• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Wilderness House Literary Review 7/3 Don MacLaren Interview with Robert Whiting, author of Tokyo Underworld Questions (Q): Don MacLaren Answers (A): Robert Whiting Robert (Bob) Whiting is a critically acclaimed and commercially suc- cessful author whose book, Tokyo Underworld, I would put at the top of my list for anyone with any interest in Japan – or for that matter anyone interested in U.S. post-war relations in East Asia, with a cast of characters as colorful as any I’ve come across in either fiction or non-fiction. His works – written in both English and Japanese – focus on gangsters operating in Japan, baseball and U.S.-Japanese relations. His book You Gotta Have Wa was submitted by its original publisher, MacMillan, as an entry for a Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction. Bob first came to Japan as a young man in the early 1960’s while serv- ing in the U.S. Air Force and has spent most of his time in Japan since then. He attended college at Sophia University in Tokyo, majoring in Politi- cal Science, with an emphasis on Japanese politics, writing his thesis on the factions of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party. He is married to Machiko Kondo, who recently retired from her job with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Her last post, in Stockholm, was as Representative for Scandinavia, an ambassador-level position. Bob graciously took time while vacationing in Paris with his wife this past summer to allow me to interview him by e-mail. Here is what he had to say: Q: Why did you begin to write and when did you first start writing seriously? A: 1973. I had moved to New York after spending 10 years in Japan. I was living in Manhattan and was spending a lot of time talking about my experiences in Tokyo. People were less interested in Japanese politics (my field) and other such topics than they were in my stories about baseball and the difficulties imported American ballplayers had in adjusting to baseball in Japan. I was a big baseball fan in Japan and found that looking at the different way the Japanese approached the game provided a win- dow into the Japanese culture as a whole. Friends encouraged me to write a book about it and so I did. Took a year to write 100,000 words. The result was The Chrysanthemum and the Bat. It was the first thing I’d ever written and it showed. Q: You served in the U.S. military and went to college in Tokyo in the 60’s. At that time Tokyo, along with places like Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Chicago, New York and Paris was in a state of revolutionary cultural Wilderness House Literary Review 7/3 and political ferment. What are your impressions of that period in To- kyo? A: It was exciting. I was there when the students took over the cam- pus of Tokyo University. I also took part in a Zengakuren demonstration in front of Shinjuku station[1] demanding the U.S. return Okinawa to Japan. The Zengakuren was the big leftist student alliance, famous for their snake dance protests. I was tear-gassed by the Japanese riot police that night. There were some very smart, articulate people leading the student move- ment. But what got me was when they graduated, they all got jobs in big corporations, working for Japan Inc. They went from being socialists to capitalists overnight. Still, the demonstrations had value. If nothing else, they were a great way to meet girls. Q: The last time I looked at your Wikipedia page it stated you were an “informal advisor” to the Sumiyoshi-kai, one of the largest crime syn- dicates in the world. Is that accurate? If so, what does an informal advi- sor to such an organization do? A: This was 1969-1970 or so. I got to know one of the yakuza belonging to a wing of the Sumiyoshi-kai which ran my neighborhood in Higashi Na- kano.[2]. He was an enforcer. He collected tribute, or protection payments, if you will, from the various bars and nightclubs in the area. He told me his gang was going to open up a new club in Shinjuku[3] using hostesses imported from Southeast Asia. Nobody in the gang could speak English, so he asked me to manage the club for them. They offered me 300,000 eny a month, which was a lot of money at the time. But I already had a good day job with Encyclopaedia Britannica Japan in their Editorial Department that took up a lot of my time, so I turned him down. Also, I did not want to be beholden to yakuza. I had seen this particular guy lose his temper one night and almost kill a cab driver for refusing to pick him up. Going to work for someone like him was playing with fire. So, I offered to help out on the side. I wound up writing messages in English for them to show to the girls. “Don’t drink so much.” “Don’t sleep with the customers” or “Please sleep with the customers.” Sometimes I would talk to hostesses for them. That is how I became an informal advisor. They would invite me to their meetings and their receptions. They would treat me to dinner, take me out to their private drinking establishments and set me up with beau- tiful women - whatever I wanted. But then they started asking me about getting guns for them and I decided to back off. Gun laws are really strict in Japan. You can go to jail for a long time if you are caught with one, and Japanese prisons are extremely unpleasant—no heat in the winter, no den- tal care. I left Japan at the end of 1972 and never saw them again. Q: How well did you know Nick Zappetti – the“American gang- ster in Japan” who is the subject of the subtitle of Tokyo Underworld? Did you consider him a friend? (I have to say that though he is a rather unsavory character, in many ways I empathized with him, given that he experienced frustrations similar to those of many foreigners in Japan.) A: I ate at his restaurant for years. The ballplayers used to go there all the time. But I never talked to him until fall 1989. You Gotta Have Wa had just come out the previous summer and he approached me one day while I was sitting at a table by myself, with a copy of the book in his hand. He said, “Did you write this?” I said “Yes, I did.” And then he said, “Well — 2 — Wilderness House Literary Review 7/3 have I got a story for you.” That’s how our relationship started. My agent in New York had told me to write about something other than baseball, and Zappetti seemed a good place to start. So I interviewed him for 20 hours over the following weeks. He told me stories about Rikidozan, Ginza Machii[4] and the Tosei-kai gang of Korean yakuza, his days as a black marketer, the crimes he committed as well as his various love affairs. Then it took me two years to check out and verify everything he said. I had to study the history of the gangs, the black markets and professional wrestling, as well as interview the people in Zappetti’s circle. I also had to finish writing Slugging It Out in Japan, a book I had started writing after turning Wa in. Then I went back and interviewed him for another 20 hours. I’d never met anyone so willing to talk about the most intimate de- tails of his life. But, as he explained, he had a bad heart and wanted to get some things off his chest before he died. He passed away in 1991 shortly after our last interview. By that time I guess I did consider him a friend. It took me another five years to finish Tokyo Underworld. There was a lot of legwork left to do on the other parts of the book. Q: You wrote the foreword for the English edition of Toppamono, the memoir of Manabu Miyazaki – a person who grew up in a yakuza family, became a student radical in the 60’s, was the prime suspect in the Glico-Morinaga case (a case of kidnapping and extortion in 1984, which has never been solved), subsequently cleared, and later became a journalist and writer. Like Nick Zappetti he sounds like an interesting guy. How well do you know him? What’s he like? Would he be someone readers of this interview might want to sit down and have a beer with (if they could speak Japanese)? A: I had a three-hour taidan (interview/conversation) with him for a magazine and dinner on a couple of other occasions. He’s soft-spoken, very smart and very cynical about so-called straight society. He said the only difference between yakuza and people involved in banking, the stock market and real estate is that yakuza are up front about the crimes they commit. I remember he said the techniques he learned as a student radical were not all that different from techniques yakuza employed. Q: You and the journalist David Halberstam have written extensively on both sports and East Asia. He said your writing on baseball “is appli- cable to almost every other dimension of American-Japanese relations.” How well did you know him? What was he like? A: I knew David quite well.

Load more

  14

Copy Link