Tokyo Vice Read online

  We had worked together before, two years ago. I had been sent to Ishikawa Prefecture to write a “fun” feature about harvesting rice on tiny fields along the slope of a mountain. Chuckles was at the local bureau, and when I challenged her to join me on the slopes cutting rice, she took me up on it on her day off. She was much better at it than I was. She also kicked my ass as a reporter.

  When she greeted me, she seemed pleased to see me, if a little awkward. Japan, as every two-bit Japanologist will tell you, is a vertical society. In the company hierarchy, I was technically her superior by virtue of my seniority, but in the small world of the TMPD press club, she was top dog. Those distinctions were subtle but important and were compounded by the fact that she was the only woman on the police beat.

  As we talked, she’d call me “Jake-san,” which indicated respect, but then slip into “Jake-kun,” suggesting equality, familiarity, or disdain; it was as if she couldn’t make up her mind where I stood in relation to her. On the other hand, I kept addressing her as “Chuckles-chan,” an affectionate honorific that others might have thought bold and brazen. Finally I said, “Just call me Jake. Everyone does.”

  “But if I did, that would be disrespectful.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Okay, Jake-san.”

  “Good. Now please show me around.”

  My second day on the job, I worked the night shift. I tried to get a few winks in at two in the morning, but that of course was an impossible dream. Midmorning there was a TMPD press conference to announce a warrant for the arrest of the leader of a loan-sharking operation that stretched efficiently across the country.

  Now, this was more like the kind of crime I knew and loved. It was also Chuckles’s story—she’d been following it for months—but as she was out of the office, I tried to pick up what bits of information I could in her stead. Two things struck me: first, that this loan shark, a bigwig in the Yamaguchi-gumi, was on the wanted list on suspicion of violating, curiously, the Investment, Deposit, and Interest Rate Control Law; and, second, that the Community Economic Safety Division was handling the case, not the Organized Crime Control Bureau.

  As has been noted, the Yamaguchi-gumi is the largest of the three main yakuza groups in Japan. It is also the most violent and the most active in infiltrating the stock market and high finance. Extreme loyalty is demanded; anyone caught snitching on his boss may be forced to sacrifice an appendage or even be murdered. In terms of expansion and methods, it is like the Wal-Mart of organized crime. It has its own financial division and maintains strong ties with politicians, including former prime ministers.

  Susumu Kajiyama was the Emperor of Loan Sharks. He was a master criminal. A corporate blood brother of the Goryo-kai, a subdivision of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Kajiyama had created, beginning in 2000, a network of close to a thousand loan shark outfits across the country.

  He had bought up databases of heavily indebted people whose credit was lousy and could no longer get loans from consumer loan companies, and he had devised the now-popular loan shark strategy of attracting customers through personal phone calls and e-mail. He had set up corporations to provide storefronts for customers, handle the business, and launder the funds. If you walked into one of these stores, you wouldn’t think it different from any legitimate consumer loan shop. Attractive women at the reception desk put you at ease. You’d be able to secure a loan no one else would give you—although it might have to be at an elevated interest rate. That is to say, 10 to 1,250 times more than allowed by law.

  But once you fell behind in repayments, Kajiyama’s collection agency would come knocking with the standard, subtle lines of moneylenders: “Do you want to die?” “You stupid fucker, how about I make your family pay up?” “Do I have to invite myself to your place and beat the money out of you?”

  Most of the time, the collectors didn’t follow through on their threats. They didn’t need to, although they were so persistent—browbeating the debtor, hounding the wife, calling his employer—that they drove more than a few to suicide.

  It was obvious to me that Kajiyama was yakuza, but when I asked the TMPD division chief if that was indeed the case, he hemmed and hawed and would not give a clear answer. According to him, after the anti–organized crime laws had gone into effect, most yakuza had stopped printing their yakuza affiliation on their business cards. I know it may seem odd to some, but that made it harder to identify someone as a yakuza.

  Whatever he was, Kajiyama was doing very well. He lived in an apartment that rented for 900,000 yen a month (about $9,000). Even though he’d skipped town as the police closed in, the bills were still paid while the apartment stayed empty.

  At the same time the press conference was going on, the TMPD was collecting evidence in several of Kajiyama’s offices and shops around the country. As far as the investigation went, it was a big leap forward.

  When Chuckles returned to the press club, she dispatched me to an office in Shinjuku, where a police raid was taking place. She wanted photos. So off I went.

  At the site, I snapped several blurry photos of grim-faced plain-clothes cops—eleven of them—emerging from the building with boxes of documents.

  I was in a great position. I was Chuckles’s backup and got kudos if I came up with anything good but wasn’t responsible if I didn’t. Yet those old reflexes started to kick in. Kajiyama interested me. I wanted to know more about the man. He was a smart criminal who’d built an empire; he was the stuff of a television series.

  I rang Noya, a retired cop I’d done a big favor for, and proposed an evening out. Noya was a veteran of the Organized Crime Control Bureau, and I figured that even if he didn’t have information about Kajiyama at his fingertips, the lure of getting felt up by a beautiful European woman would make him do his homework.

  I was not mistaken.

  Once the distraction of Lily, the Estonian girl sipping champagne on his lap, was removed, Noya proceeded to fill me in: “Susumu Kajiyama. Career yakuza. Joined in the seventies. Record of twelve arrests. First arrest in Shizuoka Prefecture in March 1974, assault and bodily injury. Didn’t serve time—got off with a fifty-thousand-yen fine [a mere $500].

  “Next arrest two years later. Extortion—spent a year in jail. From 1979 to 1983, he was in for methamphetamines—using or selling, I forget which. Once he got out, he moved to Tokyo. I’m guessing he was working for the Goto-gumi.”

  The Goto-gumi. That was really the first time I paid attention to the name. Of course, I had a vague idea what it was, but I didn’t realize that it would become a subject of great interest later in life.

  “Any connection between Kajiyama and Goto?” I asked.

  Noya wasn’t sure, but he had his suspicions. “Goto-gumi spearheaded the Yamaguchi-gumi invasion of Tokyo, built the foundations—set up the infrastructure. If Kajiyama was working in Tokyo in 1983, the odds are very good he was a lackey of Goto.

  “Anyway, back to Kajiyama’s arrest record. In October 1984, he gets busted for attempted extortion. In 1985, possession or distribution of marijuana. In 1989, assault again. But in 1990, he gets investigated for violations of the investment laws; he’s hit with a fine, about four million yen [$40,000]. In 1992, assault, but only a fine. In 1994, once again he gets arrested for violations of the investment laws; once again it’s just a fine, five million yen [$50,000]. You can see that somewhere along the line, your boy got smart. No more drug dealing and extortion, the pay is too low. Investments and finance—that’s where the big money is.”

  “He tells the police that he’s not a yakuza anymore. When we write about him, we have to say ‘former yakuza.’”

  “That’s just bullshit. He’s the number two in the Goryo-kai in the Yamaguchi-gumi. Since 1984, he’s been a player. There’s a video of him at a blood brother ceremony in 1985. He’s been arrested twelve times, convicted twelve times. He has his footprints in a slew of other investigations. Former yakuza? Bullshit.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s why I’m asking.”


  “This is how they do it. As soon as one of their brethren gets busted, they excommunicate him—and they send out a letter announcing it. That’s supposed to keep the cops away from them. Idea is, if the punk acted on his own, the organization isn’t responsible. ‘He was a bad guy, so we got rid of him.’ Legally, it’s smart because the courts have said that yakuza bosses are liable for damages inflicted by their soldiers. No boss wants to be broke.”

  “But Kajiyama is part of the Goryo-kai, right?”

  “Well, not technically. Last year he was seen coming in and out of the Onai-gumi, the predecessor of the Goryo-kai. He’s the civilian face of the boss; he’s the front guy. He’s charming, and he looks a little like Robert Mitchum.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Hmm … likes to travel. He’s been to the United States a couple of times. Gambles at the same casinos where Goto had an account. That’s another reason I think he used to work for Goto.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Caesars Palace and the Mirage. Maybe both.”

  “That’s where Kajiyama gambles?”

  “No, that’s where Goto gambles. Kajiyama gambles at the Mirage. He’s like a big shot there. I’m guessing Goto got him set up there.”

  “How does he get into the United States?”

  “He’s Japanese. You think anyone keeps track? The National Police Agency won’t share its list of yakuza with the United States, so it’s hard for your people to track them.”

  “Why won’t they share?”

  “Ask some dickhead in the NPA. I don’t know why.”

  There was one other person who could give me background on Kajiyama, but I didn’t get around to asking for a few months, and in retrospect I wish I hadn’t.

  I did report back to Chuckles what Noya had told me but left out the part about Kajiyama’s trips to Vegas, which, though interesting, didn’t seem to lead anywhere. I did send a note about Kajiyama and some articles to Special Agent Jerry Kawai, the attaché for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the U.S. Embassy, though.

  (Note: Kawai and Mike Cox, two of the special agents at ICE, initiated an investigation into Kajiyama that resulted in more than half a million dollars of Kajiyama’s money in the United States being seized. They also made sure that the bulk of the seized money was returned to his victims in Japan. Every little bit helped.)

  On August 11, the TMPD raided the headquarters of the Goryo-kai in Shizuoka Prefecture.

  The Yomiuri had gotten advance word of this, and by the time I arrived at work at ten that morning, Chuckles was putting the finishing touches on the article. The problem was that the police hadn’t planned on there being a traffic jam, so the raid got started way behind schedule. As a result, editors kept calling, screaming for a story that wasn’t ready to go. You can’t plan for everything.

  The raid got rolling around noon. Yomiuri reporters from the Shizuoka office were on the scene taking pictures and sending in reports to their editors—all of which was being compiled at the Tokyo office. It was the usual photos of scary-looking yakuza in dark suits stepping to the side while cops in riot gear hovered and expressionless plainclothes cops went into and out of the building, bringing out cardboard boxes that presumably contained documents.

  What was amusing about the police raids was that everybody knew about them in advance. The press knew, and so did the yakuza! If they didn’t, the police would notify the yakuza that a raid was going to happen. That way everything would go smoothly, and nobody would get hurt. But you can imagine what the likelihood of a raid turning up anything useful would be.

  In the evening of the day of the raid, Kajiyama, accompanied by his lawyer, showed up at the police department and turned himself in. He was supposed to have said something to the effect that he “did not want to cause anyone more trouble.” Well, good, a yakuza behind bars, but the press still wasn’t allowed to refer to Kajiyama as a yakuza, because the police hadn’t officially identified him as such.

  It was because of lawyers. The Yamaguchi-gumi had a lot of them. And they were always ready to sue on behalf of their big boys. That’s another problem with organized crime in Japan—so damn organized, so damn corporate. Allegedly (we’ll never know for sure), a couple of cases were quietly settled where the yakuza sued civilian credit-rating firms that had dared to label one of their operations a front company.

  The Kajiyama dance went on. The Emperor was released, the police arrested him again, the Emperor was released, the police arrested him on different charges. Each time he confessed to nothing.

  The big mystery—the real issue—was, where had all the money gone? A huge chunk of the Emperor’s profits had to be going to the Yamaguchi-gumi, but where was he hiding it? It wasn’t showing up in any Japanese bank. How was it being laundered? When you considered that there were more than sixty-thousand victims who had paid illegal and exorbitant rates, it was an astronomical amount of money. Police estimated group revenue to be several billion dollars. If you could follow the money, you’d have the case solved.

  Chuckles had me check out the front companies of the empire.

  I was woken at three in the morning on the twentieth by the number three guy on the homicide beat. The Asahi had run an article on Kajiyama’s company having two yakuza on the payroll, indicating that it was further evidence of the guy’s connection to the yakuza. Well, I said, it’s not like this is news. Other people have written about it before, and we didn’t pay any attention to it. Tell Chuckles, I told him. She was unreachable, he replied.

  So I knocked on some cops’ doors before coming to work to try to confirm the story. As usual, I got a hello, a tip of the head, and nothing else.

  When I arrived at the office, Harry Potter pointed out that the Sunday Mainichi had run an article about the female leader of a Buddhist group saying that her name had been used without her knowledge as the guarantor for a mortgage on Kajiyama’s property. She was thinking about going to the cops.

  I flipped through all the real estate deeds we had for Kajiyama, but nothing came close to the property mentioned in the article. I tried to get a deed to his 900,000-yen-a-month apartment in Minato-ku, but as it was a rental no information was available.

  I did write an article about how Kajiyama’s name had appeared on the roster for the Jinnai-gumi before his boss rose through the ranks to become the chairman of the Goryo-kai, a second-tier Yamaguchi-gumi organization. In other words, up until a year before, Kajiyama had been a registered member of a Yamaguchi-gumi crime group.

  What was the point of all this? I wanted, in my own way, to demonstrate that the Emperor was a yakuza and that his whole empire was a yakuza operation. If I could, the case could go forward, and I’d have a scoop.

  Harry gave a nod to my effort, but his take on it went like this: “It stands as a story, but it is not a great story. The real story for me is how several hundred non-yakuza had no qualms about working in the loan-sharking industry. That’s a side of the story that no one is writing about. We expect yakuza to do nasty things, to exploit people and rip them off. What’s unusual is that so many non-yakuza are willing to help them out.”

  He was right. Kajiyama was definitely a yakuza, but he had “civilians” doing a lot of the work for him.

  There is organized crime and then there is ORGANIZED CRIME. The guy was practically a modern-day Professor Moriarty. Kajiyama’s empire was a laundry list of front companies: a real estate agency, a construction firm, a share in a marina … The guy wasn’t just a loan shark; he was a franchise. He ran a sex parlor. He laundered money by forcing his employees to be regulars there, but the girls were so unattractive that the employees often just went to pay and left without getting any service. He established a religious corporation in Hokkaido and forced employees to make donations. They were instructed by the various agency managers to attend meetings at a hotel in Tokyo. The donations were supposed to be paid from the profits made at each loan shark shop.

  Most of his front
companies had SK, as in Susumu Kajiyama, as part of the name: SK Housing, SK Finance, and so on. Let me elaborate, lest the full reach of the operation go unnoticed: Employees at each loan-sharking shop were obliged to buy their lunches from SK Shokuhin. With the profits from the shops, managers were obliged to dine at a Korean barbecue restaurant that happened to be owned by a cohort of Kajiyama’s; thus were funds laundered. Managers and employees were obliged to take their leisure at designated hot springs and beach resorts, where transportation and accommodations were arranged, thus laundering more funds. This was a new breed of yakuza; he was the future. Here was a guy who knew how to cheat everyone. He wasn’t called the Emperor for nothing.

  SK Finance in Shinjuku looked very much like a branch of Promise, the consumer loan company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. There it was: SK FINANCE printed in white against a blue background. The firm had been licensed as a consumer loan operation by the Tokyo government, and the license was on display so as to demonstrate its bona fides. SK Finance had gotten the tōichi rating (tō from Tokyo, ichi as in number one), which was given to outfits of this kind. In other words, the majority of the firms had been given permission to operate without any real background check.

  SK Finance was also a realty, and the license was proof of it. This was a good deal for Kajiyama’s gang. Real property would be taken as collateral for a loan, and if the debtor defaulted, it would be seized and sold, all without the participation of an annoying middleman who would claim a share of the profit. And of course there was the usual renting and leasing of properties.

  I wanted a photo of Kajiyama. I went to SK Housing’s branch office, also in Shinjuku, but it appeared to have already gone out of business. I went to one of his other real estate agencies near the station, and to my surprise, the staff were quite helpful. They didn’t even flinch at the fact that I was a foreigner. Within minutes they located a very spacious apartment above a very conveniently located pachinko parlor. I gave it serious consideration. But my goal was to get a company brochure with Kajiyama’s mug on it, and there wasn’t any.