Tokyo Vice (30 page)

The Japanese colonized Korea during their warlike days, and after the war a lot of the Koreans who had been brought over as slave labor remained in Japan. They later split into two groups: those pledging allegiance to South Korea and those pledging allegiance to North Korea. The North Korean Japanese have their own school system and a kind of local government board. This guy used to be part of that local government.

As you can imagine, with North Korea admitting that twenty years ago it had abducted Japanese citizens—one simply walking along a beach—and spirited them away to North Korea to teach the Japanese language to spies and never let them leave, North Korean Japanese were and always will be tense. This guy had agreed to meet me to talk about the situation of North Koreans in Japan and their support for the North Korean government.

During a period when many Koreans had returned to North Korea
to help rebuild the country, his elder sister had gone to join the effort. By the time she and everyone else figured out that the “workers’ paradise” was really a hell on Earth, there was no way to get his sister home and he was forced more or less to pay a “ransom” in terms of support for North Korea. That was not uncommon, he said.

As he was going on about North Korean government activities in Japan, our conversation was interrupted by a tough-looking young guy who immediately engaged the company president in a loud, heated discussion in Korean. I recognized him as a young executive-class yakuza in the Yamaguchi-gumi Yamaken group. I’d seen his face in a yakuza fan magazine. There were several available at the time; and any good police reporter covering organized crime made sure to read them regularly. Of course, I didn’t understand a word the two were saying, but later they didn’t mind explaining that it was about a botched murder attempt the previous week.

Two punks in motorcycle helmets had burst into a bar and fired guns at the former Sumiyoshi-kai syndicate boss. The punks were crappy shots; five people were killed, three of them innocent bystanders; the former boss wasn’t touched. This mishap spurred the police into cracking down hard on the Sumiyoshi-kai. The yakuza hadn’t been successful in giving the police anything to make them lay off. They offered up a fall guy, but it didn’t look as if he was the killer.

The young executive gave me the name of the guy who was really responsible for the killings. I wasn’t there to get information about that story, but I passed what I’d learned on to our local bureau and a cop I used to know well.

Around eleven, I met the corporate blood brother, or kigyoshatei, of a Kokusui-kai faction at a bar and pumped him for info on the ATM robberies. I paid for the drinks and handed him front-row tickets to a prizefight.

I got home past midnight. Sunao and Beni were asleep. I washed the dishes in the sink, took a shower, and went to sleep on my own futon, finally.

The Japanese have words for sadness that are so subtle and complicated that the English translations don’t do them justice.

Setsunai
is usually translated as “sad,” but it is better described as a feeling of sadness and loneliness so powerful that it feels as if your chest is constricted, as if you can’t breathe; a sadness that is physical and tangible. There is another word, too—
yarusenai
, which is grief or loneliness so strong that you can’t get rid of it, you can’t clear it away.

There are some things like that. You get older and you forget about them, but every time you remember, you feel that yarusenai. It never goes away; it just gets tucked away and forgotten for a while.

There is a beautiful children’s song, written by the artist Takehisa Yumeji, called “The Evening Primrose.” The evening primrose is a yellow, sometimes white flower that blooms only at night, then tinges with red in the morning and withers. The song is almost impossible to translate because it says more in what it does not say than in what it does. Any translation would be an interpretation. But here’s mine.

Every now and then, you meet someone who nurtures you as a person or, in my case, as a reporter. I suppose that I always come across as
a stray dog that people feel a need to take in, to nurture. Mami Hamaya took me under her wing when I first got to the shakaibu. She had been a police reporter as well. When I started on the Fourth District beat, she was the only one to actually give me some useful contacts. I don’t know why we hit it off, perhaps because we were both minorities within the department. From early 2000, we spent a lot of time working together. I thought of her as an older sister of sorts.

Hamaya looked a lot like Velma, the girl with the thick-rimmed, thick-lensed glasses on the old cartoon
Scooby-Doo
. She had her hair in a Beatles cut and had a button nose. She would usually forgo a skirt, wearing only slacks and a collared shirt to work, dressed a little like a guy. She was tough and hardworking, as is every woman in the National News Department. There is a macho vibe to the whole department, and women are few in number. In 2003, there were six or seven females out of a hundred reporters in the department. To survive in the shakaibu women have to put up with the same lousy hours as the men, they’re expected to pour the drinks for their male counterparts on social occasions, and they can never complain. In many ways, they have to work harder than the men.

One particular phone call sealed our friendship.

I was at work on the day shift, which basically involved sitting around the newsroom answering the phone and waiting to dispatch people and orchestrate panic when and if something happened. For about nine hours. At that point in time, I was a member of the yu-gun (reserve corps), an elite special forces unit of the National News Department that mobilized for breaking stories and had the freedom to run around writing about anything interesting during a slow news period. I was also responsible for working on the feature “Safety Meltdown,” a long-running series about how crime rates were rising in Japan, why, and what it meant for the country. Even though crime rates were still ridiculously low, the police clearance rate (ability to solve a crime) in several categories of felony had hit an all-time low. It was a hot topic.

The day was flat and quiet, and nothing of any particular importance was on the horizon. Then the phone rang, with an irate Yomiuri Giants fan on the other end. He didn’t like the current coach. I told him that we were the news department of the paper and that we were neither the sports department nor the managers of the Yomiuri Giants. I suggested he call elsewhere.

He gave me his name and then demanded I give him mine. I did—sounding it out in Japanese style.

“Jei-ku A-de-ru-su-te-in.”

The caller was not pleased.

“Is this some kind of trick? Who the hell are you?”

He demanded my name several times.

“I’m a reporter for the
Yomiuri
. I’m also a foreigner.”

“You’re not a foreigner. You’re some kind of machine, designed to trick people and make them hang up.”

“I assure you that I’m not a machine. I’m a human being; a non-Japanese human being.”

“A foreigner, huh. No wonder you don’t get what I’m saying. Put someone else on.”

The only other person nearby was Hamaya. She nodded her head and asked me to give her the phone.

“Hello, this is Hamaya. I believe that Jake already answered your question.”

The caller was now fuming.

“First a gaijin and then a woman? Put a man on the phone.”

“I’m sorry,” said Hamaya in a sticky-sweet voice, “the only people working today are either foreigners or women. Or foreign women. I guess we can’t help you.”

Then she hung up on him.

I liked Hamaya.

Whenever I submitted a feature, an article that I’d put together on my own, Hamaya would look it over for me and make suggestions. The formulas for standard news articles and in-depth analyses were quite different, and I had a tough time wrapping my head around feature articles that departed from the standard reverse-pyramid format.

She had a black sense of humor and a nice, gentle way of poking fun at me, especially my atrocious table manners. She was not particularly pretty, but she was one of those women who mysteriously become more attractive the longer you know them.

Hamaya and I were both assigned to the information technology coverage crew. Japan was in the middle of an IT bubble, and “Internet,”
“hacking,” and “computer virus” were the big buzzwords. The IT crew was assembled from a cross section of the newspaper, including science, economy, culture, and business reporters. I was assigned to cover the underbelly of IT: viruses, hackers, DOS attacks, Internet fraud, illegal sales over the Net, child pornography, yakuza incursions into the industry, the misuse of prepaid telephones, and anything else remotely unpleasant that was connected to the latest technological advances in Japan and the world.

I was a self-taught computer geek. I started on a Mac but made the switch to Windows and spent a brief period of my life obsessed with first-person shooting games. I learned how computers worked so that I could squeeze as much juice out of my rig to play games such as Blood and Thief at a higher resolution. My motives were wrong, but my results were good.

Hamaya was assigned to the section after me. She could barely use e-mail, and I suddenly found myself in the position of teaching my teacher. Hamaya was a good student, and I never felt uncomfortable with our temporary role reversal. I loaned her books, explained terms to her, showed her how to work the various Net browsers and make bookmarks. In turn, she’d read my features, make suggestions, and point out my grammatical mistakes. I could also count on her to cover my ass when I needed it.

When I got news that Beni was about to be born on September 17, 2000, Hamaya kicked me out of the office and took over my half-finished article before I could even ask her to do it.

I was allowed to take two days off for the birth. A week later, one of the IT coverage crew reporters needed a photo of a baby for an article on cloning. Hamaya immediately volunteered my child.

“Jake, it’ll be an auspicious start for the kid. Besides, I want to see the little bugger. We’ll all go.”

So we got in a taxi with a
Yomiuri
photographer and made a run to Saitama Prefecture, where Sunao was staying with her mother. Hamaya was very good with the child. When Sunao let her hold Beni, I saw her smile as I’d never seen her smile before. She glowed.

Hamaya had sacrificed a lot for the job. Most of the women in our department had. She’d missed chances to get married and was past the age where she could have a child safely—assuming she could ever find enough free time to date someone.

The photographer snapped the photo while Beni cried away, and the next day Beni, as part of a montage, was on the front cover of the
Yomiuri
next to a headline that read: “Cloning: Are We Going to Create a Superhuman Race?”

Hamaya put a total of twenty-eight copies of the edition on top of my desk the next day, separated into four bundles, neatly held together with plastic string. It was a great memento and a keepsake.

One of the problems with Japanese newspapers, and maybe Japanese companies and the government as well, is that you are never allowed to do the same job for very long. There are constant personnel changes, just for the sake of change, which hurts job continuity and makes it very difficult for a reporter to have his or her own specialized field of knowledge. The lack of a byline on most stories also hurts a reporter trying to get recognition as an expert on a certain subject matter.

Hamaya’s field of expertise was the mentally disabled, especially involving the appropriate measures to be taken with them when they broke the law. She was also an enthusiastic advocate for the handicapped, an area where Japan is still decades behind the United States in terms of social intergration.

The law and how it should deal with the mentally ill was being discussed heatedly in the late 1990s. Some people loudly asserted that officers of the law should have stronger authority to forcibly incarcerate mental patients.

What sparked the debate occurred on July 23, 1999. A Japan Airlines plane leaving from Haneda (Tokyo International Airport) was hijacked by a mentally ill individual. He stabbed the captain of the airplane during the crime, and upon his arrest a huge debate as to whether his name should be released to the public ensued. Because he had a history of mental illness, and because he had been a patient in a mental hospital, most newspapers did not report his name—as was the custom in these cases. However, on the twenty-seventh,
The Sankei Shinbun
, the most conservative of the daily newspapers, began referring to him by name.

The prosecutor’s office did not submit the man to a formal mental competency evaluation before prosecuting him, implying that it believed he was mentally capable of being held criminally responsible. By August 10, even Nihon Television, the
Yomiuri
’s sister news station, was reporting his real name.

By the time he was formally charged, almost every news agency was using his real name. In fact, his psychological problems and medical history were revealed in great detail by several media outlets.

Hamaya vigorously opposed publishing the man’s name and expressed her dissatisfaction at the way the story was being covered.

“You know, we’ve all developed a mob mentality. All the reporting coming out pretty much implies that if someone is being treated for a mental illness, they’re one step away from committing a horrible crime.”

She told me this over lunch in August, and I didn’t agree with her, not at first. I still had my police-beat mind; I was thinking like a cop. Punish criminals. Don’t rehabilitate them. All mental illnesses are faked by crafty thugs to avoid jail time.

However, when she brought me up to date on his history and the kinds of calls that were flooding into mental health clinics, I began to see her point.