People Who Eat Darkness (28 page)

“When they captured one, they shouted, ‘Korean!’” according to a contemporary account.

Many Japanese rushed to the scene, surrounding the victim. They tied him to a telephone pole, scooped out his eyes, cut off his nose, chopped open his stomach, and pulled out his internal organs. Sometimes they tied a Korean’s neck to a car and dragged him around until he choked to death. They also captured women, grabbed their legs, pulled them in opposite directions, and tore their bodies. The Koreans resisted till the last moment, begging and insisting on their innocence. But the crowd never listened.

Two or three years after this, near the port city of Pusan, in what is now South Korea, Joji Obara’s parents were born.

*   *   *

In Japan, a crime is regarded not merely as the act of a criminal; in some deep sense, it originates from within his family. Morally, if not legally, his closest relatives also bear a responsibility—hence the spectacle, surprisingly common in Japan, of a wrongdoer’s parents (and sometimes siblings, schoolteachers, even employers) bowing deeply before the cameras and offering tearful apologies for deeds over which they had no influence or control. So within hours of Obara’s arrest, Japanese reporters were competing with one another to find out where he came from and who his people were.

The essential facts—name, age, and occupation—were quickly established. But there the flow of information stopped. A few years later, I spent several weeks inquiring into Obara’s background. I spoke to a dozen Japanese journalists, veterans of solemn broadsheets and scandalous weekly magazines, who collectively had put in months of work. They were experienced investigative reporters; they had time, resources, and contacts. But between their efforts and mine, we assembled little more than scraps. “In most criminal cases,” one magazine reporter told me, “even if you don’t get anything from the family, then at least people around them will talk—friends, neighbors, business colleagues. But in Obara’s case there was almost nothing.”

His father’s name was Kim Kyo Hak, his mother’s Chun Ok Su. They came to Japan before the war, not as conscripts but as voluntary migrants. According to one of his sons, Kim Kyo Hak was imprisoned for two and a half years for his resistance to the Japanese, although where, when, and how this happened is not clear. But he was in Japan in 1945, and in little more than a decade he went from being a disenfranchised immigrant to one of the richest men in Japan’s second-biggest city.

Japan immediately after the war was poor and chaotic, but for Koreans it was a moment of rare confidence and opportunity. One can imagine the powerful, even violent, exhilaration: after thirty-five years as despised underdogs, Zainichi stood suddenly alongside the victors, a liberated people in the heart of the defeated country. Osaka, like almost every other city, had been substantially destroyed by Allied bombing. Title deeds to property had been lost forever; in the confusion that followed, force was enough to make claims to land that might never be overturned. Black markets sprang up in the ruins, dominated by the Japanese yakuza on one side, and on the other by the people referred to as
sangokujin
, or “third-country people”—newly liberated citizens of the former colonies. There were murderous turf wars. The police looked on helplessly as armies of gangsters fought pitched battles with hundreds of Koreans, Taiwanese, and Chinese. Many Zainichi hurried back to Korea after liberation, but conditions there were as wretched and desperate as in Japan. And after the exultation of victory, those who stayed behind were soon faced with the reality of their situation. They were still poor, still disadvantaged, and still the victims of prejudice. And with the defeat of the empire and the liberation of Korea, they were unambiguously foreigners, stripped of even the basic rights of colonial subjects.

Zainichi formed themselves into two organizations: Mindan, affiliated with the right-wing American-backed dictatorship in the south of Korea; and Ch
ō
sen S
ō
ren, which was loyal to the Communist north. In 1950, backed by the United States and China respectively, the two Koreas embarked on the three-year war that ruined and pauperized the peninsula all over again. The tragedy of the Korean War was Japan’s good fortune, as the American military’s demand for steel, uniforms, and supplies jerked its economy into recovery.

By the time the future Joji Obara was born in 1952 as Kim Sung Jong, his father, Kim Kyo Hak, was rich. Exactly how he made his fortune is difficult to tell, but for a man in his position the possibilities were limited. No large or respectable company would take on a Korean as anything but a manual laborer; no Japanese bank would lend him money. Apart from property, Kim Kyo Hak had at least three sources of income: parking lots, a taxi company, and pachinko—a uniquely Japanese arcade game, a kind of vertical electronic bagatelle, and one of the few forms of gambling tolerated by the law. The common feature of all these enterprises was that they demanded no large-scale capital investment. A shop or a restaurant required premises, staff, and stock. But having acquired a plot of vacant land, a car, or a pachinko machine, a man could start to make money from them immediately. Each day brought cash income, for the simple needs of survival or to reinvest (another car, a second machine). But even businesses as simple as this could not prosper in a vacuum.

Successful pachinko players were not rewarded directly with cash, but with prizes such as cigarettes or coupons that they could take to a discreet window nearby and exchange for money—by this means, the pachinko parlors bypassed the legal ban on gambling. The cash windows were operated by yakuza gangs, who creamed off a commission. The gangs also kept order in the markets, “resolved” ownership disputes over property, drove out unwanted tenants, made loans, and allocated the right of businesses to operate on a particular territory—all for the appropriate fee. The yakuza had always been a refuge for those with nowhere else to go, for the poor, outcast, and marginalized. Koreans were prominent in the great Japanese gang syndicates—the Yamaguchi-gumi in Osaka and Kobe, and the Sumiyoshi-kai in Tokyo—and there were Korean gangs too, such as the Yamagawa-gumi and the Meiyu-kai, notorious for their aggression, who defended Zainichi shops and ghettos.

There is no evidence that Kim Kyo Hak was a yakuza, or that he played any part in organized crime. He had no criminal record. But for many men of his background, in that place, at that time, and in those businesses, some kind of contact with the criminal syndicates was common. “It was inevitable,” said Manabu Miyazaki, a journalist and the son of a yakuza boss. “For a Zainichi Korean, establishing relations with the yakuza was a condition of running a successful business.”

*   *   *

“In the taxi business, he was the most successful,” said an Osaka Korean who remembered Kim Kyo Hak. “In the pachinko business too. He was charming, sociable, talkative. He was rather fat, and none too tall. He always wore a jacket that was too big for him. He drove the most expensive cars. He began his career in the market.” The man who told me this was a respected public servant in his fifties, distinguished in his field, with a foreign education and a fine collection of classical music recordings. His father, like Joji Obara’s, had been a Korean immigrant, and he smiled as he recalled how he had supported his family by purchasing dead horses from the knacker’s yards of the occupying American forces and selling their meat as beef.

Those who made a success of life in the Zainichi ghettos shared this spirit of opportunistic entrepreneurship. People who lived through the ten years after the war remember a period of acute hardship and food shortages, in which grown adults sometimes died of hunger, but they also talk of fellowship and camaraderie that are rarely present in times of prosperity and of a dark, gallows humor. The Kim family lived in the Abeno-ku area of Osaka, in a neighborhood of wooden homes thrown up hard by one another in narrow alleys off a street of shops and market stalls. It was a tough, cheerful, noisy place; one of the family’s pachinko parlors was around the corner. But by the time the future Joji Obara was a toddler, the family had moved to an area little more than a mile south but a world apart in social status and glamour.

This was Kitabatake, an immaculate district of huge silent houses surrounded by gardens in walled-off compounds, inhabited by the wealthiest and most respectable people in Osaka. They were people of restraint and breeding; however surprised they were at their new neighbors, they would have been unlikely to make any display of overt racism. But Korean immigrants in an area like this in the 1950s could not but have been conscious of their difference from those around them.

In secluding themselves in such an area, the Kims would also have detached themselves from the life of the Korean community at large. But perhaps this was happening anyway. Kim Kyo Hak was one of the wealthiest men in Osaka—yet now almost no one remembers him. Like his son after him, he strove to move through life without a trace.

Compelled, like all Zainichi, to make a choice of nationality after the war, he took that of South Korea. The rival residents’ associations, Mindan and Ch
ō
sen S
ō
ren, were central to the lives of many Koreans in Japan. They served as social clubs, schools, and cultural centers, where friends and contacts could be made. Associated with them were credit unions that lent money to businessmen who could raise nothing from the Japanese banks. But, most unusually, Mr. Kim was not affiliated to either of them.

The characters on the huge front gate in Kitabatake identified the family as Kim. But they also used the name Hoshiyama. Koreans often took new names because of the advantages to be had from fitting in, from being able to pass as Japanese. But the effort was self-defeating, because the names they chose still distinguished them as Koreans. Hoshiyama, for example, was the kind of name recognizable as typical of Zainichi. The Zainichi knew this, and it expressed their plight and their pride, and the pain of surrendering completely an identity as deep as that of race.

“That was the period when the gap began to open up between rich and poor Koreans,” Manabu Miyazaki told me. “The society was split between the extremes. People like Obara and his family were the winners, in that sense. They would have had faith in the future, in a life without discrimination. But in Japanese society, discrimination is not so easily overcome. The Japanese tribe wants always to keep itself separate from other people, to maintain the differences. For Koreans who believed in their equality, that sense of difference was a cause of fury.”

*   *   *

“The first generation had great regard for their Korean identity,” said the man whose father had sold horsemeat. “Among them were some who had success in business, charismatic figures who built their own empires. They couldn’t find employment in the mainstream of Japanese society because of discrimination, and when they came across such discrimination, they asked themselves why. The answer they came up with was: education. They didn’t have a decent education—my father only went through elementary school, for example. And so they wanted their children to have a better education than they had received themselves.”

After his arrest, Joji Obara resisted all inquiries into his childhood and family. But a bizarre book, commissioned six years later by his lawyer, and that bears the signs of originating with Obara himself, dwells in detail on what he calls his “extreme special education for the gifted,” which began in early childhood. In the absence of other information about the family, it is revealing about the intense pressure that Mr. and Mrs. Kim placed upon their children from an early age. “My father was in prison for two and a half years,” Obara’s younger brother told me in my one, strange encounter with him. “He was [in the] resistance, fighting the Japanese. But the only thing I can blame him [for] is [that] he has no time to take care of the family. But he always said the importance of education.”

Two years before he went to elementary school, Kim Sung Jong was sent to a Roman Catholic nursery; every day when he got home from school, three private tutors were waiting for the little boy. Violin and piano lessons, according to the book, began “at the age of three years and ten months.” On Saturdays, he studied with his music teachers from lunchtime until evening, and then played with an orchestra for an hour. On Sundays, there were more private tutorials in the morning and afternoon. “It was dreadful having no free time,” the book, narrated in the third person, records. “[Obara] deliberately pretended to be not worthy of teaching in order to escape from the misery.” He wrote his schoolwork with his left hand, instead of his right, to spoil his handwriting, and started on exam answers only when the time was nearly up. This later account summarizes the situation with an intriguing phrase: “He liberated himself by degrading himself.”

At the age of six he entered the famous school attached to the Osaka University of Education, one of the best schools in the country. It was a self-consciously elitist institution, founded in emulation of a British public school. In the 1950s, many of the teachers were former officers of the disbanded Imperial Army and Navy, and the parents of the Osaka upper middle class—doctors, lawyers, and businessmen—competed to enrol their young sons.

At school, Kim Sung Jong was known as Seisho Kin. A man who was in his class at elementary school remembered wrestling and playing baseball with him. “He was a strong boy then, on the big side,” he told me. “He had an older brother at the school, and I remember going to their house in Kitabatake, and his mother, who was very kind to me. He was a real Korean. He got angry quickly; he was very short-tempered. I thought his eyes were very strong. He had a strength in his eyes. But it would not be true to say that everyone liked him.”

Another classmate from those days also played baseball with Seisho Kin. “He always wanted to be the pitcher,” he remembered. “Not that he threw very fast or with great control. He always wanted to show off, but his technique didn’t match his ambition. I don’t remember seeing him laugh cheerfully as a child. And he wanted things his way, without paying attention to what other people might feel. I think he set up a wall between himself and others. His contacts with others were shallow or nonexistent. When you ask me now, I can’t think who his close friends were.”