They sped past Tokyo’s Marunochi District, where blocs of banks, investment houses, and trading companies that made up “Japan Incorporated,” the heart of the nation’s financial empire, stood shoulder-to-shoulder like stones in a fortress wall. Tokugawa noted the gleaming marble headquarters of the Commerce Bank of Japan, Nippon Heavy Industries, Sumitomo International, and Chikara Electronics.
Tokugawa was on a first-name basis with the executives who ran these businesses. His connections and influence had helped many of them build their empires. In return, their enormous financial resources were always at his disposal. Yet there were times when Tokugawa needed more than financial muscle. Sometimes he needed the kind of muscle only a man like Ojima, Kabukicho’s most powerful yakuza chieftain, could deliver.
Tokugawa looked at Ojima and said, “Business is good, yes?”
The wiry man shrugged. He had a hard face that remained immobile, like a Kabuki mask. Tokugawa knew he was a good judge of refined heroin and had an unquenchable lust for money. “Yes, Iseda-san. But the foreigners, the Taiwanese Mafia, AIDS,” he shrugged again, “they all take a bite. I miss the simpler times.”
Tokugawa said, “Yes, we are both vulnerable to the vagaries of economics and social turmoil.” A long pause. “And our friend Naito, he poses a different kind of problem, no?”
At one time Masayuki Naito had been Ojima’s protégé and partner. Now he wanted to oust Ojima as Kabukicho’s supreme yakuza and take control of Tokyo’s pink industry. Worse, he was muscling in on the lucrative drug trade Ojima controlled.
Ojima said, “Yes, he is a problem. I have enough trouble from the metropolitan government without worrying about him. And now the foreigners are making inroads, trying to buy up the clubs. Even women are becoming club owners.”
Two wealthy Indonesian women had recently opened The Crystal Palace, a lavish sex club that catered exclusively to high-level salarymen who paid to unwind in private rooms with classy prostitutes. The women’s success angered Ojima. “Naito backs them,” he said, his face stony.
Gaze fixed straight ahead, Tokugawa said, “And now he is going around you, trying to do business directly with Wu Chow Fat. Yes?”
Ojima nodded.
“Then it is time to put an end to his entrepreneurial spirit. I don’t want Wu Chow Fat caught in the middle, between you and Naito.”
Ojima barked a laugh. “Caught in the middle, Iseda-san? But that’s what Wu Chow Fat is, a middleman. He works the road between us, the North Koreans, the Mainland Chinese, and the Taiwanese. And now Naito.”
“Then there is even more reason to cut Naito out of the chain.”
“It is not easy to do. He pays for protection from the head of the prefecture police.”
The Maybach had reentered the Shuto Expressway and was speeding back to Kabukicho.
Tokugawa, his white shirt so stiff with starch that it crackled when he reached into his inside jacket pocket, removed an envelope and laid it on the seat cushion next to Ojima. “Please.”
Ojima opened the envelope and looked at a document.
Tokugawa said, “That confirms a final payment of two million dollars has been transferred from Daiwa Bank to Chase in New York. The funds are already in your designated account. A similar amount is in the Swiss account owned by the head of the prefecture police.”
“Ah…”
“Sometimes things require certain measures.”
Ojima gave Tokugawa a small head bow. “With respect, Tokugawa-san, for a stupid man, Naito has been extremely lucky—”
Tokugawa’s eyes bulged ominously. “He is clever!” he snapped, “not lucky. Above all, he is not stupid. You, Ojima, are the stupid one. You allowed Naito to make a fool of you.” Tokugawa’s eyes were about to pop from their sockets. “You should have tended to this business when it was clear he had plans to challenge your control of Kabukicho.”
Again, Ojima bobbed his head. “I apologize for my shortcomings.”
The car exited the expressway and dove into Kabukicho’s narrow streets.
Tokugawa said, “You have two days to conclude your business with Naito. Before I depart for southern waters.”
“I understand.”
Tokugawa’s driver pulled up in front of the Shinjuki Ward Office. The Maybach, its twin-supercharged V-12 engine idling imperceptibly, sat at the curb while rain, cold and steady, beat against the passenger cabin’s darkened windows. Tokugawa watched pedestrians, salarymen, and secretaries scurry through wet streets. Those without umbrellas held folded newspapers over their heads. Ojima, Tokugawa noted, had no umbrella and no newspaper.
Tokugawa said gravely, “It would not please me to see Naito doing business with Wu Chow Fat. Naito is a hothead and too involved with those Colombian powder merchants and Russian arms dealers. And frankly he’s not as easy to do business with as you are. I like our arrangement better.” He looked at Ojima and actuated the automatic door lock. “Two days.”
Tokugawa watched the downpour turn the yakuza’s jade-green suit black as he ran for cover.
The Maybach departed Kabukicho and sped east through the crowded Ginza to the Ichigaya section of Tokyo.
Tokugawa didn’t blame Wu Chow Fat for entertaining offers from Naito; Fat was a businessman, after all. Instead, he cursed Ojima and seethed at the loss of face he’d suffered. Ojima had forgotten how business was conducted in Japan. And also how to show proper respect to the person who saw to it that doing such business in Japan was possible in the first place. Lately Tokugawa had detected a subtle shift in his relationship with Ojima, who, lately, had seemed more like a lover whose ardor had grown cold. Tokugawa blamed it on the young and ambitious Naito. Ojima had two days to make amends. He knew what would happen to him if he failed.
Tokugawa arrived at the headquarters of the Japan Pacific War Veterans Association’s office north of the Imperial Palace grounds, which overlooked the abandoned but still imposing World War II Imperial Army Headquarters building.
Tokugawa stepped from the elevator and was greeted by a row of six smiling, bowing executives wearing dark, shiny suits, white shirts, and, like Tokugawa, black silk neckties.
The association’s president, Ichiro Hatoyama, chairman of Nippon Technologies, Ltd., a short, stubby man in his late fifties, greeted Tokugawa. He bowed deeply, hands held flat against his thighs. “It is such a great pleasure to see you, Iseda-san. Welcome!”
Tokugawa greeted the others and was escorted into a conference room, which doubled as a museum. Preserved artifacts from the Pacific War — swords, bayonets, grenades, Arisaka bolt-action rifles, Nambu pistols, and sunburst flags — were displayed in glass cases. A battle scene painted in oils covered one whole wall. The work glorified determined Japanese troops and civilians turning back an American amphibious assault, one that never materialized, on the beaches of the Tokyo Plain in 1946. It was titled Defeat of America.
The other members took seats and sat stiffly and silently around a huge, black conference table while a servant set at each man’s place hot tea and sweet, sticky rice cakes. Tokugawa stood at the glass curtain wall, looking out at the ugly granite edifice that had once been the headquarters of Japan’s Imperial Army. Like his colleagues, Tokugawa believed that the spirit of the Imperial Army and that of its leader, General Hideki Tojo, still dwelled there. To most Japanese, the building personified the malignancy of Japan’s wartime savagery and was therefore hated.
Tokugawa rolled back the calendar, changing the scene outside to early summer 1945: Instead of sleek Toyotas and Hondas clogging Tokyo’s streets, he saw jinrickshaws and, overhead, not fat 747s but formations of silver B-29s raining devastation on a mammoth scale. His memory of the carnage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that was then yet to come made Tokugawa shudder.