Tokyo Underworld

by Robert Whiting

  That was what Nick’s ‘all right’ had meant.

  ‘All right’ as in ‘All right! Now we can get those bastards.’

  Of course, Nick’s legal chief had an entirely different take on the conversation. He was increasingly of the opinion the case was unwinnable and that reaching such a harmonious conclusion would constitute a major feat of legal skill on his part. He believed he was doing his client a huge favor by convincing the other side to settle. However, since no one could read Nick’s mind and Nick was incapable of uttering much more than a few unintelligible grunts at a time, no one disputed the ‘agreement’. And thus while Nick was still bedridden, his fourth wife used his company seal to approve the contracts and the money was paid.

  Much to everyone’s surprise, Nick began to recover. And when he was well enough to realize what had really happened, instead of being grateful as his lawyer had anticipated, he was livid – or as livid as his delicate medical condition allowed him to be. He accused his lawyers of selling him out, of striking a quick deal to get their money before he bit the dust. He had had a chance for victory, he rasped, but the goddamn lawyers had snatched it from him.

  The matter of legal fees was the breaking point. Nick had been given a bill of 15 million yen by his legal chief, which he interpreted as payment for his entire team of four lawyers. This was on top of a retainer of five million yen a year he had already been paying them all in toto. (That was the system in Japan. One paid retainers. Then one paid legal fees, which were decided after a settlement was reached.) But the chief counsel said no – the 15 million applied only to him. There would be more invoices coming from the desks of the others and that was between them and Zappetti.

  The subsequent bills were perhaps not unreasonable in the Japanese context, but Nick was in no mood to listen. He refused to pay a single yen more. His legal chief took him to arbitration, while the other attorneys flat out sued him – three separate suits, one after the other, for several million yen. For a lawyer to unilaterally sue his client was almost unheard of in Japan. But Nicola Koizumi had managed to make it happen. Three times. He could have written a manual on ways to get into trouble.

  Nick’s health eventually improved to the point where he was able to leave the hospital, but he was not exactly in peak condition for courtroom warfare. He had a hacking cough. He needed to use a cane to walk because one of his legs had atrophied, and he was popping glycerine pills like candy to control what was literally only half a pulse. His doctor had told him that if he ever really lost control of his temper, he ran the risk of blowing out what remained of his heart. His blood pressure would rise, his heart would expand, and – poof! Sayonara Nick-san.

  He had also managed to lose most of the vision in his left eye with the assistance of the staff at aging prewar Toranomon Hospital, the venerated caregiver to Tokyo’s diplomatic corps. A few months before his heart attack, doctors there had diagnosed him with diabetes; they informed him he had ‘blood on his eyeballs’, that the capillaries around the edge of each eye had become brittle from high sugar content, and that he would need laser treatments to cauterize the veins. Under doctor’s orders, he began making regular visits to the Toranomon laser room – from which he would stagger each time, seeing blurred spots of red, yellow, and blue for the rest of the day.

  During one session, a junior technician had unwittingly trained the laser beam directly on the retina of Nick’s left eye. The slip created an instant blind spot – a missing center of vision in the orb. After that fateful afternoon, if Nick looked at someone’s face with his right eye closed, the person’s nose was blocked out – like the genitalia in a censored pornographic movie – and the area around it fringed with colored polka dots.

  The vision in his right eye had also deteriorated. In optical tests, he could barely make out the top line of the chart. To read a newspaper, he needed a magnifying glass. He was forced to wear an audio watch – one with a computerized voice that announced the time – because he was unable to read a conventional timepiece. Driving a car was totally out of the question.

  When the expurgated vision in his left eye failed to improve, he complained to the doctor, who conducted an internal investigation and reported back, huffily, that his staff had done nothing wrong. It was the patient who had moved his retina into the path of the beam, not vice versa. The hospital was, therefore, not responsible.

  How things had changed, Nick thought. In the old days, back when he was The King, the hospital would have come up with a new eye for him. But not anymore. Now, it was Fuck you, gaijin. He toyed with the idea of suing the hospital, but he was running out of energy. He did not think he could handle any more law suits, especially one he probably wouldn’t win. In fact, he had growing doubts about his ability to withstand his present legal calendar, busy as it had once again become.

  ‘I’m coasting on the gasoline fumes in the tank,’ he would croak. ‘I can’t get it up anymore. It’s just a question of time until I keel over.’

  But then he appeared before the judge in 1990 to hear the formal reading of the first complaint against him – ‘Failure to pay ex-lawyer 15 million yen for settling the case, as agreed’ – and he felt a reawakening of resolve. ‘Settling the case?!’ The dirty son of a bitch had some nerve. His heart began to beat faster as he sat there. He could feel the expansion. He clenched his fists, took a few deep breaths, and swallowed a glycerine pill.

  The newly hired Japanese counsel, a young attorney not long out of law school, scribbled him a note in English which urged him to keep his calm, to answer all questions posed to him rationally, and to avoid making his usual remarks like, ‘I was blackmailed,’ or ‘My money was hijacked.’

  Nick read it twice, then popped another glycerine pill.

  All right, he would keep his cool, if that’s what it took. And to start things off, he would also scare the piss out of the cutthroat sons of bitches – that very day. He would teach the Japanese legal profession what it meant to mess with Nick Zappetti. At eight o’clock in the evening, he took a cab to his erstwhile attorney’s downtown office. He limped down the dimly lit and deserted marble hallway, stopped at the glass door that bore the name of his legal firm in black stenciled letters. He turned the knob and slowly opened the door. The outer office was in shadows, but he could see lights and hear voices coming from an inner conference room. He rang the bell and in short order one of the men appeared. Nick smiled at him, malevolently, through the gloom.

  ‘How do you like the way I come here and visit you? Eh?’ he said, tapping his cane on the floor. ‘One of these days somebody is going to come here like this and kill you – before you know what’s happening. So from now on you better lock your door and be careful how you open it – especially at night.’

  He was pleased to see the man cringe and take a step back.

  It seemed to him he had lost everything to the Japanese. Once he had had nine different restaurants. Now all he had was the Roppongi Crossing branch, where he spent his afternoons and evenings commiserating with fellow expatriates. His wife now operated three Nicola’s. Her sister ran one more. And the rest of the Nicola empire, including the old flagship building in Gazembocho and several other small-sized restaurants around town, belonged to his one-time Japanese partner, Nihon Kotsu. Their menus were even inscribed with ‘Nicola’s, since 1956’.

  Oh, the slings and arrows.

  He calculated that had he been able to keep everything – all his restaurants, all his land, all his buildings – he would have been worth a billion dollars, bare minimum. That, as he liked to note, was the equivalent of the entire budget of the United Nations. The value of all the property he had lost in Roppongi alone came to nearly $500 million in 1990 prices. Add to that an annual gross of several million dollars over thirty-five years in service revenue and accounts receivable and he’d be in Ross Perot territory.

  Now, however, someone else was the beneficiary of his labors. He had less than $1 million in the bank and only two houses – a new
four-bedroom 10,000-square-meter place he had bought with the Nihon Kotsu settlement, and a $700,000 home in Hawaii. In Nick’s view of the world, he was nearly poverty stricken.

  What was happening to him after some forty-five years in Japan was not unlike what was happening to the United States in its relations with Japan.

  RIO BRAVO

  Now that the Japanese possessed half the world’s money, they were spending it on buying up America, reeling in many high-profile American properties: the Rockefeller Center, Columbia Pictures, Universal-MCA, Pebble Beach, and the Riviera Club, among others. Even ordinary office girls found themselves able to buy condominiums in Hawaii and New York. Japanese tourism to the United States had also exploded with millions of travelers annually invading the West Coast or New York City, where they stayed in Japanese-owned hotels, ate at Japanese restaurants, rode on Japanese-owned buses, and bought their souvenirs in Japanese-run trinket shops (many, incidentally, run by yakuza groups). Hawaii was jokingly referred to in some circles as Japan’s forty-eighth prefecture; California as her forty-ninth. Fifth Avenue was starting to look like the Ginza.

  America’s reduced status in Japanese eyes was beginning to be reflected in the eyes of Japan’s leaders. ‘Lazy and illiterate’ was what the speaker of the Japanese parliament had only recently termed the Americans, while Nakasone had termed their intelligence level ‘low’. (Even Nick’s own son had joined the enemy camp, so to speak. ‘Who’s Nicola?’ he once said dismissively, referring to the Roppongi operation. ‘Who knows you now?’)

  As American complaints about ‘unfair trade’ escalated, accordingly, the intensity of emotion surrounding matters of international commerce between Japan and America was ratcheted up to all-time highs. In 1989, for example, a famous article on trade in the Bungei Shunju bore the indignant title ‘Warui No Wa America!’ (‘It’s America That’s Bad!’). A year later Dietman Shintaro Ishihara’s saber-rattling polemic, The Japan That Can Say No, urging that Japan stand up to the United States, sold a million copies, as did two sequels in the early 1990s. A noted Japanese psychiatrist, summing up the national mood, likened America to a bullying corporate executive driven by some inner psychotic need to intimidate his subordinates and declared that America, as a whole, was suffering from a disease called obsessive neuropathy.

  America, which had once relegated the subject of Japan to the back pages, now was experiencing its own brand of paranoia, a prime example being the best-selling 1992 novel Rising Sun,in which Japanese characters in pursuit of American technology were unflatteringly portrayed, including one who liked to slice up women with a sword during sex. (Said a perplexed Bungei Shunju editor after reading Sun, ‘In my whole life as a Japanese, I’ve never met anyone resembling the people portrayed in that book. I must be missing something.’) There was also the Japan expert who warned that Americans were all doomed to be enlisted men in the Japanese Imperial Corporate Army if something wasn’t done soon.

  The marriage of Nick and Yae Koizumi was symbolic of the US–Japan relationship – two countries bound by a treaty and divided by a vast cultural gulf. They were a distinguished-looking couple when greeting guests at the entrance to the Roppongi restaurant – she elegantly dressed and bejeweled, he sporting a thick white mustache and dapper blue serge suit and cane of polished oak; they could have been hosting a diplomatic reception. When sitting together in a back corner of the room, however, they were often engaged in heated argument.

  They fought about everything from household medicine to the auto industry. If he had a headache, he would take Tylenol brought from Hawaii, a brand-name pharmaceutical, she might note, that was not approved by the Japanese government. If she had a headache, she would put magnetic patches on her temple – something he referred to as a ‘quack’ cure. If the subject was which new car to buy, he would lobby for a Cadillac Seville, in his opinion, the best car in the world, while she might argue for a Japanese or European model; after all, the word around town was American cars were so poorly made you might cut your finger opening the hood. She was inclined to agree with the Mitsubishi executive who opined that America ought to give up making cars because they just weren’t capable of doing it well.

  More often than not the bone of contention was the management of Nicola’s empire, the major portion of which his wife now controlled – much to Nick’s unending vexation. In fact, the only restaurant over which Nick exercised complete authority was the only Nicola’s in existence losing money, a state of affairs that galled him even more and one that his wife did not fail to remind him of periodically. All the restaurants Yae’s company owned and operated were raking in yen, as were the Nihon Kotsu-owned branches. But the Roppongi Crossing branch – his baby – was in steep financial decline. Except for Friday night, when the expatriate community came out in force, business was mortifyingly behind the curve.

  Modern Roppongi and its environs now offered too many other more fashionable spots. The ballplayers, the mobsters and the politicians still came around. The slick-haired future prime minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto, then biding his time as a cabinet minister, came in. Hollywood actor Tom Selleck, filming Mr Baseball, also graced his portals. But younger Japanese preferred the trendier places like Ristorante Sabatini, on the top floor of the nearby Ibis Hotel, with its house wines and canzone singers straight from Rome or the deluxe Le Patio in the ANA Hotel featuring an Italian chef who also sang opera. The new glossy Il Forno with its original menu of California Italian cuisine was turning people away at the door.

  Without red brick walls, medallioned waiters, and wandering minstrels to attract diners, Nicola’s was starting to look old-fashioned. Unlike Nihon Kotsu, Nick did not have a fleet of 4,000 taxi drivers to turn to as potential ‘voluntary’ diners when business was slow.

  He had tried a number of tactics to reverse his moribund business – sponsoring a late-night television show aimed at younger viewers, installing a large new neon sign in his third-floor window, and erecting a life-size poster of himself at the front door – standing there, pizza in hand, next to a beaming nubile model, looking like some jolly old bald-headed Santa Claus. He also invested millions of yen in a large flat-paneled TV screen system so his customers could watch sumo wrestling and pro baseball games. But nothing happened.

  In 1990, Nicola’s Roppongi lost over $700,000, the fifth year in a row Nick was in the red. By contrast, his wife had shown a profit of over $1 million in the Yokota operation alone, which she was running all by herself, and where the clientele was now 98 percent Japanese. It pained him greatly to admit it, but she was now worth far more than he. In fact, she had become one of the wealthiest women in Japan. Her Yokota interests amounted to $30 million, her Roppongi property worth nearly as much. She possessed five or six luxury golf club memberships, one of them valued at more than $500,000 and a million-dollar jewelry collection.

  His wife told him that his present sorry state had come about because he failed to keep up with changing Japanese tastes. With Pizza Hut down the street, Domino’s starting the home delivery market, and Shakey’s operating branches all over town (serving eggplant and mushroom pizza made especially for the Japanese), he needed something different to compete.

  You had to Japanize the product, his wife said, reciting the Japanese trade mantra. Nicola’s anchovy dressing was too strong for the Japanese palate. So was his sausage spice. Didn’t he know that Nihon Kotsu now served pizza with soy sauce? It was time that Nick started paying attention.

  She herself had a tie-in with Tokyu, a major department store chain, for whom she supplied year-end holiday pizza with colorful pineapple and cherry toppings, as befitting the season. Nick said he had never seen anything so grotesque, but the department store people had been ecstatic and sales were terrific.

  It was also an absolute must, she kept saying, to give o-chugen and o-seibo, summer and winter gifts, to business associates. She always did it. It was how she maintained and serviced business relationships in Japan and one reason why she kept ge
tting repeat department store orders. It was something that Nick had always stubbornly refused to grasp. But he could not continue to dismiss such important customs as bribes if he wanted to revitalize his business.

  Nick listened as much as he could, then told her to shut up and mind her own business.

  He was the one who had started Nicola’s. He had taught her everything she knew. Who was she to tell him how to do things?

  She replied that there was a limit to how Westernized Japan could become. The Japanese had accepted a massive infusion of bread and milk into their diets and adopted other radical changes into their daily lives in the wake of the Occupation. Would Americans ever tolerate a similar shift? Would they commit to a regimen of raw fish and rice every day? Would they start wearing kimonos instead of suits? The Japanese were flexible – a lot more so than the Americans, in her opinion. But there were limits, and it was time he learned that.

  At the very least, she said, do something about the lighting and the music. Most Japanese people liked their restaurants brightly lit. They didn’t feel right eating in darkened rooms. They wanted to be able to see their food clearly as well as look at the faces of their dinner companions. And as for the music, it was much too soft. Japanese diners liked it louder. Everyone knew that.

  He refused, and thus was the battle of the lights and music engaged. Growing ever more assertive and determined to help him turn things around in spite of himself, Yae would arrive at the Roppongi Crossing branch and turn the light rheostats all the way up. At the very first opportunity, Nick would turn them back down again. In the course of a two-hour meal, patrons might experience several levels of illumination. This continued for some time until finally, in exasperation, Nick put cloth covers over each individual lightbulb.