Tokyo Underworld by Robert Whiting Read Free Book Online Page A

workforce willing to toil twelve to fifteen hours a day and to careful government direction of investment.
    As early as 1956, Japan would pass Britain to become the world’s leading shipbuilding nation, led by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Ishikawaharimajima. A firm called Sony would already bemaking portable transistor radios, and the textile, steel and mining industries would be competing internationally.
    Although Tokyo was still a dusty, rubble-strewn city where homeless ex-soldiers vied with street urchins for handouts and graduates of Japan’s esteemed Tokyo University drove cabs (Renault cabs because there were no domestic autos), the economic recovery was especially noticeable during the year-end holiday season, when Japanese business corporations held thank-you banquets for suppliers, clients and workers to reward them for their devotion. Faced with a rare opulent buffet and all the alcohol he could consume for free, the impoverished, malnourished employee (whose average waist size was estimated to be about twenty-four inches) would gorge himself and inevitably wind up getting sick on the way home – which inspired a popular haiku of the time:
    Christmas
,
    Stars in the heaven
    Vomit in the street
    In 1952, 1953 and 1954, the list of all income earners, Japanese or foreign, as reported by the National Tax Office, was topped by the aforementioned Blakemore, a self-confessed Japan addict who, after translating the Japanese Civil Code into English, had set up a private commercial law practice on the Ginza, taking on many of the clients of the ACJ’s James Lee Kauffman, who willingly provided the introductions. He represented General Electric, RCA, International Nickel, and Dow Chemical in joint ventures with big Japanese firms. Blakemore hobnobbed with the likes of John Foster Dulles, John D. Rockefeller III (one of the five brothers indirectly controlling the Standard Oil and Chase Manhattan Bank empire and the largest single foreign investor in Japan), Shigeru Yoshida, who was prime minister of Japan from 1948 to 1954, and the Crown Prince.
    To some Japanese, the tall rangy Oklahoman embodied the ideal image of the American, the one they saw in the popular TV series
Father Knows Best
. He lived with his wife, a graphic designer with the State Department named Frances Baker, in a newly built American-style house that stood on land in central Tokyo purchased at bargain basement prices. There was a big, modern, American-style kitchen and a huge refrigerator stocked full of food. Blakemore’s dogs, a pair of blooded Irish setters, ate better than most Japanese.
    Tokyo was a city brimming with opportunity of all sorts where there were also thousands of other
gaijin
– ex-Occupationnaires, carpetbaggers, drifters on the make – whose presence caused many Japanese observers to bemoan the transformation of Tokyo as a ‘miserable colonial city’.
    One of them was American Ted Lewin, a thickset, flashily dressed man in his fifties, of Asian extraction it was rumored, who traversed the ruined city in a black Cadillac limousine, one of the few deluxe cars in a sea of Army jeeps and three-wheeled trucks. Lewin, a mobster formerly associated with Al Capone, introduced casino gambling to the Japanese.
    Gambling was illegal in Japan and had been for centuries (the old shoguns had believed that such a ban was necessary to maintain order among the populace, even though they themselves occasionally invited the
bakuto
into the castle for a private gaming session). Indeed, the only type of public wagering allowed was on thoroughbred racing under the aegis of the Ministry of Agriculture and on municipally sponsored bicycle and motorboat races established after the war specifically to raise needed revenue for local government. In fact, the Japanese authorities took the anti-gambling laws so seriously they once blocked a raffle at the American Club.
    But Lewin, who had been in and out of Asia since the 1930s – he had managed the