Authors: Robert Whiting
Nicola’s was still the attraction. It now occupied an entire newly constructed three-story concrete building with forty large tables, two blocks away from its original location and a stone’s throw from the opulent new Hotel Okura, modeled after an ancient Kyoto palace and adjudged to be the finest hotel in the world. The restaurant had made Roppongi synonymous with pizza. Although Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko had subsequently curtailed their pizza-eating excursions to concentrate on the task of producing an heir to the throne, Nicola’s remained a Who’s Who of Tokyo and international society. On any given night, celebrities in full view might include: Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark and Cary Grant, who all filmed movies in Japan; Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr, Billy Eckstein and Xavier Cugat on concert tour; and even Ava Gardner, who came to town promoting
55 Days in Peking
(announcing that as long as she was in Tokyo she was going to sleep only with Japanese men).
It was neighboring Akasaka, however, with its bevy of expensive new hostess clubs that had sprung up around the New Latin Quarter, that offered one of the more interesting views of emerging ‘Japan Inc.’. Akasaka was where Japanese corporate executives took their prospective foreign clients, to soften them up with what amounted to a modern-day version of the old RAA (now retired with honors), one now applied to global commerce
instead of domestic peacekeeping. Among Akasaka’s popular establishments was the pagoda-like Mikado, the world’s largest cabaret. Featuring splashy, Las Vegas-style shows in which scantily clad girls in feathers were transported overhead in pint-sized cable cars, the Mikado boasted 1,000 comely hostesses bearing numbered electronic pagers in their bras.
Said one American importer who was frequently taken to the Mikado by his Japanese associates on buying trips to Tokyo, ‘It was like a giant warehouse of sex. Your eyes would get tired from staring so much. You’d be out dancing with #832 and her beeper would go off and she’d leave you for another customer. But you didn’t care, because the next one would be even better. It added a whole new dimension to doing business in Japan. I can’t tell you how many contracts were signed because of that place.’
Japan spent (and still does) 1.5 percent of its annual gross national product on declared ‘business entertaining’, which is more than the country ever allotted per annum during the postwar era to the national defense budget; most corporate executives were given generous expense accounts for that purpose. The high figure was a measure of the special Japanese need to develop a relationship with their clients and partners in commerce that goes beyond the mere exchange of goods and services – in the interests of the long-term success of the alliance. It was a need that the Japanese government recognized, incidentally, by condoning tax laws that allow most entertainment to be written off as operating expenses (a policy that, in turn, helped keep the city’s myriad watering holes in the black). Entertainment was said to be the adhesive that bound together Japan’s so-called Iron Triangle of business, politics and bureaucracy, and there was, naturally, often more going on than mere fun, games and male bonding, as anyone familiar with the Akasaka Copacabana could attest.
The Copacabana was the most exclusive and expensive club in the city, by far the most impressive place a Japanese could take a VIP from abroad. It was a successful attempt to create a
Western-style
ryotei
– the name given to the old-style high-class restaurants of polished bamboo where silk-robed geisha traditionally entertained Japanese politicians and captains of industry – and from where, it was said, Japan was really governed. Located on an Akasaka back street near the New Latin Quarter, the Copa offered an elite corps of beautiful bilingual young women, flawlessly groomed and garbed in Givenchy gowns and white enamel shoes. They poured drinks, hand-fed gourmet snacks, flattered, caressed and otherwise pampered clients in an intimate setting of dimly lit tables and red velvet booths, while noted performers from abroad like Nat King Cole and Dean Martin entertained on a small stage. (The Copa’s owner, a former dance hall hostess and prewar Shanghai dancer known as ‘Mama Cherry’, was famous for her discreet but eagle-eyed surveillance of her hostesses to see that the service was perfect. When technology later allowed, she even enlisted the aid of strategically placed TV cameras.)
Each night a steady stream of sleek black limousines glided to a halt in front of the Copa’s distinctive arched entranceway to disgorge the rich and the famous. Private citizen Richard Nixon was taken there whenever he came to Tokyo to discuss business with the great trading house Mitsui Bussan, whose American affiliate he represented. So was King Faisal and Indonesian President Sukarno, among others. And it was a hotbed of espionage.
To cite one notorious example, as reported in 1966 by the
Shukan Gendai
, a Copa showgirl known as ‘Dewi’ (whose real name was Naoko Nemoto), was hired by the Japanese Tonichi Trading Company, under the baton of Yoshio Kodama, which had developed several interests in Indonesia, to serve as a ‘secretary’ for Sukarno. She did her job so well, she became the president’s fourth wife and mother of Sukarno’s youngest child. Tonichi coincidentally or otherwise continued to reap financial benefits in Jakarta until Sukarno’s ouster from power in the middle of the decade.
It was, however, the budding military and commercial aircraft
manufacturing industry that generated most of the action. The Copa was where the big trading houses took the unsuspecting executives from Grumman, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas and Northrop, the major players in the aircraft sales business, where billions of dollars in contracts were up for grabs. And, as it turned out, the agents for the Japanese trading houses, the middlemen in the aircraft buying business, were paying the hostess girlfriends of the American aircraft executives to listen in on any business talk that took place in their presence. The agents had recruited and trained them to ferret out anything that would help in negotiations and the effort to obtain contracts. What they valued, in particular, was information that involved fuel consumption and maintenance or that involved rival government ministries and defense agency personnel (e.g., ‘Was it true that the Grumman airplane was having problems with its SFC [specific fuel consumption]?’ ‘Was the finance minister in favor of
x
or
y
?’ ‘What was MITI’s unofficial position?’ ‘Had Colonel So-and-So at the JASDF approved a certain plan or supported a certain strategy?’). Some of the girls, in fact, had developed considerable knowledge about aircraft and had grown into fairly skilled industrial spies. The Americans, not surprisingly, had little idea what was going on – at least not until a magazine article about the Copa entitled ‘The Nighttime Stage for the Aircraft Wars’ appeared on the stands in the mid-1970s.
The intelligence gathered was valuable in determining strategy and decision making in regard to contracts. But there were other deciding factors, too. Like bribery. Which was the case during heated competition between Lockheed and Grumman Aircraft Corporation in 1959 to sell planes to the Japan Defense Agency, which had just begun to negotiate the purchase of jet fighters. The Defense Agency had initially decided to buy the Grumman F-11 (F-11F1F), then suddenly and mysteriously reversed its decision and chose the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter instead. Said Jim Phillips, an ex-fighter pilot who joined Grumman in 1958, ‘It didn’t make any sense. Grumman’s craft was stable and Lockheed’s
was marginal in terms of safety. I thought I was a smart man but I didn’t find out what was going on until much later.’
What was going on was a lot. It was later documented that a secret donation in the neighborhood of $1.5 million had been made by Lockheed representatives to certain members of the Japanese government; the contribution had been engineered by – who else? – Yoshio Kodama, who received a fee of $750,000 from Lockheed for his efforts. The payments, it was reported by the
New York Times
, were made with the knowledge of the CIA, which kept that information secret from Grumman and the rest of the aircraft industry. (Lockheed was the firm that had built the U-2 reconnaissance plane for the Agency, and Yoshio Kodama, lest we forget, was an employee of the CIA at the time.)
A subsequent Diet inquiry into the affair had gone nowhere, thanks to Kodama’s considerable powers of persuasion. After the Socialist in charge of the probe refused to accept a briefcase full of Patek Phillipe watches and, after that, refused to be intimidated by a sword-wielding Kodama associate, Kodama resorted to blackmail. He produced an embarrassing series of photos of the Socialist in secret trysts with his mistress, and that proved to be enough to do the trick. Kodama did his job so well Lockheed would turn to him again some years later – this time with somewhat different results.
If the business world was expanding its horizons in the new post-Olympic era, so was organized crime. An Olympic year crackdown weeded out the more youthful offenders, cutting the number of badge-carrying yakuza in half, but its primary accomplishment was to further strengthen the ties between the authorities and the underworld, already close, thanks to the ‘I Like Ike’ army. Many gangsters had volunteered to help police clean up Tokyo and reduce crime during the Games so as to protect Japan’s image before the foreign visitors. Ginza Machii, for example, had
ordered all his followers who had no regular jobs and whose appearance was ‘not pleasant’ to leave Tokyo during the two months around the Olympic Games and go to the seashore to undergo bodily and spiritual training. The result was that during the Olympics it was almost impossible to find anyone who looked like a yakuza in Tokyo, offering yet another lesson in gang psychology, Japanese style. Afterward, the gangs that remained consolidated their strength and increased their participation in the operation of legal businesses like taxi fleets, trucking companies, construction firms, and entertainment agencies, using front companies to disguise their ownership. (90 percent of all the booking agents in Japan were run by underworld gangs; in fact, Japan’s number one earning singer throughout the decade called the boss of the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi ‘Uncle’. Many of the Akasaka-Roppongi – area deluxe hostess clubs were backed by mob money, among them, according to more than one report, the Copacabana.)
Tosei-kai boss Machii had reorganized his men into a ‘credit union’ formally known as the
Toa Yuai Jigyo Kumiai
(or East Asia Friendship Enterprises Association). And had further established a corporation that now owned nineteen clubs in the Ginza, including the Silk Road, where the cost of one drink in the company of a hostess was equivalent to a month’s salary for ordinary Japanese men. He had also gone into the restaurant business at Zappetti’s urging, despite his protestations that he didn’t even know how to boil water. (‘You got 1,500 little yakuzas running around the Ginza that can bring you customers,’ the Nicola’s boss had said. ‘Who’s going to say no to a gangster?’) The result was a small smoke-filled greasy chopstick Korean
yakiniku-ya
that was always full and, in a few short years, transmogrified to two haute cuisine Korean restaurants where the ingredients were imported directly from Seoul. Then, in 1966, in partnership with Kodama, Machii opened a restaurant in Roppongi called the Caravansary that had to be seen to be believed. It featured a Persian
façade with Moorish furnishings and massive Arabic tents suspended over floors of polished Italian marble and had more than a million dollars of old Persian jewelry, tapestry and artifacts hanging on the walls. Tuxedoed Korean gangsters greeted the guests, and fez-capped Caucasian waitresses dressed in black tights did the serving. The menu offered French food prepared by a Japanese chef with six years’ experience in Germany (which as far as most Japanese of that era were concerned was close enough to France to count). Entertainment was provided by a belly dancer from Cairo and a Japanese quartet singing Spanish songs. If nothing else, it gave new meaning to the term ‘international dining’.
In a press interview, Kodama, the director general of the operation, announced grandly that the purpose of the restaurant was to ‘impress foreigners’ and erase the postwar image of Japan as a country of prostitutes and bar hostesses.
‘Foreigners believe that Japan is a paradise in which to obtain women,’ he said. ‘This I cannot tolerate. I wanted to help create this, the number one restaurant in the world, in order to show Japanese superiority to foreigners.’
As Kodama gave this speech, he was proving Japanese superiority in another field as well, the recondite world of corporate extortion. He was in the process of bringing under his wing the city’s 2,000
sokaiya
. A concept invented in Japan, a
sokaiya
was a racketeer who specialized in corporate ‘security’. The idea was to obtain enough stock to give him the right to question company officials at general shareholders meetings (
sokai
means ‘general meeting’) and, for a price, agree not to. The
sokaiya
and his organization would bully malcontent stockholders, suppress unscripted comment, and otherwise control procedures to assure a brief, eventless meeting on behalf of management; or conversely, they might even stand up and question the performance of the board, depending on who was footing the bill. There were an estimated 5,000
sokaiya
throughout Japan, and they also published scores of so-called black magazines, to which they persuaded
reluctant corporate executives to subscribe – by fair means or foul (those who declined to purchase a subscription ran the danger of finding themselves the subject of a negative feature in the publication they had declined to buy). Another field Kodama was involved in was ‘solving’ internal business disputes or resolving intra-boardroom power struggles by the use of unfriendly persuasion for a ‘mediation fee’. He was being paid some 20 million yen a year as an ‘adviser’s fee’ from the giant brokerage house Nomura Securities, one of the many companies who paid him for his services and whose representatives claimed the investment was well worth the expense.