Confessions of a Yakuza (27 page)

So she explained.

Around the time the war ended and naval officers were due to be discharged and sent home, there were various rumors going around about the occupation forces. One was that women would be raped, and it’d be safer if they shaved their heads. Another was that anyone caught with a sword on them would be arrested and shot. Well, it seems a lot of officers believed this story and just chucked their swords away, dumped them in a river or something. But some of them had swords by famous swordsmiths, and rather than lose them altogether, they got the idea of leaving them somewhere safe and getting them back later. That way, a number of officers came to see Kofuji and ask her to look after the things. The Bizen sword was one of them. It had been in the man’s family for generations; his grandfather had carried it into battle against the Russians. He told her before he left for home that she was to get rid of it if he didn’t come back for it within three years, but not before.

“My place was completely cluttered up with swords. And you know, it’s strange, but I kept feeling chilly with them in the house.”

“I wonder why, though?” I said a bit doubtfully.

“It’s true.”

“And so?”

“So, late one afternoon, I found this farmer in the alley outside, and gave him some money to put the swords in the box he used for collecting scraps of pig feed.”

“I bet he was pleased, wasn’t he?”

“He’d have been in trouble if he was found out, so he piled the scraps on top of them.”

The idea made me laugh. “Good for him!” I said. “But what about the Bizen sword—you didn’t get rid of that?”

“I was going to, but I couldn’t bring myself to somehow.”

“So you want
me
to look after it for you, eh?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

“But what’ll you do if the officer comes back?”

“I’ll tell him the Americans took it away. After all, the kind of man who’ll leave a family treasure with a geisha just because he’s afraid the Americans might catch him doesn’t
deserve
to have it back, does he?”

She had a point there. After I’d agreed to take it off her hands, I got an expert to have a look at it, and he said it was a fine piece of work. He wouldn’t name a figure, though, so it must have been quite valuable. I kept it around till only recently, but as there wasn’t much sense in keeping a sword at my age, I sold it to an antique dealer. I got a good price for it, too.

One of the “big spenders” at our games in those days was a guy called Tsukada Saburo, and his story’s worth telling you. I suppose it would have been about two months after the defeat that he first turned up. He came in carrying a big cloth bundle of money slung over his shoulder. Kamezo pointed him out to me.

“What do you think he is?” he said, looking worried. “Not one of
those
, I hope.” And he crooked his finger in the sign for a thief.

But when you heard what Saburo had to say for himself, you felt that “thief” didn’t do him justice. He was the kind of man, in fact, who makes you want to take your hat off to the human race. I mean, the way they won’t let anything keep them down for long.

He was the seventh son of a greengrocer, but he was turned out of home when he was still a kid. After that, he tried his hand at all sorts of jobs, and ended up a rickshaw man. That was just before the war. But since he only stood about four foot seven and was kind of scrawny, he was never called up. In due course, though, he was mobilized for war work, and the place they sent him was the naval air base at Tsuchiura.

A bunch of us were sitting there listening to him when he told us all about it.

“You ever been inside the base?” he asked me.

“I’ve been past it in the train, but never inside.”

“You wouldn’t understand what happened unless you’d actually seen inside. It was the biggest supply depot in the country. You name it, they had it. And within two weeks of the end of the war the whole lot had disappeared. I mean,
vanished
—without a trace.”

According to him, it was the Emperor’s broadcast—the one announcing the defeat—that started it all off.

“It made thieves of everybody,” he said. “There were some, of course, who wept and wailed about it, but most people were as pleased as punch. Up till then, you couldn’t so much as fart without written permission for some high-up, but now it was first come, first served. And there was this treasure trove right under their noses, waiting to be cleaned out before the Yanks got to it.

“It started with things like blankets and parachute material. They were falling over each other, dragging it out in great bundles and taking it home. The parachute stuff was silk, and worth its weight in gold. You had to be a fool not to try and nick your share.”

But that was only the beginning. Before long, he said, it wasn’t just the civilian workers and NCOs, but anyone else who’d heard that since the defeat you could get into the base without a special pass.

“They came in swarms, like ants. They barged into one warehouse after another—whichever was nearest—grabbed whatever came to hand, put it on carts, and hauled it off.

“The bigger things took a bit of organizing. What happened was, the local big shots used the name of some organization—the Agricultural Co-op or something—and applied to the Supplies Department for an official transfer of property. Not that the department had much clout by then, but they must have been on the take as well, and stamped the documents for them. So naval trucks were made available, and carried off loads of heavy stuff....

“In Takatsu,” he told us, “they’d dug deep tunnels in the cliffs, and when the raids got bad the navy shifted tons of food there to keep it safe. I was around when this was going on, so I knew where it was, and so did the people in the neighborhood. And under cover of night, they ‘evacuated’ it themselves—left the place as clean as a whistle, apparently.

“Evacuating” military stores

“Some of these supplies, in fact, were already in ordinary people’s homes. The military had taken over civilian storehouses to keep their own supplies in, a bit in each place —clothes, blankets, canned food, machine tools, etc. Well, with the end of the war, the original owners sort of disappeared, and nobody saw anything wrong with helping himself to them.

“There was masses of timber in the depot, too. Forests were requisitioned during the war—leaving most of our hillsides bare as a result. They used some of the wood to build boats and so on, but a lot of it was left over. So the navy turned it into charcoal and rationed it out to the families of NCOs and above.

“I knew about this,” he said, “because while the war was still on, I’d been in charge of the men making the charcoal. I had three kilns built outside the base, and we produced bales and bales of it—good oak and beech charcoal that you’d never get in most households at the time.

“Being an insider, there wasn’t much I didn’t know about how the other half—the officers—lived. Like what went on in the galleys, as they called them. They had everything: meat, fish, vegetables, piles of the stuff. I was always trying to lift a bit of their grub and give it to the women workers at the base. Lots of them were just middle school girls, you know; they barely got enough to eat in their own homes, and they were stunned when they heard about all that meat.”

Another luxury the officers had was coal briquets. Heaps of coal had been commandeered from the mines—more than they could ever use—but as there was nowhere in ordinary houses where you could burn coal directly, it had to be turned into briquets.

“One day,” Saburo went on, “this lieutenant in Supplies sent for me and said he’d give me twenty men to do the briquet-making work. I’d put ‘briquet manufacturer’ down as one of my trades in the form I’d given them, so he must have thought he was onto a good thing.

“Well, making things is just my line—I can even make babies with other men’s wives!—and this was a cinch for me. First you powdered the coal, then made a paste out of it with water and a bit of clay. Since the clay wasn’t enough to make it set hard, we used to mix in a kind of seaweed called Ise laver as well. After that, all you had to do was shape it and dry it, and you’d got your briquets.

“But there was a limit to the number we could turn out. I knew an ironworks in Chiba, though, where they made briquet-producing machines. So I told the lieutenant about it and suggested he order one; that way, he could keep all the officers supplied, I said.

“He agreed right away. So I went down there and told them what I wanted; but they said they didn’t make them any more, nobody was buying them. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but orders are orders, so do what you can, and just name your price.’

“ ‘Well,’ they said, ‘we
could
do it, but it’ll cost you seventy thousand.’ A hell of a price. But I told them OK, go ahead—it wasn’t
my
money, after all. And for two whole days they gave me the red-carpet treatment, with geisha laid on ... I couldn’t walk straight for a week.

“A while later, word came that it was ready, so I went to the lieutenant to get the money. But all he gave me was a requisition order, no cash, and when I turned up in Chiba with it, the poor factory owner just burst into tears. You see, with one of those orders, you could walk off with anything—cars, cows, horses, boats, anything—just by handing over a slip of paper. And if anyone objected, they put the MPs onto him.

“After all the wine, women, and song I’d had at their expense, I felt bad about it, but there wasn’t anything I could do. I got them to help me load it on the truck, and took it away. And it worked: it turned out thirty briquets at a time. I was impressed; the officers’ wives were pleased; and the lieutenant was plain delighted—told me that on the battlefield I’d have been decorated for it....”

“Was there really all that much stuff at the base?” Okyo said, putting her head on one side as if she had trouble believing him.

“There was! Oh yes, they made a packet out of what they stole.”

“If I’d known, I’d have gone along myself,” somebody else put in. And they all looked as if they’d missed out on something.

“That’s what I said, didn’t I?—anybody who didn’t join in was a fool. But you know—
real
thieves are in a different class. We had a few of them as well.” Saburo stared around at everybody and took a swig of his tea.

“The biggest of the lot was the lieutenant himself. He was a real quick-change artist. Almost overnight, he got rid of everything to do with the navy—his epaulets, his sword, his cap. Then he called everybody of foreman rank together and told us: ‘As you know, this air depot, like everywhere else, has got to wind up business before the Americans arrive. I need your cooperation. You’ll all be wanting to get home as soon as possible yourselves, so from now on I’m going to pay you a daily allowance of five hundred yen.’

“That made everyone rub their eyes. I mean, till then our salaries had been thirty yen a
month
. There were about fifty men of our rank, and we all jumped at the offer. What the actual work involved was loading heavy stores onto trains. There were plenty of sidings inside the base, and every morning dozens of freight cars came in for us to load.

“Mostly it was steel plates, brass, sheets of copper, duralumin, and other alloys—high-grade stuff they used for making aircraft axles and so on. There was masses of tin as well, in bars the shape of bricks. As I found out later, one of them alone would have fetched thousands on the black market. Anyway, the loads were so heavy they made the springs sag if we shoved in anything over a quarter of the car’s capacity.

“The trouble was that, like a fool, I thought it was going off to be handed over to the occupation authorities. But I was wrong. The bastards in charge knew it was worth too much for that. They’d worked out that if they got it hidden away before the Americans came, then sold it on the black market, they could make a fortune. And there we were, slaving away to make it easy for them.”

“You mean, you did the work without knowing what they were up to?” one of us asked.

“Yep. We were soft—we followed the lieutenant’s orders. Just went on loading till the warehouses were empty.”

There was a groan from everybody in the room.

“You really don’t know where they hid the stuff?” I asked, feeling a bit suspicious.

But Saburo took it in his stride. “If I did, you’d have heard about it,” he said. “You could have bought all Hokkaido and Kyushu with that much stuff. So if I had any leads, I would’ve asked you to help track it down....