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Sex and Drugs and Mao Zedong
I became a barfly as soon as I hit Asia. I guess I’d never been able to afford it in England, and most British pubs were dreary places in the early ’80s. Also, there didn’t appear to be any licensing laws and you could drink 24–7, which I did my best to make the most of. It didn’t matter whether you were in Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei or Tokyo: when one bar closed another opened, and if you were skint you could always buy a hip flask-sized bottle of whisky or vodka from a vending machine. I was addicted to Coca Cola, too, and drank endless cans of it to keep the never-ending hangover at bay. There were various speedy drugs available over the counter, like the Thai slimming pills Captagon, which kept you up all night and made you feel like committing suicide when they wore off. The thought of taking them today makes my mind reel, but I had some great nights on the town with them and loved the confidence-enhancing rush they gave me.
If you got bored with the legal drugs available, there were always dealers around to find something else. Japan, with its harsh legal system and outrageous prices, was the hardest place to buy drugs, but if you knew a yakuza you could get hold of shabu, a frighteningly powerful type of amphetamine. This came in pure crystal form and cost a hundred dollars for a mini packet. It seemed like a rip-off until you realised how little you could get away with taking. A single tiny crystal gave you a massive rush if smoked on tinfoil, while a medium-sized line would make you feel like Superman for 36 hours. An American musician friend taught me how to get the most out of the stuff by putting it in a mini spice bottle with a lollipop stick spiked through the cork top. We’d then get a mini blowtorch lighter and heat up the glass while spinning the stick between our fingers. If it got too hot the crystals would start to turn brown, so the trick was to wave the lighter around the base of the bottle at just the right distance while inhaling the fumes. Once the lighter was turned off, the hot liquid would recrystallise immediately and be usable later. The comedowns were devastating and left you feeling like your life was, to all intents and purposes, over. The depressions got so bad I had to give the stuff up while I was still sane.
Work was a mixture of market-trading, English-teaching and busking, and the yen was at its peak. A good run of work in Japan would bankroll a year in cheaper Asian countries. Busking in Japan reached its zenith around this time, and various duos and troubadours would vie for the key spots in the bar districts of the big cities. My favourite was outside the public toilets on Kiyamachi Street in downtown Kyoto, which had a stage of sorts, with male and female entrances either side. Large gangs of students and office workers would congregate while their mates had a pee, and it was not uncommon to make twenty dollars off one song. A gangster once gave me a hundred dollars for singing ‘Wild Horses’ to him and his girlfriend, but usually it was couples that wanted to hear Beatles ballads like ‘Yesterday’. Salarymen, the name given to the blue-suited white-collar workforce, tended to favour cheesy country songs like ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, which I hated singing. I’d plead with them to let me play Merle Haggard’s ‘Sing Me Back Home’ instead, but after I’d sung it they’d demand to hear ‘Country Roads’ all the same. ‘Let it Be’ and ‘Stand by Me’ were probably the most requested songs of all, but I built up a deep dislike for both and would sing ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’ or ‘Help!’ instead, which would usually keep them happy.
It was hard to argue with the punters, because if they requested a song they invariably paid for it. Unlike many countries, where busking seems closely related to begging, street singers (as we were known) were effectively human jukeboxes. The choice of songs mirrored those found on the karaoke machines in the local bars, and most people knew all the words and sang along. Musicians would come along and have a strum while I popped off round the corner to the beer machine. I’d learned this trick from stories I’d heard about the legendary blues harp player Little Walter, who liked to invite wannabe harmonica players up on stage while he went off drinking or chasing women, only to leave the hapless victims on stage for the majority of ‘his’ set. Some people would give you beer instead of money, and occasionally I’d be invited to go to one of the local restaurants, where I’d be plied with drinks and delicious food. Weekends were naturally the busiest, and it was possible to play from six in the evening to two or three in the morning. On the really good nights, the atmosphere became carnivalesque as great swathes of human traffic descended upon the street, bombarding my guitar case with hundred-yen coins. Every so often the local police would move me on and I’d go for a few drinks at friends’ bars and come back an hour or so later, but as a rule they’d smile and wander past uninterested.
While I was busking, Rosie would be hostessing in one of the many expensive clubs in Gion, Kyoto’s main bar district. This entailed sitting talking to Japanese businessmen and pouring their drinks. I’d worked in such places myself on earlier visits to the country and knew the routine well. Each customer had his own ‘keep bottle’, which sat on the shelf behind the bar. Each time he visited the bar, he’d drink from the same bottle and only be charged for the ice and water, which could cost him a hundred dollars alone. When the bottle was finished he’d be obliged to buy another one, and this was how I earned my money. The mama-san (landlady) would invite me from my place behind the bar to have a drink with the customers. Generally speaking, Japanese people couldn’t drink much, and when they did it tended to be misouari (whisky and water)with very little whisky in it. As soon as I sat at the table I’d be given a half-pint glass with almost no water in it, and by the end of the evening the customer would be obliged, at great expense, to buy another keep bottle, while I’d be totally legless. If the punter was a bourbon drinker, which I had an unhealthy tolerance for at the time, I’d happily drink until the new bottle arrived, but I quickly developed an aversion to the local whisky and would pour it down the sink while the customer was out of sight. It made no difference to the mama-san, who made a good profit out of my drinking habits, and all the customers had company accounts, which they were happy to invoice for their expensive habits.
There was one particular customer that we dreaded. He was a senior executive at a major Japanese corporation. He always came to the bar late, in a state of advanced inebriation, and would flail around to traditional Japanese music, groping the hostesses, who treated him like a naughty schoolboy. The hostesses would ply him with salty snacks, which would get caught in between his protruding yellow teeth. He spoke no English whatsoever, but would insist on talking to me in slurred Japanese, pinging vile globules of slimy squid snacks in all directions. One night I missed the train back to Kyoto, and he asked me if I wanted a lift in his taxi. Reluctantly, I agreed. Throughout the journey his hand slid across the seat into my crotch, until I put an elbow in his ribcage and he roared at the taxi driver to kick me out. We were in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning, so I refused and the cab continued to his house. On arrival I discovered we were still a good 15 miles from Kyoto, so I demanded he pay the driver for the remainder of the journey. He was outraged and tried to leave me to sort it out with the driver. Finally, his wife came out of the house in her dressing gown, reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet and gave 10,000 yen to the driver. As the taxi pulled away, I saw him collapse in the driveway of his home.
Although reluctant to take a hostessing job when we first got to Japan, Rosie took to her new line of work and was soon earning good money. After a while, her customers started to ply her with expensive gifts and day trips to local cultural events and sushi restaurants. I started to feel jealous and resentful that I couldn’t afford to do the same for her, but she put my mind at rest and we started to make plans to take the money we were earning back to India to invest in jewellery and crystals to sell in Europe. The success rate of Western couples in Japan was not good, with the men invariably being tempted away from their partners by the pliant, exotic Japanese women they came into contact with as English teachers or bar workers. Hav
ing lived in the country several years earlier, including 18 months with a local girl called Miya, I was less enamoured of their coquettish charms and was more in love with Rosie than ever. My Japanese girlfriend Miya had been a maikosan from the age of 15 but had given it up instead of graduating to be a geisha like many of her friends. Whereas geishas were all over Japan, maikos – meaning dancing girls – were only found in Kyoto and were comparable to apprentice geishas. They studied for two years under the most conservative mama-sans in the old part of Gion and were hired to dance at exclusive banquets all over Japan. As well as dancing, they were expected to be expert in tea ceremony and playing the shamisen, the three-stringed cat-skin instrument that looks a bit like a banjo. But Miya was more interested in rock and roll than traditional arts, and had opted out of the intensive training necessary to make the transition to geisha that her mother had enrolled her in. My feeling was that she had not wanted to continue in a profession that would likely lead to her having to compromise her integrity, but she never admitted it to me.
Even though Miya had given it up, she still had an apartment paid for by her benefactor, a wealthy and very aged local businessman. Her former colleagues Satomi and Mimi lived with her, along with several cats, and within weeks of our meeting I moved in too. The household was entirely nocturnal, and we rarely got out of bed until after dark in the winter. Miya had a hostessing job in an upmarket Gion club, while her friends worked as geishas around the country. She’d spend at least two hours getting ready for work, but her friends took around four hours to put on their faces and kimonos. The transition was extraordinary as these rather plain-looking girls morphed into exotic dolls.
Miya’s work had led her to meet many celebrities and she knew the composer and occasional actor Ryuichi Sakamoto, a major star at the time who’d collaborated with David Bowie on Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Although she was trained to mix with the great and the good, she liked a bit of rough with the smooth, which is probably where I came in. I was more interested in gang culture than tea ceremony, and I’ll never forget seeing hundreds of Japanese lads on motorbikes having showdowns with the police in Kyoto. I’d often hang around on the streets late at night, watching the bike-gang subculture known as bōsozōku. I could hear them long before I saw them, as their modified exhausts turned Kyoto’s main drag into Brands Hatch. Police sirens screamed from all directions as the police set up roadblocks, creating a wall of uniforms across the road. It was a game, but a dangerous one, as the bikers never wore helmets and the police took swipes at them with batons before leaping out of the way to avoid being run down. Sometimes the police would simply throw their truncheons at the bikers, and a few people were hurt, particularly if the bikes crashed. An ambulance was usually on hand to pick up the pieces afterwards. The police often resorted to dragging a spiked chain across the road, at which point the bikers would move locations, but often the bikes would mingle with other traffic, preventing such drastic measures from the cops. It was a great sight, and in typical Japanese style it involved an elaborate, ritualised dress code including kamikaze bandanas, Imperial flags and yakuza-style punch-perm haircuts. Some of the hard core bōsozōku went on to become gangsters, but more often they grew out of it in the same way as mods and rockers did in England in the ’60s. Like the cherry blossoms of Kyoto their youthful exuberance soon faded, but at their peak they reminded me of the kinds of kids seen in movies like Rebel Without a Cause and Rumble Fish.
Miya knew some high-class yakuza, too: rich Koreans with legitimate businesses in the construction industry. In fact, we lived on the cheap in a flat owned by one of them, which made Miya nervous, as it was not a good idea to be indebted to such people.
Kyoto often hosted major gatherings of high-level yakuza, and it was common to see lengthy convoys of white Mercedes-Benz cars with blacked-out windows arrive in the Gion bar district. Immaculately dressed hoods with perm hairdos and sunglasses would stand beside their cars, waiting for the bosses to arrive in their black cars. The police kept well out of their way and seemed to look upon them more as military top brass than gangsters.
Once we’d met a yakuza on the riverbank in Arashiyama, one of the most beautiful places in Japan, famous for its cherry blossoms, cormorant fishermen and expensive fish restaurants. He was sitting alone drinking beer, throwing stones into the river near where we went swimming, and invited us to drink with him. He had a full-body tattoo suit, as well as one and a half small fingers missing: a sign he’d upset his boss on several occasions. We got chatting, and I discovered he’d spent 15 years in prison for a murder his boss had committed. The police knew he was innocent, but bosses rarely went to jail, sending their underlings instead. In return for his sacrifice, he’d been rewarded by being made the boss of one of the most exquisite parts of Kyoto Prefecture. He drove a huge, top-of-the-range, jet-black Mercedes and carried the first ever mobile phone I recall seeing.
He wore a navy kimono with a black T-shirt underneath and, like many Japanese gangsters, had tattooed eyebrows that looked odd with his shaved head. The more he drank, the more he insisted on trying to fondle me, much to Miya’s amusement, who laughed as I pushed his hand from my crotch again and again. I guess the 15-year stretch had taken its toll.
Like many yakuza he was of Korean descent, a discriminated-against minority. To this day many Koreans still have to queue up at Japanese immigration centres to renew their papers, despite having lived in the country for many generations. The largest single group of yakuza members in the western Kansai region – at least in the lower echelons – are buraku people, the descendants of outcasts from the feudal period. Traditionally these people worked in occupations associated with death, such as tanning, slaughtering animals and undertaking. They lived in ghettos separated from the main communities and are still discriminated against today, though many thrive as market traders and, of course, gangsters.
Years later, Rosie and I were invited to a buraku party in a suburb of Kyoto. We’d been selling crystals and jewellery at Kyoto’s various flea markets and had got to know some of the other stallholders and the buraku organisers that we paid for the space. When we arrived, we discovered we were among the few guests without full-body tattoo suits. Even the women had them; something I’d never seen before. The first thing they did was give Rosie an envelope with a 10,000-yen note in it as a gift, while I walked around admiring the fabulous designs on their skins.
While my relationship with Rosie went from strength to strength, my friends went from Yuki to Kyoko to Suki to Midori and back again to Yuki. Sometimes it seemed like a handful of girls was being passed around from foreigner to foreigner, which was pretty much the case. Western girls living in Japan tired of the endless philandering of their male counterparts, who seemed, at times, to be living like Roman emperors with a retinue of nubile young women at their beck and call. Some went out with Japanese guys, who were generally shy and often intimidated by Western women, but sometimes these relationships lasted longer than the men’s, which rarely went beyond the casual fling.
Unlike the Japanese, the Chinese were far more prudish about sex. In Communist China, shows of passion were reserved for expressing revolutionary zeal rather than personal fulfilment. Almost all forms of entertainment were banned unless they were seen as furthering the Party agenda. Love between individuals was a bourgeois distraction from the more important collective passion for nation and leader. Mao had encouraged the people to have as many children as possible, causing a population explosion that has still not been successfully contained. His rural background had led him to believe that the more children a family had, the more hands there would be to work the fields, but China was changing fast, with a huge migration of people from the countryside to the cities. In 1979, three years after Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping attempted to reverse the trend by implementing the one-child policy. While the policy was undoubtedly a practical response to a dire population problem, it nevertheless imposed further the state’s interference i
n the private lives of the Chinese. In the early ’90s, things were changing – in the large cities at least – and yet that most primal of human urges was still dominated by the state.
Still, even in the darkest days of the Cultural Revolution there had been at least one Chinese man enjoying himself. Mao had a voracious sexual appetite that seemed to grow with age. His underlings organised ‘Cultural Work Troupes’ when he made his rounds of the provinces. These gatherings usually involved dance troupes from which the ageing lothario had a wide choice of young ‘volunteers’ to regenerate his ailing yang (male essence) with the yin shui (female water) from their nubile young bodies. Like the emperors of old, Mao believed the Daoist tradition that a regular dose of youthful vaginal juices would prolong his life. He was particularly fond of orgies with several girls at once and did not confine himself to the pleasures of women alone. Handsome, muscular young men were required to perform his nightly massage, which often involved more than a rub-down of his back.
As in many countries, homosexuality is taboo in China and was only recently removed from the list of mental-health disorders. Yet same-sex relationships are well represented in ancient Chinese texts like Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber, which Mao held in high esteem. In some respects the Chinese belief system is less hostile to homosexuality than its Western counterpart, and none of their religions consider it sinful. While the yang is primarily a masculine energy, it is also acknowledged that every yang contains an element of yin and that some men have a great deal of yin in their yang. One of the ancient Chinese terms for homosexuality, ‘the passion of the cut sleeve’, refers to a Han emperor who cut off his sleeve in order not to wake the much-treasured male concubine who lay in his embrace.
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