Authors: Robert Whiting
Dubbed ‘Little Napoleon’ by his enemies, Kodama originally made his mark in the 1930s as a government procurement agent in China, pillaging the countryside with a regiment of soldiers that included yakuza bosses he had personally recruited from Tokyo. (A favorite Kodama modus operandi in China, postwar testimony revealed, was to enter a village and have the mayor immediately shot to ensure everyone’s full cooperation in donating supplies.) Kodama’s success in providing the Japanese Army and Navy with the minerals, weapons, and other materials they needed eventually earned him a post in the wartime Tojo cabinet.
Kodama also made a considerable personal profit from the sale of opium in China. By war’s end, he had amassed a personal fortune of precious jewels, gold, silver, platinum and radium, which he secretly had smuggled back to Japan. One plane he had commissioned in Shanghai was so heavily laden with plunder that the wheels collapsed on the airport runway.
Upon his return to Tokyo, Kodama was arrested by the Allies on suspicion of committing atrocities. He spent three years in a Sugamo prison as a class A war criminal suspect but was released in 1949, along with Nobusuke Kishi, Tojo’s industrial minister and architect of Japan’s wartime economy, on the day that Tojo and six others convicted were hanged. Occupation authorities claimed
there was not enough evidence to try him, but there was widespread belief that Kodama had bought his freedom with a portion of his secret treasure and that he had supplied information about wartime government figures wanted by the GHQ, convincing the Americans in the process of his potential future value to them. In fact, despite bitter complaints in private about life under the ‘rule of the white man’, he soon went to work for G-2, where officials found his old network of agents, ex-military friends and underworld associates indeed useful in countering the growing leftist movement in Japan. While infiltrating domestic Communist groups, Kodama found time to become Ted Lewin’s partner in the infamous Latin Quarter and used his vast fortune to foster close relationships with postwar political leaders. He provided the funds that started the conservative Liberal Party and donated even more in 1955, when it merged with the Democratic Party to form the American-backed
Jiyu-Minshu-To
, the party of the
zaibatsu
, which went on to rule Japan for the next thirty-eight years and over which Kodama exerted great influence.
In 1958, Kodama went to work for the CIA, maintaining a professional relationship of considerable intensity that included helping to funnel agency money clandestinely to associates in the LDP and anti-Communist groups. One of Kodama’s assignments was to cozy up to Indonesian President Sukarno and assess for the agency the potential for the popular nationalist leader of turning Communist. (While Kodama was doing this, his business associates in a firm called Tonichi Trading Company were laying plans for business ventures in Djakarta, in part by supplying female companionship to the Indonesian president, a known womanizer, on his trips to Tokyo, continuing a tradition begun by previous Japanese business partners of Sukarno. Tonichi would eventually be rewarded with lucrative equipment and construction contacts.)
While working for G-2 intelligence, Kodama had come in contact with another operative, the aforementioned Machii. The son of a Korean factory owner from Seoul and a Japanese mother,
Machii had first made his name in the postwar black market running a band of young thugs. Nicknamed ‘Fanso’ (Violent Bull) as a youth, he had won several barroom brawls versus larger American GIs, including one encounter with a US Marine colonel, a karate black belt, whom Machii knocked out cold with one punch. He was famous for once having snapped a set of handcuffs in a fury over being arrested. After emerging victorious in several turf scuffles with pro-North Korean groups in Tokyo as the Korean peninsula headed toward civil war, he began to call his gang, euphemistically, ‘an armed force for the self-defense of South Koreans’.
His exploits won him the attention of the Occupation’s G-2 intelligence wing, who put him on their payroll as an anti-Communist fighter and strikebreaker, and he went on to take part in several street battles against leftist protesters, often fighting side by side with pistol-toting members of the CIA.
As unlikely as it may have seemed, the combination of Machii’s G-2 contacts and his knowledge of the Korean underworld on both sides of the Japan Sea (he had spent much of his youth in Seoul) earned him a spot with Kodama on an inspection tour of the Korean DMZ led by John Foster Dulles’s party in June 1950, shortly before the outbreak of the Korean War.
By the mid-1950s his curriculum vitae included two arrests for manslaughter with his bare hands and several others for extortion and assault. Yet Machii never went to prison, thanks to his American connections in high places. He was either released on bail, acquitted or placed on probation. The Tokyo chief prosecutor, who was known for his constant pursuit of the gang chieftain, was once quoted as saying, ‘Every time we tried to get him, we were always pulled back. We’d bring him in, but each time there was pressure from above and he’d wind up being released.’
The older Kodama took him under his wing and became an ‘adviser’ to the Tosei-kai, helping Machii to become a naturalized Japanese citizen. Kodama and Machii joined forces in many
enterprises, among them the professional wrestling promotion business, investing heavily in Rikidozan, whom Kodama saw as a symbol of a rejuvenated Japan and poster boy for the conservative right. While the TSK men helped stage many matches in the Tokyo area, handled the concessions and provided security, Kodama bought and ran the evening daily
Tokyo Sports
, which he turned into the bible of pro wrestling, devoting the bulk of the coverage to Rikidozan and creating an emotion-filled vehicle for unifying emerging Japanese nationalism, which of course was necessary to the effort to fight Communism.
The matches continued to follow the same highly successful pattern, one in which pure-hearted Japanese heroics defeated American villainy, thereby pumping up the national psyche. Among the willing and well-paid participants in the charade were wrestlers like the ‘bloodsucking demon’ Freddie Blassie, who helped inaugurate the color TV era by slashing Riki with a hidden fingernail file and biting him in the forehead – a display of bloodletting that caused five elderly men and three elderly women watching at home around the country to die from the shock. At the same time, however, as it was later revealed, a large percentage of the profits from pro wrestling and related businesses were secretly donated to the conservative pro-American LDP, an irony that appeared to bother none of the parties involved. Another irony that bothered absolutely no one was that in order to circumvent tight currency exchange laws, foreign wrestlers had to be paid in black market dollars.
The governing body of professional wrestling was the Japan Professional Wrestling Association, and its organizational chart was a revealing microcosm of the power structure in Japan, above and below the surface. Kodama was the president. The commissioner of the JPWA was the vice-premier of the LDP, Bamboku Ono, who called his appointment to the post an ‘honor impossible to refuse’. Several JPWA commission members were high-ranking Parliament members, including a future prime minister, Yasuhiro
Nakasone, who even maintained an office in one of Rikidozan’s Tokyo buildings, free of charge. Others included the CEO of Matsushita, one of the richest men in Japan, who bought television airtime for the matches, the head of NTV, which broadcast them, and the head of Daiei Film Studios, which made movies about them, while a retired police detective sat on the board of the advertising wing. The auditor of the JPWA was ‘Ginza Machii’, who was also a ‘bodyguard’ to Bamboku Ono and had secretly inducted Rikidozan into his gang in a ceremony at the Club Riki, thereby completing the unholy circle.
The confluence of legitimate and illegitimate forces described here reached a zenith of sorts in 1960, when Kodama helped his old prisonmate Nobusuke Kishi, who had gone on to achieve the premiership in 1958 and ram through an extension of the unpopular Mutual Security Treaty with the United States in 1960, deal with wide opposition and massive street demonstrations. These came from students, leftists and ordinary citizens who did not believe that Japan was really benefiting from the treaty or that the United States could possibly save Japan from nuclear attack. They were especially upset that the man behind the treaty was a former class A war criminal suspect whose career had been resuscitated with the support of the Americans.
After the night of May 19–20, 1960, when the treaty extension was endorsed by Parliament, and police, called in by the LDP, had physically removed protesting Socialist Party members squatting inside in front of the Lower House Speaker’s chamber, literally grabbing them by the collar and pulling them back, protests increased in size and intensity – to the point that several hundred thousand angry people snake-danced through the streets daily. US President Dwight Eisenhower had been scheduled to visit Japan to commemorate the treaty’s renewal – the plan called for him to ride in an open-car motorcade with the Emperor from Haneda Airport
into the city – but the Japanese government seriously began to reconsider this idea in light of the severity of the disturbances and the fact that the maximum deployable policemen numbered only 15,000.
Kodama helped the LDP organize a ‘security force’ of approximately 30,000 gangsters and right-wingers, among them the members of the Tosei-kai and the Yokohama-Yokosuka-based Inagawa-kai. The mobilization orders for this incredible army called for them to be armed with meter-long wooden staves and, after gathering at Tokyo’s Meiji Shinto shrine to pray for heavenly assistance in ‘fighting the degenerates’, to be deployed at various spots between the airport and the center of the city, ready to assist the police at the first hint of trouble. Banners, placards, leaflets, loudspeakers, badges and armbands were prepared, along with a fleet of trucks, ambulances, six helicopters and eight Cessna airplanes. The LDP appropriated nearly $2 million to pay for it all.
An honorary delegation of five elder
tekiya oyabun
, or gang bosses, was dispatched to visit the US Embassy to make a courtesy call on US Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, nephew of the former SCAP chief. The group included the aging Shinjuku boss Kinosuke Ozu, a man once branded by the Occupation as the most dangerous criminal in the city. History does not record whether the
sakazuki
, a ritual exchange of sake cups to connote brotherhood among yakuza, was performed during the meeting, but MacArthur did cable the State Department that a force of 30,000 young men of various ‘athletic organizations’ was ready, if needed, to help the police out.
The ‘I Like Ike’ yakuza army was never used, as the demonstrations grew increasingly violent and the Eisenhower trip was canceled, but the idea was roughly, perhaps, the equivalent of the Chicago mob joining the Cook County police to keep order during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Unthinkable in the United States, of course, but completely in character with the self-image of the yakuza foot soldier.
‘We’re not like the Mafia,’ went their mantra. ‘Mafia are criminals who commit crimes for money, who sell their services to the highest bidder. But not yakuza. We have a tradition of helping society.’
As gang boss Machii put it when it was all over, ‘Even in dirty swamps, lotus blossoms bloom.’
Still another Machii–Kodama project involving US interests was laying the groundwork for a normalization peace treaty between the Republic of Korea and Japan, in the face of bitter feelings among the Korean people toward the Japanese because of Japan’s brutal wartime occupation of the peninsula. The US government naturally wanted closer ties; they had several hundred thousand soldiers stationed in Japan and the ROK to counter the Communist threat. Kodama and friends had in mind somehow using reparations money that would be paid and taking full advantage of the investment opportunities that would subsequently open up.
It certainly helped that Machii’s close friend was the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, a man who, with the support of the US CIA, helped engineer the downfall of the staunchly anti-Japanese Syngman Rhee in 1960 in favor of the more cooperative military dictator Park Chung Hee, thereby guaranteeing the United States would have its NATO-style military alliance in the Pacific. Rikidozan’s new Tokyo penthouse was the site of many secret meetings involving ROK and LDP officials, Kodama and Machii, and the head of the KCIA – which were later concluded over pizza in Roppongi. That Tokyo underworld figures were helping to effect US policy in Asia in such a way was, of course, amazing to contemplate, but not particularly disturbing to the US government if the letters of commendation praising Machii’s role in helping normalize relations between Japan and the ROK that later adorned his office walls were any indication. (The peace treaty was signed in 1965, and when the $800 billion in reparations became available, Kodama and Machii helped spend it
on the Korean peninsula, opening up casinos, hotels, cabarets, and other ventures in Seoul.)
Nicola Zappetti was given an unprecedented glimpse inside this profligate world when he was invited to a private card game organized one night by Rikidozan; he was, he was told, the first American to be so honored. It was a rare look inside a world that Japanese knew existed, but seldom saw – and a reminder that in Japanese society, there was always more going on than meets the eye.
This particular event took place at a residence in the suburbs of Tokyo surrounded by a high wall and shuttered tightly despite intense nighttime summer heat. Inside, seated on both sides of a long, rectangular table in the living room and cooled by several large fans, were about twenty men, all dressed in expensive business suits. Zappetti recognized many of them from the newspapers and television and from their visits to his own restaurant. There were movie celebrities, business tycoons, LDP politicians, Tokyo gang bosses, and a highly placed member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. It was as if Frank Sinatra, Henry Ford, Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana had all sat down to play a game of poker.