Tokyo Underworld

by Robert Whiting

  A further irony of his situation was that he would spend nearly his entire adult life in Japan without any formal training in the language or in doing business there, yet still he would fare better in the Japanese marketplace than other supposedly ‘more qualified’ individuals, including senior corporate go-getters and Ivy League MBAs. His success was based on raw intelligence, sheer energy and an instinctive understanding of the way people really did business – not to mention a willingness to break the law.

  He would suffer his share of setbacks, including one of monumental proportions – a takeover that would go down in Roppongi history. What caused his problems, however, was less his disdain for domestic customs or his peculiarly American way of thinking that Japanese (along with everyone else) should strive to emulate the United States in all things, but rather other more universal flaws like greed, arrogance … and lust.

  He was married four times – thought to be a record in the annals of American-Japanese matrimony, and that would not prove helpful. Like thousands and thousands of other Western men who had been taken in perhaps by images of the submissive, docile female geisha doll as portrayed in movies like Sayonara and wed Japanese females, he found the reality of marital life not quite as advertised (as did, perhaps, the Japanese wives involved in such unions, who for their part had been equally deluded by the courtesy and gallantry American men showed during courtship, seeing in these foreign males liberation from the traditional bonds of female servitude that had been their lot).

  Zappetti had married his first wife because she spoke fluent English, and because she was a practicing Catholic (one of the very few Christians in the country).

  But there had been conflict almost from the beginning. His wife had been especially angered at the suggestion made by an Army officer, in one of several prenuptial interviews required by the US government, that her sole motivation for marrying an American was a desire to live in the United States and escape the poverty of Japan. Because of that, she decided she would never go there. And not once, in all the years that followed, did she ever set foot on US soil – not after both she and her husband had accumulated considerable wealth, not even after she had divorced him and reestablished her dental practice, which she had temporarily abandoned for the life of a housewife. She would travel all over the world, to Europe, to Southeast Asia, to Australia, but there was one country she steadfastly avoided. She would not even enter an American military club.

  Of course, more troubling for her was her husband’s view of matrimony, which allowed him to adopt the male Japanese custom of taking mistresses, which, in addition to his criminal tendencies, was what prompted her to file for divorce. In June 1957, she was awarded custody of their two children, along with the house in the suburbs and monthly support. It was an arrangement the children liked just fine because, they had let it be known, the fewer the people who knew about the foreign blood coursing through their veins the better. His eldest son, Vincent, fluent in both English and Japanese, had had his fill of being teased in school by his classmates. But then Zappetti discovered that his ex-wife had found herself a Japanese boyfriend and alarm bells went off. He was sure he knew what would happen if his wife married this man and had another child. A pure-blooded Japanese child in a house with two ‘half-breeds’ was, in his opinion, a certain recipe for disaster, for it was not difficult to guess where the next husband’s affections would lie. So he took the matter to the katei saiban (family court), where the presiding judge – a holdover from the earlier divorce proceedings named Kondo and a man who had become a regular customer at Nicola’s – awarded Zappetti custody.

  Zappetti’s next stab at domesticity came in December 1964, when he married his cash register girl – a petite, determined and ambitious young woman named Yae Koizumi, the orphaned daughter of an old family in rural Maebashi. He had hired her when he opened for business because she had spoken the best English of the half-dozen girls he had interviewed from the labor office and because she had had the most poise as well. Although romance had somehow blossomed amid all the carnal distractions of the city, Zappetti’s second marriage, to the surprise of absolutely no one who knew him, did little to change his lifestyle. He left his bride behind the register and continued his nightly sexual prowling, his lone concession to matrimony the renting of a room at Riki Apartments for his liaisons with assorted young women.

  Once a very agitated young lady came into the restaurant, approached the second Mrs Zappetti, and announced, ‘I’m pregnant and your husband is the one responsible.’

  ‘What are you talking to me for then,’ the new wife replied with studied indifference and the learned forbearance of many a Japanese woman. ‘I didn’t get you pregnant. He did. Take your problem to him.’

  To some observers, it seemed that Nick’s second wife viewed the marriage as more of a business opportunity than anything else. Their union produced no children and she devoted herself to running the restaurant and helping to oversee the empire of Nicola’s enterprises. If business was her main interest, however, her choice was understandable, given the strictures of the limited options available to women in the Japanese marketplace.

  Despite the prevailing (and generally overdrawn) picture of a Japanese female as a domestic slave, it was and is the wife who controls the family purse strings, who takes the husband’s entire monthly paycheck and doles out an allowance, and who runs domestic affairs to such an extent that the bank and other sales organizations solicit her for business, not the husband. In the workplace, however, there was still much discrimination, especially on a corporate level.

  Most women who had full-time jobs in respected corporations were expected to spend their days making tea and otherwise serving Japan’s corporate samurai – before resigning at a reasonably young age, so they could get down to the serious business of child rearing and running a household. The American term ‘career woman’, directly transliterated into Japanese, has only recently gained a purchase in the language.

  Despite the great reforms of the postwar era – two out of every three women in modern postwar Japan worked at least part-time – Japan did not have an equal opportunity law until 1986, and even then it had little in the way of teeth. (As the century drew to a close, less than 3 percent of all management positions were held by women.)

  Thus did many career-seeking Japanese females, looking for a place to demonstrate their capabilities, turn to foreign companies (not high on the list of desired places for Japanese male workers, whose pecking order started with the Ministry of Finance, MITI, the Bank of Japan, Mitsui and Mitsubishi). And thus did the second Mrs Zappetti use Nicola’s as an outlet for her own career energies (and, as it turned out, the job offered almost unlimited opportunities for advancement – in family court, if nowhere else.)

  Perhaps if Zappetti had somehow managed to stay married to Yae, his business affairs might have been far less tumultuous. But that would have been asking too much, especially after his encounter with a nineteen-year-old beauty pageant queen from Hokkaido.

  Her name was Miyoko, and Nick had met her one day in 1968, on his way to his Hokkaido ranch, where he was now busy setting up a mink farm. It had been a warm spring afternoon in 1968, he was strolling down one of Sapporo’s distinctive wide thoroughfares, and suddenly there she was, right beside him, one of the most devastatingly beautiful women he had ever seen. It was the summer of love, of long stringy hair and beads, of social protest and antiwar demonstrations, but Miyoko was a glamorous throwback to another era. In her tight black dress, thick makeup and permed hair, she looked like she belonged on a Toho Movie Studios calendar.

  Nick immediately said hello and Miyoko smiled in return. They walked together down the street, exchanging pleasantries, until they reached the train station, where she handed him her card, flashing him another smile, and went on her way. Several days later, after preliminary research in which he learned she had recently won a major Hokkaido beauty contest and still lived with her mother, he was sitting down with her
over lunch at the Sapporo Royal Hotel, the leading Western-style hotel in the city. Before she was even finished with her soup, he had proposed marriage.

  Nick had long been complaining to friends about wife number two, grumbling that she was more interested in the family business than in him. At age forty-five, he still cut an impressive figure. He was in reasonably good shape, always impeccably dressed, and had a smattering of gray in his short cropped hair that lent him a certain air of distinction. With his wealth, he viewed himself an ideal catch for any girl and had begun thinking that perhaps it was time yet again to make some changes.

  He told his new inamorata he was known as the King of Roppongi and that he was the richest gaijin in all of Japan. He owned seven or eight companies, he said, a slew of restaurants and houses all over the place. He had limos, yachts, sports cars. He couldn’t keep track of it all. He would share it with her, he said, if she would accompany him to a room he had booked and took what he called in Japanese the Ii Ojosan Tesuto (Nice Girl Test) – meaning the test to determine if she was still a virgin. He was Italian, he explained, and Italians only married virgins. It was a religious thing. Dating back centuries.

  The outrageousness of what he proposed gave him not the slightest pause. His demands were no different to his mind than someone like Aristotle Onassis or Howard Hughes or Prince Charles might make. To such people the normal rules didn’t apply. And he was in the same class, of that he was convinced.

  History does not record how the Ojosan exchange ended. However, on June 25, 1968, Zappetti formally divorced Yae in Tokyo Family Court – in the presence of his old friend Judge Kondo – and on July 16 he married Miyoko in Sapporo.

  The divorce settlement was a hint of things to come. The court awarded Yae the Yokota operation, along with one of Zappetti’s smaller houses and 50 million yen in cash. The settlement made Yae a very wealthy woman. And she would become even wealthier in the years to come, as Japan’s booming economy and real estate market added more zeros to the value of her land holdings – many, many, many more zeros. Given the going rate for the Fujisawa property, of which his first ex-wife was the proud owner, Nick imagined that he was now in a class all by himself where divorced gaijin men in Japan were concerned. Both his former wives were rich and getting richer by the day.

  At first, despite the high cost of his freedom, Zappetti had been overjoyed with his young prize, whom he bragged about to his round table of friends in Roppongi. He had set up housekeeping with her in a two-story wooden traditional Japanese-style house in Sapporo so that Miyoko could be near her mother, with Nick spending weekdays in Tokyo, and he was boundless in his munificence. He gave his bride 1,750,000 yen each month for daily expenses (enough cash to last an ordinary Japanese housewife two years) and lavished her with gifts – a new car, a mink coat, a sapphire ring. When she decided she wanted to wear nothing but white suits, in tribute to the all-female Takarazuka dancing revue of which she was a great fan, he bought her a complete new wardrobe: white pants, white shirts, white hats. When she said she wanted to open her own nightclub in Sapporo, he said, ‘Sure, no problem’, and went out to look for the best site. He took to calling her Cinderella, because that’s what she was: Shindorera. She had more going for her, he’d tell her, than any two dozen Sapporo girls combined.

  But, trouble was inevitable. Miyoko was outgoing, adventurous, even ‘flirtatious,’ as more than one acquaintance described her. And Nick was the jealous type – extremely jealous. Moreover, the fact that the unwelcome specter of middle age was making its presence known and preventing him from performing in a manner he would have liked only made things worse.

  When the reports started coming in from friends in Sapporo that she was seen in the company of other men, among them her fortune-teller, and a popular singer, and that she was whiling away some of her free time in the evening at ‘host clubs’, Nick went ballistic – although Miyoko denied doing anything wrong. To him, it was humiliating.

  Host clubs were the latest phenomenon in Japan’s profligate nightlife. They were institutions in which suavely groomed young men with impeccable manners and smooth conversational skills catered to mainly rich, bored middle-aged wives with absentee workaholic husbands. Male hosts served their customers drinks, danced with them, and, after closing hours, provided other services – if the tip was generous enough.

  That was how his wife, possibly the most beautiful girl in Japan, had been whiling away her free time. A great deal of her free time, if what his friends said was true. He simply could not understand it. She was such a good-looking girl and still she paid men to cater to her. What was the appeal?

  On impulse, he decided to go see for himself. With the name and address of one of Miyoko’s ‘boyfriends’ supplied by the manager of the Sapporo Royal, Nick made an unannounced visit to the man’s residence – a modest but typical box-sized Japanese apartment not all that different from the type of accommodation most nightclub hostesses lived in.

  The young man who opened the door was tall and thin with a wavy pompadour – good-looking, Nick had to admit, but in a creepy, pouty, narcissistic sort of way. Nick introduced himself and without hesitation asked the youth, who was in the process of putting on a tuxedo for the evening’s work, point-blank, whether he had slept with Miyoko.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied matter-of-factly, not in the least ruffled. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe?’ Nick repeated. ‘I ask you if you sleep with my wife and maybe is all you have to say?’

  The man shrugged.

  ‘I can’t keep track of everyone,’ he said, affixing his bow tie. ‘Women pay me. I flatter some. I make love to others. That’s that. It’s business. Not personal.’

  Nick had to admit he admired the man’s candor. And he was not immediately sure how to proceed from there. How could Nick blame the poor guy just for doing his job?

  In a way, he could even begin to understand his wife’s feelings. A woman needed companionship, and Nick wasn’t there much of the time. Even when he was … well.

  On the other hand, what if word got around about what was ‘maybe’ going on? The whole circumstance left him furious.

  Thus, he wound up and slugged the carefully coiffed young man, knocking him out cold.

  Eventually Nick moved Miyoko to Tokyo, where he could keep an eye on her.

  With his son Vince having left home, it would be the two of them and his daughter Patti, now in her early twenties, plus the maid and the butler. But Miyoko would be under virtual house arrest, unable to go anywhere without permission and without being transported there and back by Nick’s chauffeur, who also doubled as a watchdog. If she wanted a friend, then Patti would have to do.

  It didn’t take Miyoko long to violate the terms of her parole and, predictably, she moved back to Sapporo. In 1972, she filed for a divorce, and demanded 30 million yen in alimony.

  THE TAKEOVER

  Zappetti’s initial decision to marry Miyoko had caused him more trouble than he had ever imagined, for in addition to all the emotional turmoil that ensued, it almost led to his financial ruin and, in the process, taught him some painful new lessons about business in Japan.

  To begin with, after Nick had turned over to Yae the assets designated by the Family Court, the National Tax Office sent him a bill for the very large sum of 65 million yen – a tax on the transfer of property to Yae in the divorce settlement. When Nick protested that the transfer had not been a voluntary sale but rather one ordered by the court, the tax authorities replied that it made no difference under the law. Technically, as far as they were concerned, he had transferred property and received something in exchange for it – namely, his freedom – which in their estimation was taxable to the amount of 65 million yen – a sum they would be willing to reduce to 23 million yen if he paid it all immediately.

  The 23 million yen was not an enormous sum of money, but Nick was painfully embarrassed to admit he didn’t have the cash. He had lost over 200 million yen on a mink farm venture that ev
eryone he knew had advised him not to undertake. Determined to get some use out of the land and equipment he had gone to such lengths to acquire, he had decided to raise mink in his barn, build a fur factory that processed the fur skins into coats, and sell them in Japan, despite objections from those who believed that introducing a new brand in a country that was rapidly becoming status conscious, and without connections to department store managers who sold most of the fur coats in Japan to boot, was far too risky.

  Boasting that he was going to break the ‘the stranglehold the Norwegian Jews had on the world market’, Zappetti then proceeded to lose over a million dollars in record time. Japanese buyers, who were indeed rapidly becoming increasingly status conscious, wanted little to do with an unknown label regardless of how high the quality of his garments was. (When Zappetti, desperate to make a sale, cut his prices to a third of the going rate, buyers took it all as evidence that the quality of his coats had deteriorated and paid even less attention.)

  He had followed the mink farm fiasco with yet another calamity, importing frozen rabbit skins from France. In addition, he had made a number of sizable loans to people who could not afford to pay them back, and overextended himself in a couple of other investments. Suddenly he found himself leveraged all the way up to his newly receding hairline. His last big chunk of ready cash, 50 million yen, had gone straight into Yae’s account.

  He went to his regular banker, the Setagaya Trust Bank of Tokyo, for help, but officials there told him that the bank was prohibited from loaning money to anyone for the purposes of paying government taxes. However, they said that if he could manage to borrow the money elsewhere to pay for his tax bill, then the bank would be able to lend him the money to pay back that loan, which is when Nick made the fateful decision to go to the moneylenders, Tokyo’s infamous, usurious, and entirely legal storefront loan sharks, who charged 30 percent per annum and more.