Tokyo Underworld (34 page)

The two of them were soon standing toe to toe, Nick leaning on his cane for support, exchanging insults in two broken languages. Fifty years after Pearl Harbor, forty-six after Hiroshima, the insults escalated into crisis, the two unsteady-looking men getting on in years, one American (if a naturalized citizen) and one Japanese, venting their antipathy across an unbridgeable gulf – a gulf widened further, ironically, by the more than four decades of common experience. With the two ranting, shaking fists in the air, and threatening each other with bodily harm, the confrontation might have been a Punch and Judy show on the whole bitter, dark, unreconciled side of the bilateral relationship, but the King of Roppongi was too lost in his ire to notice any ironic symbolism.

If it had not been for three Japanese youths in black cadet school uniforms who happened along, their mouths agape at the two haranguing, frail-looking, aged men, and persuaded Nick’s nemesis to leave, there’s no telling what might have ensued.

When he thought of his children and grandchildren, his mood did not improve. His son Vince (who had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with the family business, at least as long as it meant taking orders from his stepmother), had obvious Occidental features and, it seemed to Nick, mixed feelings about his American genes. Married to a Japanese woman and the father of two girls, for
a time he had avoided PTA meetings at his children’s school. He had done this, Nick was certain, because if it became known there that the daughters, who looked Japanese, were in fact biracial, the other students would give them a hard time. The mother had also let it be known she did not want Nick visiting his grandchildren at school for the same reason. In response, Nick had sent an emissary to talk to the school’s principal, who had sympathized, but pleaded helplessness. ‘People don’t want their relatives to be
gaijin
,’ he had said, as if to contemplate otherwise was outside the realm of human thought.

Gaijin
, a compound of two ideographs – the first meaning ‘outside’, ‘external’, ‘off the mark’, ‘out of place’, the second meaning ‘person’, ‘human’, ‘mankind’ – inherently implied a sense not only of Japanese uniqueness but a definite qualitative distinction vis-à-vis everyone else, which was why, even in the nineties, Japanese who lived in New York continued to call the Americans they lived and worked among
gaijin
. Non-Japanese, even in their own country, were thus defined first and foremost by their otherness.

His daughter’s children – three from two failed marriages – had similar problems assimilating, but she solved them by simply packing up and moving everyone to New Zealand.

What bothered Zappetti most of all, perhaps, was what he saw as the submissive attitude of his fellow Americans in this new era. There was a new phenomenon in his restaurant that he absolutely hated: apple-cheeked
gaijin
yuppies, speaking fluent, super-polite Japanese – young stockbrokers and security analysts for Japanese firms, living in $20,000-a-month apartments. They would come to dine with their Japanese bosses, kowtowing and bowing, as Nick watched with great displeasure.

‘Their bosses would insult them all evening, just by their arrogant manner,’ he would say in disgust. ‘And these Western yuppies would just sit there and take it. These kids actually acted as if they believed the Japanese were superior.’

Nick did not mind letting them know how he felt, either.

‘How do you like kissing the ass of your Japanese boss?’ he would whisper, cornering his prey by the cash register or in the rest room. ‘Is it worth all that money they’re paying you?’

He looked at such people, and he saw American lobbyists in Washington, DC, selling their services to the Japanese car companies, or even former US President Ronald Reagan taking $2 million from a Japanese media conglomerate for a two-week series of public appearances in Japan in the fall of 1989.

What America needed, Nick thought, was an active right wing, like the militant Japanese thugs who rode around Tokyo in their olive gray trucks with the flags and loudspeakers, shouting anti-foreign slogans. If he were younger, he swore, he would go back to New York and organize his own rightist group. Nicola’s Army, he’d call it. He would put a truck outside of Rockefeller Center, displaying a big banner that said, ‘Down with Japanese corporations in America.’

He was turning into a raving lunatic. This naturalized Japanese citizen would buttonhole anyone who would listen and regale him with tales of how great America really was. He’d remind one and all that during World War II Americans produced a 10,000-ton Liberty ship a day, that they had outfitted the entire Russian Army with Lend Lease – supplied them with every damn thing they had, clothing, uniforms, guns, helmets, and delivered it all to their goddamn doorstep. All America needed was a little kick in the ass to get back on track.

He even wrote to US real estate tycoon Donald Trump about the ‘Japan problem’. Trump’s representatives had been peddling high-priced suites in the new Manhattan Trump Towers to potential Japanese buyers in Tokyo at $2.5 million per unit. The Tokyo-based American Richard Roa had arranged for one of Trump’s top salespeople to rent Nicola’s restaurant for an afternoon to put on a seminar for a group of wealthy Japanese. Nick had sat and listened uncomfortably to the ensuing spiel and
the next day wrote his letter to The Donald, urging him to stop selling to the Japanese. ‘They’re buying us up and laughing at us, Mr Trump,’ he wrote. ‘We’ve got to put a stop to this.’

He was not pleased to discover later that the American billionaire had become a joint owner of the Empire State Building with the infamous Japanese greenmailer Hideki Yokoi.

The road to truth has many turns, to misquote an old Japanese proverb, and with his losses continuing to mount, Nick Zappetti had rounded
his
last bend. Unable to afford to hold out any longer, he capitulated – and took his wife’s advice. He invested the equivalent of a million dollars – the last million, incidentally, in Nicola Roppongi’s once overflowing coffers – and redecorated his restaurant in modern Tokyo kitsch. He replaced the furniture in the main dining room with rococo-like lounge sets of marbled granite tables, beige chintz tablecloths, and studded leather chairs. He scrapped the canned music in favor of a computerized karaoke set and player piano. He put in a cocktail lounge by the entrance, which he furnished with white marble tables, a polished black marble floor, and a multimillion-yen Yamaha piano on which a pianist imported from New York would play pre-dinner music. An enormous backlit color blowup of Italy’s Porto d’Fino harbor filled the side of one wall. Then, Zappetti added designer snacks like white pizza and tiramisu dessert specials to the menu, turned the lights up, and sat back to wait.

The great remake of his restaurant might possibly have worked. But then the bottom fell completely out of the Japanese economy. The Nikkei Stock Index, which had risen from 13,000 yen at the time of the Plaza Accord to an all-time peak of 39,915 in early 1990, began a slide that took it all the way down to 14,000 in three years and helped precipitate the worst recession to hit Japan since the war. Bonuses dropped, entertainment expenses for executives dipped, and the crowd on the Roppongi strip began to thin out.
For the first time since the brief 1973 oil crisis, nightclubs in the area found themselves in the red.

There were many reasons for this disastrous turn of events, which dimmed the lights of the city. Chief among them was a series of interest rate hikes and other credit-tightening measures by the Bank of Japan, necessary to control the wild overinvestment and rampant speculation that had created a dangerously inflating bubble. Unfortunately, in its latter stages, this bubble economy had been based so much on borrowed money using real estate as collateral that when the value of land dropped in the wake of the newly falling securities market, it became difficult or impossible for many people to pay back or even service their debt.

But there were also a series of big financial scandals, of which the
keizai yakuza
were part and parcel. The meteoric rise of the aforementioned Tokyu stock, for example, had prompted an investigation by Japan’s harried prosecutors which, in turn, led to the public revelation in the summer of 1991 of what the crime lord Susumu Ishii and Japan’s most trusted brokerage houses had been doing together. At around the same time, it was also discovered that Nomura, Nikko and the others had, in addition, been routinely
compensating
their biggest customers – the major institutional investors – for stock losses incurred during the market’s fall, paying billions of yen at the expense of the small individual investor (who only accounted for some 20 percent of the market). It was not yet known that Japan’s major banks secretly were holding trillions of yen in bad debts, much of it issued by the middleman housing financial companies affiliated with the yakuza, known as
jusen
.

One of the biggest losers in the economic downslide which would last the rest of the decade was Ishii himself. Despite his penchant for high-tech finance, Ishii was also a practicing member of the Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist sect. He prayed morning and night, he believed in divination, and he frequently consulted a shaman about business moves. When at year’s end he asked his
shaman what to do about his Tokyu holdings, the shaman advised him to hold; the stock was going to rise to 5,000 yen a share, he predicted. Ishii dutifully held and the stock plummeted to 800. Ishii had a stroke and died. And the Inagawa family, 10 billion yen in debt, was forced to declare bankruptcy.

The collapse of the Japanese bubble was accompanied by signs of a comeback in the US auto, IC, and other industries, thanks to corporate restructuring and improvement in quality control. For Japan to regain her clout, it was now being said, longtime dictums of Japanese industry such as lifetime employment and seniority-based promotion would have to be modified, as would the highly regulated, export-driven economy. While this millennium was being awaited, however, even the more lavish free spenders would find it prudent to curb their profligacy.

As several neighboring discos metastasized into karaoke boxes, many commercial rental units in the area emptied out. Nicola’s entire yearly gross dwindled to less than half a million dollars, which didn’t even begin to cover overhead. He watched glumly as the Domino’s Pizza franchise took over the emerging new Japanese $400 million home delivery market, opening over 100 outlets, which would bring in total annual sales of $100 million. He himself couldn’t even keep his one remaining restaurant afloat anymore. Although Nick slashed his prices, even his old regulars stopped coming. On one forgettable Monday evening, he served a total of nine customers in his newly refurbished restaurant.

He was forced to suffer the ultimate humiliation of asking for a loan from his wife – who, in a feat of excruciating irony, had just finished redecorating the suburban bed town branch in Chuo Rinkan and had seen revenue double as a result.

‘Why should my company have to help yours?’ she had sniffed before finally forking over the money.

‘
My
’ company.

There was no end to life’s injustices.

In the summer of 1991, the Higher Court had rejected
Zappetti’s appeal in the Hokkaido land case. The appellate court judge ruled that the plaintiff’s Japanese citizenship in itself was not enough of a factor. Nick would also have to obtain a national farmer’s license if he hoped to reverse the original decision. To get that, he would have to take permanent residence on the land, which, given his age and health limitations, he was obviously not inclined to do.

Then, a few weeks after that depressing event, a Tokyo District Court suddenly ordered him to pay two of the lawyers who had sued him in the Nihon Kotsu mess. By District Court standards it was warp speed. It was just a matter of time, he was certain, before the judge ruled in favor of the third and final litigator. There was, of course, his share of the Nihon Kotsu settlement, which he had no choice but to take. But he had used that money to buy a huge home in the suburbs. And costs were beginning to mount in the Crazy Wong case.

His defense in court was to claim that Wong had switched the gold – that the gold had originally been authentic, then sold by Crazy Wong and replaced with counterfeit gold. It made sense whether it was true or not, and it was certainly plausible given the ease with which a man could buy fake gold in Okachimachi. The judge was bound to ask why anyone would pay $160,000 and not immediately get a receipt for it – which was a good question, because it is essentially what had happened.

But Nick was getting tired of going to court. He was running out of attorneys willing to defend him. In fact, one of his own ex-lawyers was even being quoted around town as saying that Mr Nicola was the most unreasonable
gaijin
he had ever met and that he had never hated anyone more. At the same time, Nick also guessed that in the end he would probably lose – again – no matter who defended him or what the argument was. A Chinese versus an American before a Japanese judge? He had no doubt who was worse off, especially considering the insults that Japanese and Americans had been slinging at each other across the Pacific. For
example, when Shintaro Ishihara offered the view that Japanese could always make a better product than the Americans, US Senator Ernest Hollings retorted that they were forgetting who made the atomic bomb. They ought to be sent a reminder, he suggested, a mushroom cloud image with the legend affixed, ‘A quality product made in the USA and tested in Japan.’ (Hollings later apologized.)

The Crazy Wong proceedings had just gotten started when Nick received a bill for 6 million yen (almost $60,000) for having the first batch of court-related documents translated. By the time the case was over, given such prices, he might very well be bankrupt. With the recession looking as though it was never going to end, he was in a hopeless sinkhole.

Enough was enough, he decided. It was time to pack up and move out of Tokyo.