Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  “Okinawa. Tokuda used his wartime connections to put together a gang of unemployed, repatriated soldiers. He commanded like a general, a samurai ruled by bushido. In the beginning, he was just one of many engaged in a free-for-all struggle to corner the black market and control the bars and clubs favored by GIs.”

  “To pimp prostitutes?” Jackie asked.

  The diplomat nodded. “The gurentai fought among themselves, as hoods do everywhere. Turf wars erupted, with gangsters trying to kill off rival bosses. In the yakuza, your boss is God. So a gang without a boss is weak and crippled in a fight. Whoever kills a rival boss takes over his gang and territory.”

  “Capone,” said Jackie.

  “That’s who they mimicked. Right down to the clothes they wore. The legend of Genjo Tokuda is this: A yakuza boss from another district aimed to take over the black market in Ginza. He asked Tokuda to meet him to settle the matter honorably and then pulled a gun he’d hidden under the negotiating table. He triggered a shot at Tokuda, but the gun jammed. Tokuda fled with his bodyguard, but they were pursued by men with swords who caught up to them on the street. The bodyguard was killed. Tokuda was injured. Though wounded in the shoulder, he grabbed one of the swords by its blade—”

  “Ouch!” Jackie winced.

  “And wrenched it from his pursuer’s hands. Swinging the sword, Tokuda counterattacked. He hacked the heads off three men, including the rival boss.”

  “Is that true?” Dane asked.

  “The incident wasn’t reported. But that was the start of Tokuda’s reputation for vengeance.”

  “The start?” said Jackie. “There’s more?”

  “Members of the rival gang ate the ashes of their boss and vowed to avenge his beheading. One night, Tokuda was drinking in one of his Ginza clubs when a would-be assassin walked up to his table, pulled out a pistol, and shot him near the heart. When he got out of the hospital, Tokuda had the Claw—his enforcer—hunt down the triggerman and the others who had botched the hit.”

  “The Claw?” said Dane.

  “Tokuda and his closest henchmen snuck the captives out to sea in a boat. Clad in spongy, air-filled life jackets so they could breathe, the doomed hoods were forced into open coffins on the deck. Slats were nailed across the tops to hold them down. Dividers were fitted around their necks to compartmentalize their heads. Then freshly mixed concrete was poured over their bodies. When it hardened, the gangsters’ faces stared up from concrete overcoats. With his bare hands, the Claw gouged out their eyes, and one by one, the blind men were dumped into the ocean. They sank—alive—to the bottom of the sea. The following day, the rest of the rival gang members received a jar full of eyes. They quickly swore allegiance to Tokuda.

  “After that,” Yamada said, “other gangs were loath to challenge him. He let it be known that no quarter would be given. All he claimed to want was a piece of the pie, and he offered blood brotherhood to rival bosses. Those who accepted sealed the deal with a traditional sakazuki ceremony at his home. The alliance was sworn over cups of sake, and a go-between declared the union complete. That done, Tokudo slowly seized control. Instead of a piece, he ate the whole pie.”

  “What about the police?” asked Dane.

  “The civil police were unarmed. Tokuda’s gang switched samurai swords for automatic firearms, and soon they became known as the Ginza police.”

  “And the Americans?”

  “From 1945 on, their obsession was Communism. Tokuda was a tool for their dirty work. The occupiers agreed to leave his gang alone if he would control the labor unions and crush any movement that might be a Communist initiative.”

  “Lucky Luciano reached a similar deal with the Allied invaders in Sicily during the Second World War,” said DeClercq. “The Allies kept their hands off his army of street criminals, and he offered them the services of the Mafia.”

  “Kickback deals with occupation officials guaranteed Tokuda freedom from prosecution for his black-market crimes and extortions. He got involved in everything: gambling, smuggling, loansharking, prostitution, pornography, gun-running, slavery, and drugs.”

  “Heroin?” said Dane.

  “Methamphetamines. As post-war Japan developed its competitive and frenetic pace, speed became the national drug of choice. The yakuza also bartered it for Western arms.”

  “Tokuda sounds ruthless. A nasty piece of work.”

  “He’s an organizational genius. Because of his wartime connections, he has a long-standing alliance with the right-wing political nationalists. That’s how he infiltrated the corporate world. In the bubble economy of the 1980s, he laundered his dirty money through stocks and real estate. Then he got millions more from the banks in bad debts.”

  “What’s his scam?”

  “Sokaiya. The word literally means ‘shareholders’ meetings men.’ Tokuda would buy up a small number of shares in a company, earning his sokaiya the right to attend shareholders’ meetings. They would gather information on, or create, damaging scandals about the company and its executives—secret mistresses, tax evasion, unsafe factory conditions, pollution, and such. They’d threaten to disclose those scandals at the shareholders’ meetings unless their demands were met. If the shakedown was rebuffed, the sokaiya would attend the meeting and raise hell, shouting down those who tried to speak and broadcasting the scandals for all to hear. In Japan, people fear embarrassment and shame more than physical threats. One or two shareholders’ meetings like that had all executives running scared. In the end, Tokuda got majority stock control of thousands of companies.”

  “And real estate?” said Dane.

  “For that, he used jiageya, ‘land turners.’ As land prices rose, these men blackmailed, threatened, or committed arson to force small businesses or residents off prime real estate. Then Tokuda developed his acquisitions with dirty money.”

  “What happened when the bubble burst?”

  “Nothing,” said Yamada. “Tokuda caused the recession, so he knew it was coming. He cashed in at the height of the false economy and bought overseas.”

  “Here?”

  “Everywhere. America, Europe, Asia.”

  “Then what?”

  “He retired and became a recluse. He lives on the top three floors of a skyscraper behind the building to which the national police followed Kazuya and Makoto Ochi.”

  “Doing what?”

  “He collects shogun antiques.”

  “Why’s he in Vancouver?” Jackie asked.

  “We don’t know. That’s why I’m here. Not once since the end of the Pacific War in 1945 has Genjo Tokuda left Japan. He’s always had a passport, but he’s never used it. So whatever brings him here now, you can be sure that you want to know.”

  “Sergeant, Corporal,” DeClercq said, “locate Tokuda, follow him, and see what he does.”

  “I can help,” Yamada said, “with a phone call. May I summon my sister from the car?”

  The woman who entered DeClercq’s office five minutes later was also in her sixties, but she was full Caucasian.

  “Hello,” she said, bowing as her way of introduction. “My name is Lynda West.”

  “My half-sister,” Yamada said, as if reading Jackie’s mind. “My mother was Japanese, my father an American GI with the occupation forces. He died before I was born. My mother named me after him.”

  “Don’t let Roger fool you. He’s reserved on the outside, but he’s not above a prank. We joke that we’re related, but we’re most likely not.”

  “We might be,” Yamada said. “Your dad was in Tokyo during the occupation.”

  “True,” said West. “And I’m Tokyo Rose.”

  “You could be tested,” said Jackie, a cop to the core.

  “Heavens, no!” exclaimed the woman. “Joshing is one thing. That would be another. I wouldn’t want to know if Dad cheated on Mom. And that would spoil the joke.”

  “You spoiled it,” Yamada said, “by outing me. That was my test to see how sharp these officers are.”

/>   “Sharp enough,” DeClercq replied, “to wonder why Ms. West has a GPS gadget in her hand.”

  “That’s for you,” the diplomat said as his “sister” handed the chief the global positioning system.

  “A gift from Japan?”

  “At Narita Airport, the national police fitted Tokuda’s luggage with a tracking device. While we’ve been talking, my personal assistant has followed it with this.”

  Barbed Wire

  To look at the woman sighing out her last shallow breaths in this crib of a deathbed, you’d never guess that she was once the adventurous nursing grad in the photo. The black-and-white headshot from 1941 had yellowed slightly with the passing of time. From back then, Viv Barrow beamed up at her daughter in the here and now, while Lyn Barrow stared down at the wartime nightingale.

  “Were you once that happy, Mom?” she asked.

  The dying nurse didn’t answer.

  Lyn returned the photo to its place on the bedside table. Snapped in Edmonton on the day of her graduation, the Viv in the picture wore a white uniform with a nurse’s cap pinned into her upswept forties’ hairstyle and a starched bib tucked into what was most likely an ankle-length skirt. The twenty-two-year-old RN’s complexion was as fresh as country cream; her dark eyes were full of the dreams that only people that age can believe in, and her smile was as bright as the sun on the prairies. Her arm was clutched around a bouquet of roses that had to be blood red.

  The hallway outside her hospital room was shushing down for the night. Soon it would be time for Lyn to leave, so she sat down beside the palliative-care bed and reached in through the bars to take Viv’s arthritic hand in her own.

  “Mom, it’s Lyn. Can you hear me?”

  No response from the bed.

  Over the past few months, it had all spilled out. Some of what Viv told Lyn had come in the form of conscious recollections—mostly stories related by the old woman as she flipped through her wartime photograph album—and some had escaped through subconscious babblings under the effect of drugs.

  “That’s me on the day I arrived in Vancouver,” Viv had once explained, a gnarled finger caressing a photo of her leaning against the shortest of the Stanley Park totem poles.

  “This too,” she added, sliding that finger across to a snapshot of the suspension bridge high over the Capilano River.

  “Where’s that?” Lyn asked, touching a cheesy photo of an old wishing well.

  “Near the suspension bridge. Did I never take you there?”

  “Not that I recall. What are you wishing for?”

  Viv was standing beside the well with her eyes closed, about to drop a coin from the palm of her hand.

  A pregnant pause.

  Then Viv answered.

  “Canadian troops were being mustered to go to Hong Kong. I wished to follow them as their nurse.”

  Instead, Viv had landed a job at the local hospital.

  “The first thing I did when I stepped off the train—after finding a room, of course—was phone my name into VGH for a fill-in job. I hadn’t slept for two days on the rails, but I was far too excited to rest. So off I went on a walking tour of Stanley Park and a swing across the Capilano suspension bridge. By the time I got back to my room, VGH had called me in.”

  “To work that night?” Lyn asked.

  “Uh-huh,” said Viv. “And what I hadn’t checked out was the local tram route. It was a two-mile walk to the hospital. I didn’t have enough money left for a cab. I didn’t know a soul in Vancouver. And no tram or bus connected my room to VGH.”

  “So who drove you?”

  Viv shook her jaundiced head. “Believe it or not, there was a time when the Depression, armament production, and gas rationing meant few people drove cars. I had no choice but to walk.”

  “In the dark?”

  “Yes. During the blackout. As yet, we weren’t at war with Japan, but there were rumors of Nazi U-boats prowling the West Coast. There was a fear that ships in the harbor would be attacked from the sea and sunk, so streetlamps were doused, windows were curtained, and my route to work was almost as black as ink.”

  “Scary.”

  “All I had was moonlight to guide me there, and the moon was but a sliver. Of course, I was dressed in my nurse’s whites. I must’ve looked like a ghost slipping through the night.”

  “Real scary.”

  “It was,” said Viv. “A wartime seaport. Sailors loose on the town. And some of them attacked women.”

  “Anything happen to you?”

  “Luckily, I was armed. My landlady loaned me a baseball bat and told me to follow the white line down the center of the road. If footsteps came toward me, she said, ‘Swing the bat like hell and knock his head out of the park.’”

  The black leather cover of Viv’s photo album was embossed with a golden sailing ship, its sails billowing in the wind. Stuck to the inside of the front cover was a time-worn shot of a little girl sitting in a farmyard of chickens, her mouth smeared with chocolate. On the first several pages were photos of beaux in the varied uniforms of the Second World War. Their eager faces made Lyn wonder how many survived.

  There was no picture of Lyn’s dad.

  The pages that followed the snapshots of Viv’s arrival in Vancouver were filled with photos that captured her first adventure on the golden ship of the album’s cover.

  Alert Bay was a Kwakiutl village on an isle just off the inland shore of Vancouver Island. It was home to a tribe of totem carvers, a place where the aboriginal potlatch once had spiritual grounding.

  Here was Viv tugging on a rope that sank into the sea off the deck of a coastal boat, the Columbia. Here was Viv among mythological monsters that had been carved up the trunks of towering cedar trees, the wings of thunderbirds spread as if about to embrace her. And here was Viv sitting sideways on a windowsill in St. George’s Hospital, sunning herself with her eyes shut as if lost in Shangri-La.

  “I got that job,” Viv had said dreamily on the day they started her morphine drip, “soon after I arrived in Vancouver. Back then, Alert Bay was the real thing. Just a few generations earlier, the Kwakiutls were still initiating cannibals into their Hamatsa cult.”

  “Sounds thrilling.”

  “It was. The chief’s son carved me bracelets.”

  “Why’d you leave, Mom?”

  “To transport a patient. This old Indian woman was brought to the hospital with mental problems. She thought Baxbakualanuxsiwae—the cannibal monster on the totem poles—was trying to eat her. The doctor at the hospital asked if I would escort her here, to Essondale, for a psych assessment. So that’s how we ended up in bunk beds in a cabin on the police boat.”

  “Was she dangerous?”

  “We didn’t think so. I thought she was just a lonely widow in dowdy clothes. She wore a great big hat festooned with all sorts of strange plants. She was a patient like any other to me, so I treated her as if we were sailing down the coast for a physical. That was my mistake.”

  “Why?”

  “I was young and inexperienced. So, foolishly, I let her choose the lower bunk.”

  “That’s bad?”

  “You can’t hear the squeaks. When a patient climbs out of the top bunk, squeaks from the bed springs wake you up. When she crawls out of the lower bunk, she’s silently on the floor.”

  “That presents a danger?”

  “It does if she slides an eight-inch hatpin out of her festooned hat, then looms over you with her arm raised, ready to plunge the weapon deep into your heart.”

  “You woke up!”

  “No, I slept right through. But I had left the door ajar for fresh air. One of the cops onboard had come down to use the head. He peeked in, saw that I was about to get stabbed, and dashed in to grab the woman’s hand before it plunged.”

  “Wow! Another second and there’d have been no more you.”

  “And no you,” said Viv.

  The photos from Alert Bay were the last shots in the book. When she docked in Vancouver,
Viv had called the Canadian army to check on her application to serve as a military nurse. A short time later, she had shipped out to Hong Kong. That’s why Viv was in St. Stephen’s College at four o’clock on Christmas Day, 1941, when the Japanese soldiers who’d run amok in the hospital since dawn heard that the colony had capitulated, and finally stopped raping and killing the nurses.

  Nine months later, Lyn was born.

  By then, Viv was a prisoner in Stanley Internment Camp.

  Lyn had next to no recollection of being an infant POW. She had, in fact, spent almost three years in that camp, until it was liberated by the Royal Navy in August 1945. Only since her mother’s illness had Lyn been able to fit together the pieces of the puzzle that had baffled her for so long. There were two reasons why there were no photos in the album after Alert Bay. The first was that Viv had lost everything—her physical possessions and her mental health—in the fall of Hong Kong. The second was that she would slip into a deep depression whenever the topic of war with Japan cropped up. During the worst episodes, Viv was committed to the psychiatric ward at Essondale for electroshock treatments.

  Consequently, the war was off limits.

  Sometimes, bolstered by all the research she had done in a futile attempt to learn more about her father—beyond the bare-bones description offered by her mom—Lyn thought she could vaguely recall her childhood behind barbed wire.

  When Lieutenant General Takashi Sakai first announced that all residents of British background were to be interned, Sir Athol MacGregor, Hong Kong’s chief justice, suggested that streets at the top of the Peak be designated POW camps. The chief justice, it seemed, had failed to grasp what Sakai had in mind. The idea wasn’t for white colonialists to look down physically and psychologically on those who had conquered them, but for Japanese officials to be able to see Lord Such-and-such scrubbing latrines as his lady scrounged to survive.

  To that end, Sakai selected several drab apartment blocks that huddled together on the rock of Stanley peninsula at a depth too low to catch the cool sea breezes. There, in Spartan quarters built to house three hundred East Indians, the Japanese crammed almost three thousand prisoners of war. So tight were the steaming, crowded barracks that every space got used: holes under staircases, corners in halls, pantries in kitchens. The internees slept on the floor or in beds made out of boxes. There was one toilet for every ninety captives.