimes tattooed to show their social rank. The Kojiki (Record of Ancient Manners), put together circa 700 AD, and one of Japan’s oldest written works, hints that tattoos in Japan served ritualistic or magical purposes. The Kojiki also contains the first recorded account of a striptease in the land of the rising sun. There is no mention of whether the goddess performing the striptease was tattooed.