Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  One employee—in his early thirties, short-cropped hair dyed neoblond, wearing a cheap gray suit and sneakers—was cleaning up the place, packing boxes, a little forlorn. I introduced myself as a reporter for the Yomiuri Shinbun and asked if he’d be willing to answer a few questions. He looked at me, annoyed, and then picked up a box of desk supplies and shoved it into my chest. “If you want to talk, help me move this crap downstairs,” he said. How could I refuse?

  As we were stacking up the boxes (the police seemed to have taken everything newsworthy), I asked, “Didn’t you realize you were working for the yakuza?”

  He shrugged. “As far as I could tell, it was just a real estate agency. I answered an ad in one of those job recruitment magazines. How the hell was I supposed to know? I never saw anybody with missing fingers or whole-body tattoos.”

  “Have you always worked at this shop?”

  “No, I worked at one of the SK loan shops. It seemed all right to me.”

  “Didn’t you think the rates were high?”

  “I just dealt with the customers, didn’t do any deals. Yeah, maybe the rates were high, but I never thought it was so odd. I used to work at Aiful, which is supposed to be legit. You think Aiful charged legal rates? We charged what we could get away with. It’s always a bad deal for the borrower. As far as I was concerned, this was the same business, just a different company.”

  “So you had no idea either SK company was a yakuza front company? And you didn’t know your consumer loan company was really a loan shark operation?”

  “You say ‘consumer loan’ and ‘loan shark’ like they’re two different things.”

  “They’re not?”

  “A guy comes in for a onetime loan, and we charge him an incredible interest rate, and for the next few months or years he keeps paying back that loan. By the time it’s done, he’s paid maybe five, ten times the principal. This isn’t a nice job, but it’s a job. And you should look at the Yomiuri. It’s full of ads for Aiful, Promise, Takefuji, and every consumer loan company under the sun. You guys support the loan-sharking industry.”

  “But you never knew?”

  “I knew after a while. Everybody did. But it was too late. You’re in, the money is good. You just worry what the hell is going to happen to you if you leave. If they let you leave.”

  “What about the illegal activity? Didn’t you worry about getting arrested?”

  “Yeah, but they told us it’s only a fine and they’ll pay for it. They’ll pay for the lawyer. They’ll take care of us. I believed them. And yeah, the money was good. The bosses would do crazy things that kept the morale up. Last April, they rented Tokyo Dome and had a private baseball game. We had Tokyo Dome all to ourselves. It was great.”

  That was exactly what the Yomiuri had done during my first year as a reporter. I didn’t mention that, of course. The Yomiuri had done it to give the reporters across the country a sense of unity, maybe foster loyalty to the company. Kajiyama was thinking the same thing. He was no fool.

  And the employee was right. The Yomiuri and every other newspaper in Japan derived a lot of revenue from advertising from consumer loan companies.

  Our resident financial reporter, Mizoguchi, had to lobby for months to get permission for a feature series on the damage loan sharks inflict on Japanese society. It was a subject a little too close for comfort. And when it became apparent that many consumer loan companies were also charging illegal rates, it took a considerable amount of convincing to get that news out. In the end, though, as usually was the case at the Yomiuri, the news won out over corporate interests. The pivotal event was a triple suicide of a husband and wife and a sibling in Osaka in June 2003. They threw themselves in front of a train. The woman had left a note about how a loan she had taken out had snowballed into a debt that could never be repaid, how the collectors had threatened her, threatened her neighbors, destroyed her life, and how the police were unable to help.

  When three people are driven to commit suicide by debt collectors, people take notice. And it was criminals like Kajiyama who were behind those deaths. Sometimes, as a reporter, you forget the victim. You develop a kind of admiration for criminal genius and ruthless efficiency, and you forget that the criminal empire is built on human pain and suffering.

  Kajiyama was a franchising genius, and the loan-sharking operation he had put into place was elaborate and comprehensive. His desire to go after people with bad credit histories produced results. As he himself said, “The best people to loan money to are people already in debt. They’re so desperate that they will pay any interest rate you demand as long as they can have the cash right away. Once they borrow from us, they’ll never be able to pay it back. We own them.” He hired a computer geek he named Akiba-kun (after Akihabara, the electronics district in Tokyo) to create a database of the customers. Thus, every customer had a record of debt and payment, contact with the police or a lawyer, as well as detailed personal information, including supervisors, family members, even mistresses.

  When it became apparent that a customer was growing desperate, Kajiyama would have another shop approach him with the offer of a loan—usually at an even higher interest rate. In other words, Kajiyama would prey on the same borrower many times in different ways. He had been careful to avoid attracting the attention of the authorities, but the operation had become too big not to be noticed.

  When the police began raiding the corporate centers of Kajiyama’s operations in 2003, they found rows of computer terminals in the offices. Kajiyama was years ahead of them in IT infrastructure.

  With the money Kajiyama had kicked back to the Goryo-kai in Shizuoka, they had built a three-story headquarters. The name was chiseled into stone, then filled with gold. Other funds greased the palms of Japanese politicians. The Emperor contributed more than 4 million yen (about $40,000) to the former LDP politician and bigwig Kamei Shizuka over several years. And that was only the money that was on the books.

  By October 23, 2004, the TMPD had evidence to link Kajiyama’s operations to the Yamaguchi-gumi and could justify a raid on the Yamaguchi-gumi head office in Kobe. But once again everyone—cop, criminal, and journalist—knew the day before that the raid was going to happen. The Yamaguchi-gumi had even sent a formal inquiry to the police asking for the date and time of the raid, so it could be prepared. Given the reputation of the Hyogo Prefecture Police, however, it was probably the other way around. I myself had been talking to some yakuza and ex-yakuza in anticipation of the event. But during a night of socializing, the senior reporter from the Kyodo News Service just happened to mention to Chuckles that they were upping the ante and running a story about the raid before the raid took place.

  Suddenly, all the journalists were thrown into a panic. Chuckles gathered all the rival reporters together for a kind of journalistic bid rigging: everyone agreed to run the story so that no one was left holding the bag. Thus, the Yomiuri itself had a huge article announcing the impending raid in the morning edition on the day of the raid.

  The raid itself was over in twenty-five minutes. The cops wore bright red jackets that resembled happi coats, which lent the proceedings a festive touch. As they stormed in, the characteristic taunts and shouts of the yakuza could be heard a long way from the one-block fortress that was Fort Kobe, the Yamaguchi-gumi headquarters.

  “Twenty-five minutes? That’s not a raid—that’s a tea party,” sneered Harry Potter. “They probably spent the first ten minutes exchanging business cards. I bet the evidence was packaged and ready to go.”

  “They probably threw in a gun as a souvenir,” I added oh-so-cynically.

  “The boss is probably at this moment breaking it to one of the chinpira, ‘In order to let the police save face, you’re going to have to do a couple years in the slammer.’”

  In the evening, I finished up my magnum opus on another Yamaguchi-gumi loan-sharking business. This one involved video rental shops as the storefronts. The cop I talked with from OC Investigative Division 3 described t
he situation by comparing the Yamaguchi-gumi operation to a big box behemoth sneaking into a mom-and-pop shop neighborhood.

  My source at the Organized Crime Task Force added, “Up until now yakuza loan sharking was a petty crime, hard to prosecute, with a slap on the wrist for the perp. I’m ashamed to say it, but we couldn’t be bothered with it.” Which was probably why the Community Safety Bureau was running the offense.

  The article dispatched, I prepared to clear out of the office. I joked with Chuckles that if we didn’t leave right away, we’d probably get caught up rushing to the scene of a horrible crime. And indeed, an hour and a half later, while I was at home relaxing with my wife and daughter, the bureau chief called to say someone had been stabbed and killed in front of Mitaka station.

  Hyper mode kicked in: phone calls to the local cops, the local hospital, the local businesses, the local photographers. There was not a lot of cooperation, but we did manage to patch together an article.

  At two in the morning I headed out to Roppongi.

  I had set up a little information network of strippers, prostitutes, hostesses, touts, and street vendors. As a result, I knew who was dealing and who was supplying, and I also had an early-warning system in place that would inform me when there was to be a big raid on a club. Drug busts were news only if someone famous got caught, but you had to know about the bust in order to have something to work with.

  I met my favorite Chilean tout at the Propaganda bar; he’d said he had some info for me. Nami, a Thai stripper who had been married to a Japanese cab driver, brought us a round of drinks. Neither of them knew—nobody knew—that I was a reporter; they thought I was an insurance investigator. That seemed to cover a lot of ground and allay suspicions about probing questions.

  After getting drunk at Propaganda with little to show for it, I headed to Quest, a dance club, where the guy spinning the roulette wheel was dealing drugs under the table. (The Japanese owner of the club was knifed to death a few years later; nobody knows who did it.)

  At the steps in front of Quest, I lit a cigarette while fending off propositions from transsexual Colombian prostitutes who had flocked near the public toilet, making crow imitations. A blond girl in a party dress approached me, asking directions. I told her I was going to Shinjuku and offered her a lift. In the taxi, she told me her story: she was from Israel and was earning a living in Tokyo as a hostess and hating it. If only the Japanese clients knew how much those women despised them.

  It was four in the morning when I got to the little hostess bar in Kabukicho where I was going to meet my source. I wanted to know more about Kajiyama, and this guy would know. I called him Cyclops. (I suppose Mono-Brow would have been a more precise nickname. He had a round, flat face with bushy eyebrows fused together over his hawklike nose. Whatever his nickname, it was a pretty intimidating look.)

  I knew Cyclops from Saitama. He was Japanese of Korean ancestry (North Korean originally, with relatives in South Korea). He was also a member of the Yamaguchi-gumi with an encyclopedic knowledge of the underworld. He was an excellent source, but there was an evilness to him. I trusted his intel but never his motivations. He also had a serious speed habit, and he exhibited the erratic behavior, the extreme emotions, and the paranoia that methamphetamine addicts are known to have. He was also extremely violent when provoked.

  I knew Cyclops through his father, who had invested heavily in a Korean-run credit union/bank that eventually had to be bailed out by the Japanese government. The reason for the bank going under, according to a different yakuza source, was corporate malfeasance and bad loans to the Inagawa-kai crime group. Along with two other reporters, I pursued the story for almost a year before finally getting something into print. Our investigative reporting had the gratifying result of spurring the Saitama police into arresting the people responsible for the bank failure.

  No investor got his money back, but the Korean community was happy to see justice done. In the time I spent working on the story, I had become friendly with many of them. I felt a certain affinity for those guys. It was like finding another Jew at Rockbridge Elementary School. And that was when Cyclops’s father introduced me to his son.

  Cyclops was persistent; he kept pestering me about when the article would appear. It was not easy to get something about the bank failure in the paper—partly because the repercussions of writing about a failed financial institution are huge, partly because no one really cared about what was considered (erroneously) a Korean problem, and partly because a religious organization involved with the bad loans was exerting pressure to keep everything quiet. And, oh yes, also partly because a prominent politician had his fingers in the pudding. I was able to get the story into print after managing to get a copy of the Saitama prefectural government’s internal review of the bank. It was scathing.

  I had promised Cyclops and his father that I wouldn’t stop until the story was published, and as far as Cyclops was concerned, I kept my promise. I didn’t know much about the Yamaguchi-gumi at the time; its presence in the eastern part of Japan was neglible, so I didn’t feel a need to know more. However, since Koreans tended to talk with one another laterally, regardless of which organized crime group they might be in, Cyclops was always good for a cross section of the gokudo world. He would talk freely of the gossip about the Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai; I’d never asked him about his own organization. I figured that this would be the time.

  It was hard to get Cyclops to come up to Tokyo; Saitama was his turf, and he felt safe there. But as arranged, there he was waiting for me, sitting on a velvet couch in a typical Kabukicho hostess club. There were a bar, a karaoke machine, a tacky chandelier, and sofas lined against the wall with marble tables spaced in front of them. On each table were a bottle of whiskey, ice in a crystal bucket, water in a crystal pitcher, and a couple of crystal glasses. In crystal bowls there were peanuts, slices of dried squid, and assorted other nibbles. One of the girls was dutifully preparing him a whiskey and water.

  Cyclops motioned for me to pull up a chair across from him. He had the girl mix me a drink (which I accepted with good manners), and we raised our glasses and said “Cheers” in Korean. That was all the Korean I knew, besides asking where the toilet was.

  “Jake-san, what would you like to know?”

  “You know the TMPD raided the Yamaguchi-gumi headquarters today.”

  “Everyone knew about it two weeks ago.”

  “I knew only one week ago. What I want to know is, where the hell is all the money Kajiyama made?”

  “Hmm … Why do you want to know?”

  “Because there’s a good story in it.”

  “And if you write the story, what changes?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “It’s my job. I find information that nobody else has, and I serve the public’s right to know.”

  “They have a right to know where Kajiyama stashed his money?”

  “The victims do.”

  “Victims. Interesting choice of words. Did anyone put a gun to their head and tell them to go borrow money at interest rates they couldn’t repay? Or borrow money for things they couldn’t afford? Did anyone do that?”

  “No, but these are people who didn’t know what they were getting into and who were lied to when they signed the contract. Wouldn’t that make them victims?”

  “Your Japanese sucks. The word isn’t victim—it’s sucker.”

  “And the people who invested in Saitama Shogin were suckers too? They were greedy? They wanted too high a return? They should have invested in the stock market? Victims? Or suckers?”

  Cyclops didn’t say anything for a second. He was thinking it over. He wasn’t happy with the conclusion. He frowned. He bit his lip, and then he relaxed, patting himself down for his cigarettes.

  “You want the story. I’ll give you the story. It was in Las Vegas.”

  “Las Vegas?”

  “Kajiyama blew a couple million dollars at the MGM G
rand in Las Vegas. He lost it gambling, but maybe you can call that money laundering. He’s spent a lot of time in the United States. He puts the cash in a safe deposit box here and pulls it out when he goes over there. He has some overseas bank accounts too.”

  He lit up a Lark with a gold-plated Dunhill lighter, inhaled, exhaled. Those lighters were obviously an essential yakuza fashion accessory.

  “Do the cops know this?” I asked him.

  “Oh, I think so. They’ve probably seized the money by now or they’re going to do it pretty soon. Kajiyama’s a VIP at the Grand. A high roller at Caesars Palace too.”

  “How does a guy like Kajiyama end up as a VIP at the MGM Grand or Caesars Palace?”

  “Goto. Goto introduced him. Goto loves those places. He used to go to them a lot.”

  “Used to go?”

  “Ever since his liver transplant, Goto can’t get into the States. The word I heard was that he used a casino account to pay his hospital bill.”

  “Goto had a liver transplant in the United States? How the hell did that happen?”

  “I thought you were interested in Kajiyama?”

  “Yeah, but Goto, the Godfather of Japanese crime, getting a liver transplant in the United States. That’s wild. Where?”

  “Los Angeles. A university hospital. UCLA. Dumont.”

  “Dumont. UCLA—I got it.”

  “Yeah, well. Anyway, follow the Vegas angle. It should be good. Maybe you can get a free trip to Vegas out of it.”

  “Kajiyama is definitely in the organization, right?”

  “Do you see a letter of excommunication floating around? If you’re not kicked out of the organization, you’re still in the organization. That’s how it works. So he’s an albatross right now. Bringing down a lot of heat on the organization. Everyone knew this would happen. That’s why, two years ago, they started taking his name off the rosters. Nobody wants a paper trail.”