The Toyotomi Blades

22

The headquarters of the Sekiguchi-gummi was near Tokyo’s Tsujiki Fish Market, in a relatively modest neighborhood of three- and four-story buildings. It was in a modern four-story office building that looked neat and clean. There were no signs on the front, but there was some kind of logo on the front door of the building done in gold. It was a circle with three bars and a dot.

It seemed peculiar to me that a crime family would have an office, but I guess in some American cities organized crime uses bars and restaurants for its headquarters, and everyone in the neighborhood knows it. Sugimoto had offered to come with me but I turned him down. His English skills would have been handy, but I didn’t trust him. I might be paranoid, but I didn’t know what his past relationship with the Sekiguchi-gummi was, so I didn’t want him coming along to muddy up the waters. Besides, I had arranged for my own companion.

We walked through the front door of the building. In the modest lobby there was a desk and a young man in his twenties was sitting there to act as a receptionist. He was studying some kind of newspaper. It looked like the horse-racing forms we have in the United States, except this paper had pictures of small outboard motor boats that seemed to be racing each other around some kind of circular pond with a grandstand. Many Asians like to gamble and it looked like this guy was selecting his picks for races to be held that day.

He didn’t bother looking up at us until we approached his desk. Then he looked up from his paper and continued to look up and up and further up. He more or less ignored me, but since I was standing next to Gary Apia, I could see where I might be lost in the shadow of Gary’s seven-foot, five-hundred-pound frame. The man sat there with an open mouth.

When I asked Gary to accompany me, he had given me a quick “Sure, bruddah.”

“Before you agree, let me explain what’s happening.” I told him about my involvement with the Sekiguchi-gummi in Los Angeles and what I wanted to accomplish with my visit. I also told him of my run-in with the Yakuza in Hibiya Park. “You might not want to get involved with these guys,” I said.

He laughed. “Those kinda guys are always sniffing around the rikishi, looking for a tip on who to bet on. They don’t scare me. Let’s go for broke.”

That Hawaiian what-the-hell attitude never sounded sweeter to my ears, and now that we were actually in the lobby of the Sekiguchi-gummi building, I was glad to be standing next to him. He was wearing a blue kimono, and his hair was in a simplified version of the elaborate, slicked down hairstyle he wore for sumo wrestling. He told me he was required to dress this way by the association that runs sumo in Japan, and he looked very much like a seventeenth century warrior, instead of a modern athlete. It was hardly the dress for inconspicuous sleuthing, but I wanted to call as much attention to us as possible. If something happened to us, I wanted plenty of people noticing that we went into this building.

Gary, in broken Japanese, announced who we were and why we were there. No response. Gary repeated his request for us to see the head of the Sekiguchi-gummi, then he looked at me and said, “Dis guy must be dumb. My Japanese is bad, but he should know your name and why we’re here.”

I personally thought that sitting in slack-jawed amazement was probably a pretty good response when confronted with Gary’s imposing presence for the first time. The guy acting as a receptionist must have decided it wasn’t a wise policy to irritate the giant, because he finally picked up a phone and started talking in rapid Japanese.

In a few moments a pinched-faced, middle-aged woman came into the lobby. When she saw Gary her eyebrows raised slightly, but otherwise she gave no indication that it was at all unusual to have a kimono-clad mountain standing there. She looked at me and said, “Mr. Tanaka, I’m Mr. Sekiguchi’s private secretary. He asked me to bring you to his office. I’m so very sorry, but I think we might have a problem getting your friend up to his office.”

“What do you mean?” Gary said, his eyebrows narrowing suspiciously.

“Please come with me,” she said. She took us out of the lobby and down a short hall. At the end of the hall was a tiny elevator, which would normally only hold two or three people. It was hard to imagine how Gary would fit into the elevator.

“I don’t like dis,” Gary said.

I thought about ancient Japanese castles with winding entrances and narrow passages which were designed to break up formations of enemy troops. I wondered if the elevator had the same function.

“Why don’t you wait for me, Gary?” I said. “With you here I don’t think anything will happen.”

“Are you sure, bruddah?”

“Pretty sure. Just don’t wander too far away.”

“No sweat, bruddah.” He looked at the secretary and said, “Will you do da translating for him?” I smiled at this. Even I could tell that Gary’s linguistic skills in Japanese were rudimentary, at best. But still, he spoke a lot more conversational Japanese than I could muster.

“Mr. Sekiguchi speaks English, so I’m certain there’ll be no problems with Mr. Tanaka and Mr. Sekiguchi speaking to each other.”

The woman and I crowded into the small elevator. She pressed the button for the fourth floor and we started ascending. I was once in an elevator in New York City, in an old building on Bleecker Street, that was smaller than two phone booths. You could hardly inhale, but the sign on the wall said the maximum capacity was thirteen. I don’t know if Japanese elevator companies have an equally perverse sense of humor, but the elevator we were in was so small that crowding more than three into it would probably constitute some kind of sexual encounter.

When we got to the fourth floor, the door opened and I was stunned.

The elevator opened into a small lobby. While the public lobby downstairs was austere and rather cheap looking, the lobby up here was positively opulent. The rug was a thick blue wool and the walls were beautifully paneled with dark and light woods inlaid in a geometric pattern of rectangles.

In the center of the lobby was a large desk made of wood so dark it almost looked black. The secretarial chair and word processor made me conclude this was the command station for my guide. Hanging on the wall behind the desk was a scroll painting. I don’t know that much about Japanese painting, but this one looked very old and very elegant. It was a painting of a monkey sitting in the bottom corner of the scroll, looking up. In the upper corner of the painting, about six feet from the monkey’s face, there was a tiny butterfly. The huge expanse of white space between the monkey and the butterfly was pristine and effective. In Japanese painting they say that the white space is often as important as the brush strokes, and in this particular composition that was certainly true. The white space made you realize how far above the monkey the beauty of the butterfly was.

On the secretary’s desk was an ikebana flower arrangement. It was a single iris, a long green leaf, and two small white chrysanthemums. Each piece of the arrangement was in perfect harmony and balance with the other. Very elegant and very much in keeping with the lobby.

The secretary walked over to one of the wooden panels and gently pushed, revealing that the panel was a hidden door. Once again I thought about old Japanese castles, which often had secret panels or passageways so that the lord of the castle could escape in case of unexpected attack. The secretary stood to one side and bowed in order to usher me in to Sekiguchi’s office.

In Japan, adoption of adults is not uncommon. Sometimes when a young man marries into a family with no male heir, he will agree to take his wife’s name for his own in order to continue the wife’s family name. Kabuki actors and woodblock artists also commonly adopt their favorite pupils to pass on their name. Because of this custom, I wasn’t sure of the relationship that Mr. Sekiguchi had with the Sekiguchi-gummi crime family. I didn’t know if he was the founder of this family, some relative of the founder, or someone who had been adopted into the family and taken the Sekiguchi name. My purpose was not the genealogy of Japanese crime families, but still I was curious about how one got to be the head of a Japanese Mafia family. I suspect it involves acts and decisions that are pretty grim.

I thought the lobby was pretty posh, but it was nothing compared to the actual office. Sekiguchi’s office was designed to impress, and with me it did its job. It was a long rectangular room with a high ceiling. You entered at the far end of the rectangle and sitting at the other end, in splendid isolation, was a massive rosewood desk with a couple of black leather chairs set in front of it. The walls on either side of the office were pierced with small alcoves. In the alcoves were pieces of pottery or small Japanese paintings, each illuminated by its own light. These alcove walls were also paneled in rosewood and this, combined with the dark carpet, gave the office the feeling of a somber cathedral.

Sitting behind the desk was a tiny wizened man in a gray suit. On his desk were no papers, so he looked like a small statue set in a sea of wine-colored wood. As I waded through the thick carpet towards the desk, I was reminded of the scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her companions are walking in the great hall of the Emerald City to approach the wizard. They’re so in awe that they’re shaking as they walk.

My confidence was strained by having to leave Gary behind and by the obvious wealth and opulence behind the facade of a modest building. This office was designed to achieve an effect, and that effect was intimidation. Because of that, I did something I normally wouldn’t do, especially with a Japanese national I was meeting for the first time. I marched down the length of the office and flopped down into a chair without being invited.

That, of course, was rude, and rudeness is something usually avoided with strangers in Japanese culture. But rudeness is also sometimes used to establish relative social positions. To me, the layout of Sekiguchi’s office, including the long march to his desk, was designed to make you feel like a supplicant, inching your way towards the dais of a shogun. I was ticked off at this man, and my aching head and bruised hip reminded me why I was angry. I wasn’t going to let something like a clever layout of his office beat me down.

Sekiguchi stared at me impassively as I flopped down into the chair. As an American, I suppose he expected me to be too familiar and rude. I wanted him to know that I understood the proper protocol to follow in this meeting and I had chosen to ignore it, but there wasn’t a way to actually say it. The head looking back at me was almost bald, with wisps of silver hair still clinging to the sides. His pate was freckled with brown spots. The eyes were as hard as two black pearls. He was probably in his late sixties, but his bearing was still erect and as stiff as a weathered pine standing on top of a mountainside.

Without a preamble, Sekiguchi spoke. “Because this meeting was arranged on short notice, I can only give you fifteen minutes. Why do you want to speak to me?”

My apprehensions and fears dissolved. I fought to keep from giggling. Not because of nervousness, but because the man behind the desk, the head of the Sekiguchi-gummi crime family, talked like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. He didn’t have a Sicilian accent, but he tended to mumble his words in a low whisper. I don’t know if he always talked this way or if it was an affectation picked up after he saw the movie, but the effect on me was not sinister or menacing at all. It was comical.

I regained my composure and a bit of my cockiness with the unexpected comic relief. “Thank you for your time. I realize this is on short notice and I appreciate you seeing me.”

The man nodded.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked.

“I understand you’re from California and that you’re an American and that you’ve appeared on the Japanese television show News Pop.”

“I was also responsible for getting your son arrested.”

Mr. Sekiguchi stared at me expressionless. I would hate to play poker with him. Trying to get a response from him, I pushed on. “I can see that my involvement with your son’s case could be upsetting. That’s why I wanted to meet with you to talk to you about why you’re trying to harm me.”

Once again he sat silent and motionless. I thought about the two thugs chasing me in Tokyo and my amusement over Mr. Sekiguchi’s Godfatherlike voice disappeared. I forced myself to relax. Showing anger would be showing weakness. I raised my eyebrows slightly and waited.

I had already used up a couple of my allotted fifteen minutes. If Mr. Sekiguchi wanted to sit there in silence for the remaining thirteen minutes, then I was quite content to sit there in silence, too. I wasn’t going to beg or plead with him. I’m not above begging or pleading, it’s just that I figured with this man those tactics wouldn’t work.

Finally, after a silence of several minutes, Mr. Sekiguchi sat back in his chair. Studying me carefully, he said, “What makes you think I want to harm you?”

“Several times now, two men identified by the police as members of the Yakuza have chased me. It’s been the same two men so I know it’s not an accident. Yesterday they caught me in Hibiya Park and roughed me up. Since the only connection I’ve ever had with the Yakuza is through your son, I think their interest in pursuing me is because of what happened between your son and me in California.”

Once again Sekiguchi remained impassive and almost immobile. I reacted by settling back in the chair, as if his silence was an invitation to make myself more at home. Finally, Sekiguchi broke the silence and said, “Toshi is my youngest son and one that I have indulged over the years. I’m afraid that does not make me a very good father. I sent him to school in the United States and helped set him up in business in California in the hope that the new climate and responsibility would help him to grow up.

“Like every Japanese father, I’m very concerned about my children. But in the case of what happened in California, Toshi made several mistakes and he must pay for them. I don’t view the punishment he’ll receive as something which must be paid because he has done wrong. In my view he has not done wrong. But he made many mistakes and those mistakes can be serious. In the life we have chosen, if a man is to be a leader, he must be careful and he must be thoughtful. Perhaps because I have indulged him, Toshi is not very careful and sometimes he is not very thoughtful.

“The time he will spend in an American prison will allow him to grow more reflective and more serious about his life and about our business. Our California lawyers tell me that he’ll not be in prison for a very long time. Actually quite less than the five years he spent graduating from USC. I think the education he will get from getting caught because he was careless will be much more valuable than the time he spent in college.

“Because of these feelings I have no personal grudge against you and do not wish you harmed. In fact, until this interview, I did not know who you were or what your involvement was with my son. I don’t know why other Yakuza would want to chase you, but whatever the reason, it has nothing to do with the Sekiguchi-gummi.”

He sat back in his chair and his hand disappeared under the desktop. For a brief second I thought he had set me up so that he could reach under the desk for a gun or some other weapon, but when the secretary popped through the door behind me a few seconds later, I realized he had simply reached for some kind of hidden buzzer to summon her. I knew the interview was over and stood up.

“And you have no interest in the Toyotomi blades?” I asked as a parting shot.

He was used to hiding his thoughts and gave me no response, but I thought I detected a slight flash of puzzlement in his eyes. I felt like I had just driven to the Tokyo Match Company.