Tokyo Vice (9 page)

Without thinking, I turned and blocked the kick and punched him full in the chest, knocking him on his back. It was an extremely lucky punch. It was like hitting the sweet spot on a tennis ball; there was a pleasant
thwack
on impact, and Kimura actually lifted off the ground for a nanosecond.

For an older guy, Kimura was pretty lithe. He sprang up and grabbed me, putting my head in an armlock and wrestling me to the ground. Meanwhile, everyone in our group came rushing over to watch the excitement. Shorinji kempo has some great joint holds, but by relaxing into Kimura’s lock, I was able to get out of it, and I returned Kimura’s favor by gouging him in the larynx. While he was choking, I rolled up on top of him and in a drunken fury was getting ready to palm-heel his nose into pulp when Odanaka, a senior reporter and a generally lovable roly-poly kind of guy, pulled me off Kimura. He asked
me
if I was okay and brushed the dirt off my clothes.

Kimura was holding his hand to his throat and was about to lunge for me when a couple of other reporters restrained him. He was yelling obscenities.

“Hey, you threw the first kick!” Odanaka screamed at him. “What are you complaining about? You’re supposed to set an example.” Odanaka was one of the few guys who would stand up for the younger reporters. It took guts to scold a senior reporter in the
Yomiuri
hierarchy.

At that point, Saito walked into the fray and jabbed Odanaka with his index finger. “Why don’t you shut up. Let ’em fight it out. This is good stuff.” He laughed as he motioned for the other reporters to let go of Kimura, who was now foaming at the mouth.

“What kind of boss are you?” Odanaka yelled at Saito. “You can’t let senior staff pick on the freshmen! You should be lecturing Kimura. You’re such an asshole—you little dwarf.”

At those words, Saito took a swing at Odanaka, and Odanaka responded by almost popping him in the jaw. Now the crowd had divided into four groups: one to restrain Kimura, one to restrain Saito, one to protect me, and another one to keep Odanaka from punching Saito into a bloody mass.

I ended up walking home with Yamamoto and a couple of other reporters. We stopped at a fast-food restaurant, Yoshinoya, for a bowl of rice topped with beef. I was a little worried that maybe I’d lost my job.

Yamamoto assured me that that was not the case. “Hey, that’s what bonenkai are all about. Tomorrow, everyone will have forgotten. Well, not really, but nobody will talk about it, so you shouldn’t either. By the way, nice punch. If you could write articles as well as you fight, you wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass.”

He was right. The next day it was as if the night before had never happened. I never discussed it with Kimura, and we got along better than we had before. He started to call me Jake-kun affectionately, and I made sure never to discuss politics with him.

I thought my year would end on a quiet note, until December 29, when Yamamoto and I were the only ones in the Saitama police press club. He was reading comic books on the sofa, and I was typing up an article on aloe plants blooming in the winter. Over the fire department radio band we heard of a fire spreading in Kawaguchi, so I hopped into a taxi and went to the scene.

By the time I got there, the fire had been contained. I was taking notes when I heard over the CB in the fire truck that there was another fire just seconds from where we now were. As the firemen rushed to their trucks, I ran ahead to the park where the fire was supposed to be happening.

As I turned the corner at the entrance to the park, I almost bumped into a walking tower of flame in human form. I got so close that my eyebrows
were singed. The figure walked in a circle around a seesaw in a slow, robotlike fashion while people from the neighborhood tossed buckets of water on him and sprayed him with extinguishers. A group of children gathered in a circle around him, watching the whole proceedings with fascination. I got a faceful of fire-retardant foam in the confusion before the man collapsed in a ball on the ground in a fetal position. The area smelled like kerosene, burned hot dogs, and hoisin sauce.

The man was still breathing. You could hear him wheeze, see his chest move. He took five more breaths, and then he died.

For a second there was total silence. Even the kids were quiet. You could hear the hum of traffic from a few streets away and the crackling of skin and nothing else. Then everyone started talking about what to do.

The firemen showed up two minutes later. One of the medics tried to find a pulse but singed his hand on the body, yelping in pain. Another medic brought out a stethoscope and put it where you would guess his chest had been. He pronounced the man dead on the spot and draped a blue tarp over the body. The police hadn’t arrived yet.

I called the office and let them know where I was, then started asking people in the crowd what had happened. The three elementary school children who had watched the entire thing brought me up to speed. The man, dressed in a blue work suit, had ridden into the park on his bicycle with a red plastic canister of kerosene in the basket. He had stopped, poured the kerosene over his head, and taken out a box of matches. He had had trouble lighting one, since they were soaked in kerosene, but had finally found a dry one, picked up a rock, and lit it off that. The moment he touched his chest, he burst into flames.

The kids tried to describe the sound but got into an argument as to whether it sounded like firecrackers or more like a
pachi-pachi
sound. They used the word to describe a man on fire,
hi-daruma (hi
means “fire,” and
daruma
refers to the legless, armless Buddhist icon). They didn’t seem fazed or shocked by the self-immolation in the least. For them, it was just an interesting incident.

I talked to one of the firemen on the scene.

“It’s a shame,” he said. “We see a lot of these things around this time of the year. People who don’t want to face the new year. Makes for a busy holiday, for us anyway.”

“Seems like a painful way to go.”

“Nah, not usually, since you lose consciousness. But if you don’t die immediately, it’s a terrible way to go. You just linger on in excruciating pain while your body gets infected, and then you die of your own toxicity. So his timing was good.”

He hauled the corpse into the back of an ambulance and wished me a happy new year.

I went off to the local police station to get the official details.

The victim was Hikoki Harasawa, age forty-eight, birthday on January 5. Not only was he facing a new year, he was looking at another birthday as well. He lived about five minutes from the park. His neighbors said he’d lost his job when a car parts factory closed down; he’d been jobless for months. It was still hard for me to imagine that a man would light himself on fire just for this. Later, when I began investigating yakuza loan-sharking schemes, I discovered what had probably put him over the edge: serious debt to seriously dangerous people.

I called Yamamoto at the press club.

He had one question: “Is the guy famous?”

I said he wasn’t.

“Then drop it,” Yamamoto said.

I went back to Urawa and picked up a gift for Ono, the big boss. He’d just had his first child, so we’d made a gag T-shirt with the image of his face in a
WANTED
poster with the crime of fathering children without a license. I took the T-shirt and my gift to his apartment.

Ono was tickled with the gifts and asked me to stay a bit. His wife brought us a couple of Budweisers. After a sip, Ono screwed up his face. “Do you like this American beer? This was on sale, so I thought I’d try it. It tastes terrible!”

“Yes, it tastes terrible,” I laughed. “Piss and ashes. That’s how we described it in Missouri.”

“Piss and ashes! Nice. I like that. It’s exactly what this tastes like.”

We poured the beer into the potted plant, opened two cans of Asahi beer, and chatted amicably. It was good to be alive and well in Japan.

The Japanese believe there’s a right way to live, to love, to induce female orgasm, to chop off your pinkie, to take off your shoes, to swing a bat, to write an article about homicide, to die—even to kill yourself. There’s a right way—a perfect way—to do everything.

The reverence for “the way”—the ideography is the
tao
of Chinese philosophy—is an integral part of Japanese society, a society that loves manuals, loves doing things by the book, literally. In ancient times, before the advent of mass-market publishing, manuals were written on scrolls. The people believed that
kotodama
—the soul or spirit of language—resided in every word; that in uttering a thought one gives life to it; that words hold a spiritual power. This belief gave the written and spoken language a near-mystical status and encouraged a reverence for the written word beyond that in the West.

Today the Japanese obsession with manuals is unabated. A few years ago, the term
manual ningen
(“manual humans”) was in vogue to describe a generation of younger Japanese who seemed incapable of independent thought. The term is now part of the vernacular, used for someone who can only follow instructions and can’t think outside the box. A synonym for
manual ningen
is
shijimachi ningen
(“the waiting-for-instructions people”), which, as you can imagine, refers to passive employees with no initiative.

I have never found a really good translation for
manual ningen
, so I prefer to use “manualoid” when discussing this trend in English. It’s not as great a made-up word as “truthiness,” but I like it.

It’s not uncommon for books labeled as manuals to spend weeks on
the best-seller rankings. Amazon Japan (
www.amazon.co.jp
) listed 9,994 manuals on its Web site at the time I first wrote this chapter, and both the sales rankings and the books themselves are a microcosm of Japanese society.

The number one–selling book was a manual for how to argue with Koreans (whether in Japan or South Korea—I can’t speak for North Korea) who don’t have nice things to say about Japan. Koreans keep moaning about the fact that Japan invaded Korea, enslaved their people, raped their women, forbade their language and culture, performed biological experiments on POWs, and kidnapped thousands of Koreans, shipping them off to Japan to work in sweatshops of industry. The thrust of the book is this: Tell those miserable Koreans to stop exaggerating and shut up.

The book has had one unexpected side effect: by disdaining Koreans’ complaints, it actually touches upon Japan’s less-than-noble history with Korea, which is something the Ministry of Education has worked hard to keep out of the public school system. Apparently, not knowing history means never having to say you’re sorry.

Number two on the best-seller list,
Kabu no zeikin
, was a manual for preparing your tax returns if you own or sell stocks. The popularity of this title, one assumes, is indicative of the significant flow of cash into and out of the Japanese stock market.

Number three was a manual for aspiring landlords. When land is scarce and housing is expensive, becoming a landlord is the high road to fortune and luxury. Japan, however, has very strong tenant rights embedded in the law that have been known to gum up the works. I assume that’s where the manual comes in, to keep that cash flowing. It was also a sign that the decadelong real estate slump might be coming to an end.

Number four was the perennially listed
Perfect Manual of Suicide
. The title is self-explanatory, to be taken literally. More on that later.

Number five:
The Manual of Superorgasmic Fellatio and Cunnilingus—with over 400 Photos
. I’m not making this one up. The Japanese are very sexually driven and they’re perfectionists, so this book fills an important niche, and it’s available almost anywhere in Japan. I’ve even seen it on the shelves of a 7-Eleven and a mom-and-pop bookstore in central Tokyo—not far, as a matter of fact, from the U.S. Embassy in Toranomon. That this book sells so well should tell you a little about the Japanese attitude toward sex and sexuality: enthusiastic, accepting,
condoning, clinical, and earnest. And from the targeting of the book, it’s clear that both men and women are interested in improving their technique or, at the very least, using textbooks to supplement the oral tradition. The book itself is very well researched and not without some practical value.

Number six was
The Advanced Cardiac Life Support Provider Manual
by the American Heart Association, translated into Japanese. My guess is that a lot of people buying number five are also buying number six.

Number seven was
Sex: A Foreplay Manual
. The fact that this book is number seven instead of number five suggests that most Japanese already have the basics of sexual intercourse down before they go book shopping.

Number eight was a book for engineers wanting to pass a really difficult test. Just the title gives me a headache, so I won’t even mention it here. I’ll be brief and just point out that there are lots of Japanese into learning and making a living doing really technical, brainy kinds of stuff.

Number nine:
The Sought-After Guy (How to Get Chicks): A Manual of 40 [Techniques]—What Women, in Their Heart of Hearts, Really Want from Men
. Originally published in 2003, with a price tag of 500 yen, this manual is a proven long and big seller, although it is now on sale for half price. You might think it’s odd that books about giving women better orgasms sell more than books about getting women in the first place—a case, perhaps, of putting the cart before the horse. Note, however, that numbers five and seven are aimed at men and women both, which explains the ranking. But maybe it doesn’t.

Number ten:
The Indispensable Manual for the National Center Test for University Admissions
. In Japan, the college you get into determines the rest of your natural life. Graduating from college isn’t usually so critical, although dropping out will tip the balance. If you can pass the entrance exams for a reputable university, 90 percent of the battle for good employment is won. Therefore, the most important rite of passage most Japanese have in their lives is taking this test; the fact that this manual isn’t higher on the list reflects the gentrification of Japan and the sharp decline in the birthrate. It may also reflect the general stupidification (made-up word) of Japanese youths. If the title were revised to, say,
The Indispensable Manga Manual for the National Center Test for University Admissions
, sales of this self-improvement tome could go through the roof.