Confessions of a Yakuza (8 page)

“I gradually got to be able to handle the horses on my own, and started taking the lumber from the mill to the yards. I used to load on a little more wood than I was supposed to be carrying, and take it to a general store where I knew the people. They’d buy it from me, and I’d use the money to buy myself some buns and save a bit on the side. I mean, the packhorse man would never have given me a single bun even if he’d had ten himself. He didn’t give me a penny in wages, either. So I’d have starved in time if I hadn’t learned to look after myself.

“Then, in the year that I turned sixteen, a man who came to recruit laborers for the Ashio copper mines asked me if I’d care to work there. They paid one yen a day, he said. I jumped at the chance. Five others were taken on besides me, and we set off on foot.

“The whole way it was nothing but hills and mountains. We went so far up into the hills you’d never have thought anybody could live there. But after we’d been walking I don’t know how many days, the man from the mine suddenly pointed and said,

“ ‘That’s Ashio, over there.’

“I couldn’t believe my eyes. ‘God, just look at those hills!’ I said, goggling.

“Everywhere you looked, the hills were bare. Not a tree in sight, not a blade of grass. We kept on up a narrow valley, and then got an even bigger shock: you see, there was a town, a proper town, there.

“There was a town hall and a hospital. An iron bridge over the river to take the trollies from the mines. Electric locomotives to haul trains carrying the ore. There was a hydroelectric power station, and the town had electric lighting. None of us had ever seen electric light before, and we were bowled over.

“It was a fantastically busy place. Every kind of shop you could think of. There were lots of inns, too—one of them was where all the people connected with the copper mines stayed, and it had a telephone. There was a photo studio as well, which had some connection with the mines, but they’d photograph you any time so long as you paid for it. That was something new to us, so we had our pictures taken to celebrate. There were two or three geisha houses, and four brothels. Two theaters, too, which opened whenever a traveling troupe came. I’d say the population was something over thirty thousand. It was a really lively place, what with miners, merchants, government officials, and women and children all stuck together in that little bit of space between the hills. We were as pleased as punch—told ourselves we’d come to a wonderful place. But things aren’t like that in real life.

“I won’t go on about it too much, because you can’t imagine what it was like unless you’d actually been there, but the toughest thing about our work was the blasting, using dynamite. Every time they set off a charge, it was like being inside the barrel of a cannon instead of a mine shaft. The dust swirled right through the shaft, blocking your nose so you couldn’t breathe.

“To start with, I was put to work with an iron thing like a rake, using it to clear up bits of ore that had broken off, and waste rock; but I was scared all the time in case they were going to set off the dynamite. I kept this up for about two years, but then, around the beginning of February 1907, something happened that I’ll never forget.

“A great chunk of the tunnel roof caved in, and I was one of the unlucky ones who got caught. Everything went black, you couldn’t see a thing. I was half buried, with my arms and legs trapped and steadily going numb. I told myself this was the end. Then there was another fall, a great rush of smaller bits of rock. I got a lot of dust or something in my mouth and up my nose, choking me. It was sheer torture.

“This is it, I thought, I can’t put up with this. But something in me refused to give up. It got steadily worse. Hell, I thought, if dying is as bad as this, I’m damned if I’m going to die! I lay there struggling with my left arm, which I could move just a bit, then somehow I managed to cough out the muck in my mouth, so at least I could breathe. I yelled for help at the top of my voice. When I did, I heard voices coming from both directions. A dim light came close up to me and someone said,

“ ‘You all right?’

“ ‘The fuck I am!’ I said.

“ ‘If you can talk like that
you’re
not going to die,’ the voice said. ‘There are some poor devils still buried. You wait where you are for a while.’ And they went off to look for the other men.

“I stayed put—not that I could do anything else—but I was sure that if there was another fall I’d be a goner. I got really mad at them, wondering how long it’d be before they got me out.

“They finally rescued me a few hours later—but we were still in the tunnel; the fall had blocked the way out, and it was impossible to get up to the surface. There’d been a lot of men working with us, and a hell of a lot of them, it seems, had been killed. Less than thirty had survived altogether.

“One of the survivors was Kihachi, the sub-foreman, and he took charge of everything. It was he that decided who was going to use the batteries we had left, who was going to look for escape routes, and what the daily ration of water would be. Everyone held on grimly, doing just as Kihachi said.

“It was two days later that they got us out. We’d all been telling ourselves we’d never breathe the outside air again, so I can’t tell you what it was like when we finally knew we were safe.

“The other men, up above, were pleased to see us looking livelier than they’d expected. We were telling them about how the cave-in happened and what it was like in the tunnel, when someone began talking about the miners who’d been killed. That gradually got everybody worked up, and they started cursing the officials in the mining office. Then, before long, they decided they ought to have a drink in memory of their dead mates.

“ ‘Let’s go to the office,’ someone said. ‘We’ll get the people there to come up with some saké.’

“ ‘That’s right,’ everybody shouted. ‘We’ll get the office bastards to provide it!’

“ ‘That’s not enough—we ought to shave their heads for them!’

“By now they’d worked up a real head of steam, and more and more men were joining them. In the end, we all marched off toward the office, with the miners who’d been rescued in the lead. But we found a couple of dozen security guards standing in the road there, blocking the way.

“ ‘No entry! Break it up there!’

“ ‘Who d’you think
you
are to order us around? Get out of the way!’

“ ‘No, get back!’

“The same kind of shouting match went on, with us gradually shoving the security people back, till a line of police suddenly came bursting in.

“That only got everybody more excited, and it was just about to turn into a real fight when suddenly behind us there was this terrific explosion. I looked, and there were flames shooting up. Some of the miners had blown up the stables with dynamite. Kihachi set off running, with us following. He crept into the office from the back, where the guards weren’t watching, and got up onto the fuel storage sheds.

“ ‘Break the roof in!’ he yelled.

“We made a hole in the corrugated iron and jumped down inside—ten of us in all, I’d say. Kihachi handed each of us a bundle of dynamite, fuses, cans of kerosene and so on, then splashed kerosene over the floor and led a fuse from it outside.

“ ‘Go and smash things up,’ he said to us, ‘—the other buildings, the town hall, anything you come across. Just let yourselves go!’

“He set light to the fuse, we cleared out, then a great flame shot up and there was an almighty explosion. After that it was like a hurricane had hit the place. We overturned trollies and blocked the road, cut power lines and telephone cables. We set fire to anything we could. Several hundred miners attacked the boss’s official residence, smashing up everything that came in reach. The boss himself was beaten up, and anybody who was any kind of official at the mine got clobbered too. The rioting went on like that for three days. I was by Kihachi’s side all the time, but toward the end he told me to get out, it was getting too risky.

“ ‘I’m not going to run away,’ I said.

“ ‘Don’t be dumb. The troops’ll be here before long and you know what’ll happen then, so get out while the going’s good.’

“ ‘What about you?’

“ ‘I’m leaving too, of course. But I’m the one who started it all, so they’ll hunt all over for me.
You’re
OK—your name’s not known. Take to the hills and keep going, straight south. If you do that and can get away to Tokyo, nobody’s ever going to find you. When you get to Tokyo, go to the end of Namida bridge in Senju, there’s a place there where the day laborers hang out, and ask for a man called Shugoro. Tell him I sent you, and he’ll take care of you. I’ll be following you before long, so get going.’

“So I made a break for it, over the hills. I heard later that soon after that the troops went into Ashio to put down the riots. I went on running for all I was worth, not even bothering to eat or drink, till I got to the foothills of Mt. Akagi, where I felt just too tired and hungry to go on. I was wandering about in a kind of daze when I met an old woodcutter. He took one look at me and said,

“ ‘You on the run from Ashio?’

“I didn’t see any point in keeping it from him, so I nodded.

“ ‘Follow me,’ he said, and he took me to a charcoal burner’s hut. There he gave me a riceball and some broth.

“ ‘Where are you going next?’ the old man asked.

“ ‘Tokyo,’ I told him.

“ ‘Well, then, you’d better put these on,’ he said, and he gave me some farmer’s clothes. ‘If you wear these and carry a bundle of charcoal, nobody’s going to suspect you.’

“I thanked him and moved on, heading for the plain below. I never knew what it was made him help me in that way.

“It was about two weeks later that I met Shugoro near the bridge in Senju. He knew all about the Ashio affair. He told me I’d better lie low a while, so I worked there for about six months.

“While I was there I met a boatman called Jimpei. When he heard who I was, he said it would be safer if he took me in himself. Shugoro, too, told me he thought that would be best, so he brought me here—to this boat. When I first started work on it, Jimpei was still the skipper, but he died and I took over from him.... I never saw anything more of Kihachi.”

“How long did you stay on the boat?” I asked the man.

“Not all that long.”

As he spoke, he began to heave himself up off the cushion he was sitting on.

“Excuse me a moment, will you?” he said. Supporting himself on the edge of the hearth, he slowly started to get up, but the bottom of his kimono got tangled with his legs and he had trouble getting upright. Taking hold of a stick that stood propped against a pillar, he opened the sliding doors and went out into the corridor. Beyond the outer glass doors, I could see the rain pouring down from the eaves. A clock struck nine. I heard the man talking to somebody in the back room. After a while, though, the boards in the corridor creaked and he reappeared.

“You can’t get around so well when you get older, can you?” he said.

“Perhaps I’d better go soon,” I suggested.

“Do you have some work to do?”

“No, but you seem to be tired.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “What would I be doing going to bed at this time of day?” He put his hands under the quilt over the sunken hearth and, sitting hunched up, coughed thickly again and again.

It was in September 1923 that I stopped working on the boat. As you know, the first of that month was the day of the Great Earthquake.

Kenkichi and me and a girl called Iyo, a worker in a spinning mill who was due to become Kenkichi’s wife, were having a meal in a place in Monzen Nakacho. Just then, there was this awful rumbling sound and the room began to sway. The china bowls and dishes and other things up on the shelves came raining down. A two-story house on the other side of the road lurched over to one side, then all of a sudden collapsed.

We knew right off this wasn’t any ordinary quake. We’d have been crushed under the building if we’d stayed put, so we scrambled out, started running, and kept going till we got to the canal. But a warehouse right by the boat we’d left tied up there had collapsed, and the boat was half sunk. It was useless, and poor Kenkichi really took it hard. “God, look at that!” he kept saying. “I’ll never be able to use it again.”

Before long the sky began to turn red.

“It’s the mill!” yelled Iyo, and she began to run again; the Amagasaki spinning mill where she worked was pouring smoke. So we set off after her. The fires were spreading at a terrific rate.

Morishita-cho was already a sea of flames. People were in a real panic, with old folk and children yelling at the top of their lungs.

“It’s no good,” said Kenkichi, grabbing at Iyo to hold her back. “There’s nothing you can do even if we get to the mill.”

A policeman was bellowing in a hoarse voice, “Go to the Army Clothing Depot!”

We ignored him and went on running steadily in the opposite direction. When we got to Eitai bridge we found that the whole area on the other bank, for hundreds of yards from Nihombashi on to Asakusa, was like a roaring furnace. Looking back, we saw that the fires were right behind us, too. A whirlwind had got up, and we saw a cart being blown high up into the air. Bits of houses and roofs were being sucked up into the whirlwind too and were dancing about in the sky like leaves. A horse that had gone crazy was galloping about the street and finally jumped into the river.