Tokyo Underworld (13 page)

Nearly four hours after his humiliating encounter at Nicola’s, Ikeda was passing the time on the first-floor level, irritably throwing his ice picks into the wall, when in staggered the
gaijin
enfant terrible himself, Pearce at his side, to take a seat at the counter.

‘Howzzit goin’ Ikeda?’ he said thickly, ordering a beer.

Ikeda glared in his direction and then suddenly wheeled to fire an ice pick into the wall – the steel tip of the pick burying itself deeply in the wood.

‘You think you can do that?’ he sneered.

Zappetti wiggled down off his stool, removed his jacket, retrieved the ice picks and proceeded to hurl all of them, one by one, sideways at the wall, intentionally caroming them off the wooden panels onto the linoleum floor. Then he climbed back on his seat and nonchalantly took a sip of his beer.

Ikeda drew a gun out of his pocket, walked over, and pressed the barrel to Zappetti’s left temple.

Accounts vary as to what happened next, but the commonly accepted version has Pearce slipping a switchblade into Zappetti’s hand and Zappetti snapping it open and placing the blade at Ikeda’s throat.

‘Let’s do this together,’ he said, beginning to draw blood. ‘You pull the trigger and I’ll slit your fucking throat. On the count of three. Let’s go.’

Then, he started counting.

‘One …’

By the time he got to three, Ikeda had put the gun on the counter and walked out with his men.

The incident further elevated the esteem in which Zappetti had been held by the denizens of the Tokyo underworld. Not only had
he not backed down, but he had followed the universal gangland code of conduct by keeping his mouth shut later when the police came around asking questions, ensuring that no arrests were made. He had even magnanimously picked up the tab for Ikeda’s departed party. Thus, those who only a short while earlier had thought to kill him were forced, by convention and by Machii’s subsequent order, to abandon their plans for reprisal.

A visiting American newspaper columnist from the New York
Daily Mirror
named Lee Mortimer got wind of the story, which went on to take its place in Roppongi folklore, and wrote an article about it for his paper. In it he introduced Nick Zappetti, noted restaurateur from East Harlem, New York, as the Mafia boss of the city.

The title stuck.

And Zappetti did nothing to persuade anyone to the contrary.

Of all the characters in the tangled web of the underground economy, perhaps no one had more to hide than Rikidozan. In one of the great ironies of history, Rikidozan, the pure-hearted symbol of national virility, was, unbeknownst to anyone except a small handful of people (Machii and Kodama among them) actually a Korean, born with the honest name of Kim Sin Rak to a poor working-class family in what is now North Korea. It was a fact that if made public would, by his own calculation, have cost him 50 percent of his fan base due to anti-Korean prejudices long held among the Japanese.

Although racially Japan belonged to the Mongoloid group of people that also gave rise to the Hong Kong Chinese and Koreans and, in fact, much of what Japan prized as its own culture – Zen Buddhism, written characters, kimono, stylized painting – was first assimilated from China or Korea. (Koreans, for example, claimed that the Imperial Court hat was derived from the Korean
tabi
, a two-toed sock that Japanese had not initially realized was
footwear). The idea of Japanese specialness was one that Japanese leaders had long promoted – to insulate the country from foreign influence and foster a national identity.

When Japan opened herself to the outside world with the advent of Meiji reform, her leaders simultaneously advocated modernizing while promoting the cult of the Emperor as a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess and the guardian of Japan’s
kokutai
, or national essence. The twentieth-century militants also appropriated the idea as they rose to power and extended their hegemony across the Japan Sea. Even in postwar newly democratized Japan where everyone was purportedly equal, non-Japanese were regarded as inherently less equal than others.

Near the very bottom of the Japan social totem pole was anyone of Korean descent. The Japanese had annexed Korea in 1910, and since that time there had been a general view of Koreans, among the sons of Nippon, as uneducated and primitive and Korean culture as not worthy of study. In fact, during the latter part of the Japanese occupation, the founders of the so-called Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere would not even allow Koreans to speak their own language – in so little regard did the rulers hold the people they had subjugated – and forced over a million and a half of them to come to Japan as slave labor. (After the war, 600,000 chose to stay on, assuming Japanese names and hiding their identities, rather than face the political turmoil that divided the Korean peninsula back home. Gang boss Machii, by contrast, openly boasted of his dual heritage.)

Rikidozan had first come to Japan in 1939 as a strapping teenager, brought by a touring sumo wrestling scout from Nagasaki who signed him on with the Tokyo Nishinoseki stable, one of several licensed stables in the country. There, as per custom, he was given a ring name, Rikidozan, and began his training.

Although records in the Sumo Hall of Fame and Museum correctly listed his name and birthplace, the feeling among those in the Nishinoseki stable was that the public would not accept a
Korean in what was known as the sport of the Emperor and was seen as the epitome of the national ethos. It was thus heretical to claim that a Korean, or anyone of any other nationality for that matter, could defeat a Japanese sumoist. As a result, the public fiction was concocted that young Kim had been born Mitsuhiro Momota, the pure-blooded son of Minokichi Momota of Omura, Kyushu – the scout who had discovered him. Later hagiographies would even describe, in amazing detail, free of the slightest trace of irony, a fabricated childhood and a fictional athletic career at Omura High School.

By virtue of his brawn and aggressiveness, Rikidozan quickly made his mark on the sumo circuit, proving himself through competition in periodic fifteen-day championship tournaments held around the country. He rose fast through sumo’s strictly graded system of divisions, passing several hundred other competing wrestlers, until he reached the top division of the best forty combatants – the major leagues of sumo, so to speak. Through it all, he endured the brutal dawn-to-dusk regime of a sumo trainee, which included the practice-ring beatings with a bamboo cane to correct bad form and the unpleasant requirement of ministering to the needs of the senior wrestlers in the group bath and toilet. He also bore the occasional whispered taunts of ‘Garlic Breath’, a patronizing reference to the Korean preference for hot, spicy food, from superiors who knew of his background.

Rikidozan was within striking distance of the top three ranks in all of sumo –
sekiwake
(junior champion),
ozeki
(champion) and
yokozuna
(grand champion) – ranks which were awarded by the Japan Sumo Association, the supreme governing body of the sport. But then Japan surrendered and the sport of the Emperor went into a tailspin. The sacred, historic hall of sumo, the
Kokugikan
, where all the Tokyo tournaments were held, had not only been damaged during the bombing raids but was also expropriated by the invading Americans, who repaired it, renamed it Memorial Hall, and began holding pro wrestling matches there. Thus, people who
had believed in the divine wind, the Sun God, and the indomitability of the Imperial Japanese Army were forced into a serious reexamination of their pantheon.

In 1949, when some semblance of order had been restored, the San Francisco Seals, a minor-league baseball team, visited Tokyo and played to standing-room-only crowds; a sumo tourney, held at the same time elsewhere in the city, drew only 75 percent of the arena’s capacity. Throughout the land, there were vast numbers of young boys sporting baseball caps, but only a few wearing the sumo loincloth.

As he started to feel the financial strain from his sport not turning a profit, Riki quit sumo and took a job in construction. His new employer was a tattooed yakuza gambler from the Sumiyoshi gang and sumo fan named Shinsasku Nita, who had special connections inside the GHQ. Under Nita, Riki supervised construction projects at US military camps, studied English in his spare time, and spent his evenings carousing on the Ginza, where one night he participated in a losing cabaret brawl that dramatically changed his life. His victorious opponent was a visiting Japanese-American Olympic weight-lifting medalist and All-Hawaiian Body Building champion named Harold Sakata, who would later gain fame playing the steel-top-hat-flinging villain Oddjob in the James Bond movie
Goldfinger
.

In the wake of the altercation, the two men became friends and Sakata introduced Riki to a group of American professional wrestlers who were in Japan putting on charity exhibitions for the Occupation forces, seeking to promote growth of their ‘sport’ in Japan. One thing led to another, and soon Rikidozan was training and wrestling in the States, where he proved to be more successful than anyone anticipated. Too unsophisticated to do anything but fight all out, he combined a spirited karate chop attack with sumo thrusting techniques to compile a 295–5 record in a year’s worth of competition.
Boxing Magazine
ranked him in its annual list of the top-ten pro wrestlers in the world.

Before departing for the United States in February 1952, Rikidozan had acquired Japanese citizenship and legally changed his name to Mitsuhiro Momota. The government family register now listed the Momotas of Nagasaki as his lawful parents and Omura his officially recognized birthplace. The move was necessary, in part, because his real country of birth was now known as the Communist People’s Republic of North Korea and was an avowed enemy of the United States. The only way he could get a visa to the United States was to have a Japanese passport. The only way he could get either one was to bury any trace of his true identity. But, as he also discovered while wrestling in Honolulu, his first stop, there were other reasons to keep up the charade.

Billed as the ‘Japanese Tiger’, he found his every move cheered by an audience of almost exclusively Japanese-Americans, waving Rising Sun flags and lustily yelling
banzai
. As one Japanese correspondent explained, describing the phenomenon in a dispatch back home, ‘These were the people who had been put in detention camps during the war and had been insulted after the war with words like ‘Jap’! When they saw Riki’s glorious victories, they felt their pride had been restored to them.’ For the man known as ‘Garlic Breath’, that must have been indeed hard to swallow. As were the taunts about Pearl Harbor when he wrestled on the mainland, where the matches were racially charged in reverse. There, he found himself appearing alongside assorted Asians passing themselves off as Japanese with names like ‘Tojo’ or ‘Mr Moto’, wearing goatees and mustaches and exotic ‘Oriental’ garb of red silk robes with high
getas
. They burned incense, flung salt, and used every dirty trick they could think of – falling to their knees, begging for mercy, then when the opponent had turned triumphantly away, launching a ferocious blow to the back of the head, a ‘sneak attack’ as it were. Demeaning as it may have been, the fans loved it and the economic lessons were obvious.

Thus, at the end of his US hegira, Rikidozan returned to Japan and solicited support from Nita and others, including the
ubiquitous Kodama, and launched his storybook career. It only worked, as Rikidozan well knew, because everyone viewed him as ‘Japanese’. He, Kodama, Machii and the others believed that if the Japanese ever discovered the truth, he would lose billions and billions of yen in ticket and advertising revenue and Mitsubishi might even cancel his contract. Riki’s predicament was such that he felt comfortable confiding his secret to Nick Zappetti but kept it from people on his own staff.

‘I can tell you Neeku’, he said, ‘because you’re American and you don’t care. But Japanese. Never.’

Zappetti understood fully because there was a man on his staff who was Korean but was hiding the fact from his children, lest they be discriminated against when choosing a school or applying for a job.

The great Rikidozan deception reached its apogee in January 1963, when Rikidozan was sent to South Korea on a goodwill tour at the request of Kodama and the LDP to help break the ice that still existed between the ROK and Japan and thereby pave the way for the normalization treaty that so many interested parties wanted.

Despite intense anti-Japanese feelings in the ROK, where bitter memories of the long, brutal Japanese occupation and wartime atrocities remained, Rikidozan was a huge hero there. In fact, many Koreans had naturally assumed he was one of them because the Chinese ideographs for Rikidozan, although pronounced differently, represented the name of a mountain in Korea – a fact most people in Japan remained blissfully unaware of. (The name was a subtle way by which Rikidozan could hang onto his identity.)

In Seoul, Riki was given an imperial welcome. He rode in an open-car parade from the airport, and Korean newspapers blared his name in the headlines: ‘A Visit To His Homeland After 20 Years’; ‘He’s Become Japanese, But His Blood Hasn’t Changed.’

Back in Japan, however, all lips were remarkably sealed. Only one paper made mention of Riki’s origins, the relatively obscure
Tokyo Shimbun
, which ran a translation of an AP article which quoted Riki as saying at a Kimpo Airport press conference, ‘I am extremely happy to be back in my own country after twenty years.’ When the men of the JPWA saw that, the paper went on the organization’s permanent personal blacklist. It was almost as if the press did not want the public to know. Then again, perhaps it was the public that did not want to know.

The facts about his birthplace were not all that Rikidozan was hiding. Another secret was that he had a daughter whom he had fathered during a 1942 sumo tour of Korea. She lived in Pyonyang, she was active in the Communist Party, and she was a member of the North Korean national women’s basketball squad. Riki had met her for the first time later in 1959, when she had made a clandestine visit to Niigata Harbor on the Sea of Japan, when a ship on which she was traveling with her teammates made a brief stop there. At that time, he had promised to bear the expenses for the entire North Korean Olympic squad so it could take part in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Then there was the letter Rikidozan had received sometime later from an elder brother in Pyonyang who informed him that Kim Il Sung, the president of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, was a huge fan of his, that the Supreme Leader had films of all of Rikidozan’s matches, and that he absolutely loved seeing a native North Korean beating the blue-eyed, white-skinned capitalist warmongers senseless. Rikidozan was so moved by this development that he had decided to become a Communist and return to live in North Korea after the Olympics – or at least he was according to an article published in a North Korean monthly magazine in 1983, which quoted Rikidozan’s brother at length. Of course, the latter, if true, was something the Americans would not be likely to welcome, given who Rikidozan was – and the fact that he had been privy to the secret peace treaty negotiations with the ROK government.