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 Pistols crossed with Kiss (although they existed way before the Sex Pistols). Saigo was a member by 1974, when he was just thirteen years old. In the original line-up, he played guitar and did some vocals. His senior, Shinji Maruyama also did vocals and played the drums. Although thin, Maruyama was as tall as Saigo. He had an extremely flat face and a wide smile that seemed to go from ear to ear.

  Gaido took intense delight in pissing off the authorities. They wore deformed kimonos, put on make-up, and made liberal use of the Japanese flag. No one could tell whether they were right-wingers or left-wingers; everyone knew they were troublemakers.

  Machida is sometimes called the Detroit of Japan — a surprising number of great Japanese rock bands such as Luna Sea have emerged from its bleak urban landscape. It was an industrial town when Saigo was growing up, with little to do, few parks, and a general atmosphere of urban decay. While part of Tokyo, it was a strangely lawless place. The term “urban jungle” wouldn’t be simply a cliché, but a judicious description. The town was full of bars, brothels, and live-music venues. That was entertainment in the town: getting drunk, getting fucked, and/or listening to rock.

  Today, Machida has two nicknames. The first is Nishi Kabukicho, which refers to its network of sleazy sex shops, love hotels, and massage parlors. The second is Machida Music City. However, being born in Machida alone was no guarantee of being a talented musician.

  Saigo wasn’t the best guitarist, and by the time the group made their first full-fledged live performance, he was relegated to the sidelines; he had roadie status. Gaido’s early performances are captured in a two-record set, “The Crazy Passionate Machida Police 1974 (Live).” The two-record set consists of the band playing at the Machida Gymnasium in February 1974, and then again at the Machida Town Festival in September 1974. They played on a temporarily constructed stage right next to the Machida Police Station. In between songs, the band — clad in white kimonos, jeans, and torn clothing — taunt the cops by asking, “Mr Policeman, are you having fun?” and the cops and locals are heard asking them to get off the stage and stop playing. The Gaido groupies can be heard rowdily cheering the band and telling everyone who complains to shut up. A grainy videotape of the performance made its way onto YouTube a few years ago. If you look closely, you can see Saigo, in a red dress shirt with hair permed to look like an Afro, happily dancing near the stage. He appears almost giddy with delight.

  The performance not only irritated the police, but because of the large numbers of motorcycle gang members attending, the media took notice. A portion of the performance was aired on national television, portraying Gaido as a corrupting influence on Japan’s rebel youth. It was the best advertising the group could have hoped for.

  Since Saigo had left school and was no longer a performer in the band, he had plenty of time on his hands and not much to do, so he bought a motorcycle. He rode it for a year, and then, as soon as he turned sixteen, he got a license and joined the local motorcycle gang, Mikaeri Bijin (Beautiful Girl Looking Back, BGLB). They were the two-wheeled kings of Machida City.

  And they were feared.

  During the 1960s, Japan was considered to be one of the world’s most conformist nations. Groups of juvenile delinquents or those who had fallen through the cracks of the rigid educational system started to gather to form large motorcycle gangs. The gangs became a popular haven for them because many kids wanted to be different and to stick out from the rest of society. At first, the gangs were called kaminari-zoku, meaning “the thunder tribes,” but that name didn’t last long. The Japanese media created the term bosozoku, which means “tribe that drives fast and violently” or “speed tribes,” as they came to be known in the west. They would go to places where there were a lot of people — Enoshima, Hakone, Shinjuku, Shibuya.

  Like many things in Japan, bosozoku started as a movement imitating American culture. In Japan’s rapid-growth period, the Hells Angels became infamous in Japan, and Japanese youth began to emulate them. Staying true to his heritage, Saigo patched his jacket with the Japanese flag, also called the Hinomaru, but added the American flag as well.

  There were several variations of speed tribes, and even motorcycle gangs with women riders as well.* They became well known for riding noisy customized motorcycles. A common trend was to cut a bike’s muffler down so it made an ear-splitting howl. Saigo didn’t agree with doing that. He thought that was a nuisance to the public.