THREE

The North Pole of Japan

To get to Aomori, I decided to take the Shinkansen part of the way, and it felt like a long, long, trip. From Tokyo, you can take the Hayabusa train on the JR Tohoku Shinkansen to Shin-Aomori (3.5 hours) and transfer to a local or limited express train to Aomori Station (five minutes). A one-way ticket costs 17,500 yen and takes around four hours. A train leaves every hour or so. I have a vague memory of it being more of a hassle in 2007, but after fifteen years, I could be wrong.

By the time I got there, it was too late to do much except check into a business hotel and get some sleep. The next morning, I took a taxi to the original home of Nakatomi Holdings. There was a small store where it had been located, and a sign that said Sasaki Painting. The sign itself looked like someone should repaint it.

I walked in, and a forty-year-old man came out to talk to me. He was skinny and dressed in a navy blue suit, wearing sneakers. I gave him my other business card that read Nichibei Shinyō Chōsa (U.S.-Japan Credit Investigations), which listed me as an investigator. Sometimes, being straightforward is the best way to go. Most of the time, when investigating a company, you are forbidden to speak directly to the company or anyone who has recently left the company. There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly they have to do with compliance regulations. I never really understood the rules myself, but I had to follow them.

I didn’t want to alert Nakatomi Holdings that I was looking into them, nor did I really want to go to the Shizuoka prefecture, which was the home of the Yamaguchi-gumi Goto-gumi and the Yamaguchi-gumi Goryo-kai. So I had decided to only disclose limited information.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve been hired to look into a Tokyo firm that does financial consulting,” I told him. “And the odd thing is that they started their business right here, where you are located. I’d be grateful if you could help me.”

The man, who I presume was Sasaki, grimaced a little bit, but then said, “Yeah, okay. I think you need to talk to my father. I’ll call him.” He did. He told me that his father could meet me at a coffee shop, Dote no Coffee-ya Manchan, in an hour, at 11.00 am.

I left the store and then realized I had forgotten to ask for directions. (Google Maps didn’t exist, nor did the iPhone.) I had a map of the city, which listed the coffee shop on it, but I didn’t quite know how to get there. I was too embarrassed to walk back in the store and afraid that by asking dumb questions I would blow the interview I had just set up.

The map would have been helpful if I could read the street names, but, as is often the case with names of places and people, the readings of the kanji are very idiosyncratic, so while I could recognize some of the characters, I wasn’t sure if I was pronouncing them correctly.

I was in Kikyōno—a place that had two kanji characters I had never seen, kikyō, and one I did know, no, meaning field—and I needed to get to Dotemachi. I spotted an old man in gray sweatpants and a heavy blue parka walking his dog, and politely asked him how to get to the coffee shop. He looked at me with some surprise when I stopped him, and cocked his head to the side. I repeated myself.

The look on his face was bemused, as if one of his dogs had suddenly begun speaking to him. He answered back rapidly in the local dialect, known as Tsugaru-ben, and I had almost no idea what he was saying.

“Could you tell me that in standard Japanese?” I asked.

He was silent for a second, and then I wondered if I’d hit a nerve by implying that his dialect was not standard Japanese, which was true. You’d never hear an announcer speaking in Tsugaru-ben on NHK, the BBC of Japan. In fact, sometimes when people from the region would appear on television, the broadcasters would put subtitles under their names. There was a gaijin (foreign) television personality whose shtick was speaking rural Japanese, but that wasn’t me. All this flashed through my head in a moment.

He then just laughed.

“Where’s your country?”

“I’m from Tokyo,” I answered.

He smiled. He motioned me to follow him, with the standard gesture that is so confusing to many foreigners (who haven’t been here a long time) because it looks like the person is motioning you to go away. The movement was palm down with fingers out front. He dragged his fingers inward, toward his palm, and then flicked them back out straight again.

I knew the intended meaning, although I hoped in the North Pole of Japan that the meaning wasn’t actually “Fuck off.” He walked me there silently, nodding once to a woman dressed in a suit we passed along the street. He opened the door for me and said, “Good luck,” and then was gone.

The coffee shop was beautiful, and the coffee was goddamn amazing. The place had a low-lit chill ambience, all wooden floors, and was pleasantly warm. One of Japan’s most famous authors, Osamu Dazai, had reportedly frequented the coffee shop in high school. Dazai was a brilliant writer but a total asshole. His book Ningen Shikkaku (Not Qualified To Be Human) was a literary classic. I had read the book back when I was attending Jochi Daigaku (Sophia University). It was a great book, but unfortunately it was kind of hard to separate the artist from their art, particularly in his case.

Dazai, a spoiled rich brat and son of a wealthy landowner, was born in Aomori in 1909. He had this habit of meeting women, falling in love with them, convincing his lover to make a suicide pact with him, and then failing to live up to his end. He lived; the girl died. Sometimes, the women lived as well. Eventually, he succeeded in one of his suicide pacts, and that was the end of his career. He turned his life failures into semi-fictional novels, creating the prototype of Japan’s “I-novels.” (You could even think of him as the James Frey—A Million Little Pieces—of his day.) His literary ambitions may have driven him to do stupid things simply so he could write about them. As a result, it’s hard to separate his fiction from his real life—as it is with all so-called I-novels.

The strange thing about Japan is that most people don’t seem to care how much of an I-novel is true and how much of it is fiction. There are books marketed as nonfiction in the West, like Yakuza Moon by Shoko Tendo, that are actually I-novels.

Make no mistake: Osamu Dazai, great writer, total asshole.

As I waited in the coffee shop for the elder Sasaki, reading about Dazai and working on my first book and semi-memoir Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, I had this momentary flash of irony and self-awareness. Man, I did not want to be another Osamu Dazai. As I was ordering the apple pie, along came the man I assumed had to be Mr Sasaki, since he saw me, walked over to where I was, and sat down immediately.

He had my business card, which he flashed at me as he sat down.

“I don’t know which is your family name. I’ll just call you Jake-san, Jake-san. Do you mind if I order a coffee?”

I ordered it for him. He could have been anywhere between seventy and ninety years old. He had a full head of thin gray hair, slicked back, and a face so wrinkled that it looked like his face had been carved into an apple that later dried out. He reminded me of a shrunken head with a smile.

As they brought him a cup of black coffee, he got straight to the point.

“So, my old company is now a fancy stock brokerage in Tokyo. Well, that’s a surprise! I always wondered what had happened to it. And now I know,” he sipped his coffee. “Why do you want to know the story?”

“That’s my job. My job is to figure out whether the current incarnation of your company is a legitimate enterprise.”

He nodded and asked if he could smoke. I said, yes, of course. He took out a hard pack of Mild Sevens and lit one. He offered me one. I declined and took out mine.

“You ever gamble?” he asked me.

“Not really,” I replied. “I don’t like to lose and I hate to lose money on something without getting anything back.”

“Smart man. I used to gamble. I liked to gamble. It was a thrill. But I played mahjong, which isn’t just about luck. There’s skill involved. It’s not just a roll of the dice. You ever play mahjong?”

I admitted that I had played in college and sometimes when hanging around the press club as a reporter, and that I was terrible. I barely understood the rules and I always lost.

He laughed, a deep raspy laugh.

“Well, I liked to play poker—still do sometimes, but not for money. And I really liked to play mahjong, but—I guess around 1989 or 1990, I forget—I got in over my head. There was a place you could play, for money, and I went there often. I lost about 2 million yen ($20,000). And that was a lot of money for me.”

I nodded.

The mahjong parlor was backed by the Umeda-ikka. They didn’t run the place, but they were the muscle and they collected protection money from the owners and debts owed. Sasaki asked the owner of the parlor if there was some way he could settle up. The owner came back to him and said there was a fellow who might be able to help him if he was willing to sign over his business. He wouldn’t actually forfeit anything; he’d just be giving the business name and corporate registration to someone else. It sounded like a good deal.

“So, one afternoon, this very well-dressed guy comes into the store who knows my name and offers to buy my company for 2 million yen, in cash. He says he’s a kaishaya, which isn’t a term I’m familiar with, but we discuss it. He already has a copy of my company registration and some forms to fill out. I get my personal seal out of the desk. So we come here, to this coffee shop, and we have a talk. He promises me that I won’t be liable for anything and that I just need to sign some forms.”

I asked him if he remembered the forms. He vaguely did.

“Yeah, they were going to move the company to Shizuoka or Tokyo—at least on paper. My name was going to be gone and there would be a whole new board of directors. I think they were setting up some retail operations. I didn’t care. It all seemed dodgy, but then again, the people who introduced him to me were running an illegal mahjong parlor, so there you are.”

“Was there anything about the man that you noticed? Anything unusual? Was he missing a finger?” I asked him.

“Nope. Nothing like that. He was just very smooth. But he had long sleeves on, and you could see a bit of a tattoo sticking out when he folded his arms. So I guess he had been in the business.”

Sasaki didn’t have anything to do that afternoon and I wasn’t leaving until the next day, so we chatted for a while.

When Sasaki got his payment in cash, he went to the mahjong parlor, paid off his tab, and “never gambled again.”

I asked him why. He explained succinctly.

“I was running out of luck.”

“In what way?”

“Well, here’s my theory. Luck is like a deck of cards. You only have so many. There are only so many good ones, and the longer you play the more you run out of your aces and your kings and your jacks, and even the cards get worn out. Maybe if you change places, you can get a new deck of cards. But luck is a finite resource, and I decided that I’d spent as much of mine as I could on stupid things, like gambling, and so I quit playing the tiles. Although I’ll admit to playing it online now and then.”

“Online?”

“Don’t look so surprised, sonny. I’m old, but I’m not so old that I can’t figure out how to use a computer. I’ve got a Mac at home. Very reliable. I’d prefer to buy an NEC or something made in Japan, but Macs are stable. I don’t want my computer crashing on me when I’m winning.”

We spoke some more. He liked to talk, and I didn’t know much about life in Aomori, so I listened to him expound. It wasn’t a bad way to spend the afternoon, and I had nowhere else to go.

Before I left, Sasaki pulled a small meishi holder out of his man-bag.

“Here,” he said. “This is the card of the man who bought my business. You may find it useful.”

I took a quick look. The company was named “Business Brain” in English with a katakana name under it. There was a phone number, a fax number, and the name of the representative. I pulled out my state-of-the-art made-in-Japan camera phone, and snapped a picture. I emailed it to Michiel, with a note: “See if you can track this company down.”

I thanked Sasaki-san again.

I never forgot that coffee shop, or his anecdotal explanation of luck as a semi-replenishable resource. And it wouldn’t be the last time I was to see Sasaki-san. The talk answered most of my questions.

Later that night, I had drinks in a hostess bar with Igari’s old friend at the Aomori Prefectural Police Department, Detective Kudo. He was on the edge of retirement and serving as the number two in the Organized Crime Control Division. Igari had made all the proper introductions, so things went smoothly. Detective Kudo told me all about the gang wars that had broken out in Hirosaki City in the 1980s and Igari’s role in prosecuting those involved in the first gang war. There had been a second one in the late 1980s after Igari had moved to a new post. I asked him what exactly was a kaishaya, which Sasaki had mentioned. I had a vague idea.

He explained.

“They buy and sell mostly dormant companies. Kaisha means company, and ya is just a genetic suffix for a seller of something. In Japan, the older a company is, the more reputable it appears to be. But there a lot of companies that are basically there in name only, sometimes referred to as yurei kaisha, ghost companies or sometimes zombie companies. And they can be useful if you want to save money in setting up your own company, or give the appearance of propriety, or plan to engage in some kind of big or small-scale fraud.”

For example, if you were the CEO of a small company and wanted to pay an allowance to your mistress, you could purchase a dead company from a kaishaya and put her in charge. You could then use company money to pay for her services with probably no one being the wiser—payments to a company are rarely questioned.

Purchased companies could be used to embezzle funds, improve sales figures, and evade taxes. The important thing was that there needed to be an actual company so it would be hard to tell what was going on. Kudo told me that Japan was rife with fraud, and in the background of many of these were kaishaya. They also helped organized crime groups set up front companies and rent properties. No sane person would rent an office to the Yamaguchi-gumi Kyokushin-kai, but they might rent to “Kyokushin Enterprises,” established in 1959.

“Most people, especially real estate agents, are not going to check on the history of a company. So let’s say Kyokushin Enterprises started as a toilet paper manufacturer in Chiba prefecture, called Kami Co, with 5 million yen in capital, and then suddenly one day became an investment-consulting firm, changed their name, and moved to Osaka and then Tokyo, upping their capital to 500 million yen. People tend to take what they’re given at face value. The most recent company registration is all they look at. And that’s why they’re often fooled.”

He felt that a 20-million-yen purchase price was a reasonable deal in some cases, although the nature of the kaishaya was to pay as little as possible and to sell for as much as possible, like any businessman. However, a large purchase would also buy silence from the seller, who would swear never to discuss the deal. Kudo added:

“Most people talk. A year passes; ten years pass. Sooner or later, most people are gonna talk about the strange deal they made, but by then the company has changed places and locations so many times that tracking it down is more work than anyone wants to do, unless they have a reason.”

I showed him the company registrations I had with me, and asked if any of the names rang a bell. None did.

“I’m not a living dictionary of yakuza, you know. If there was a big local boss on here, I might recognize it, but there’s no one I know in these docs.”

We finished drinking late as he went into great detail about the gang wars here, the stuff of yakuza movies. The next day I headed back to Tokyo, getting in the green car when I could. I had an Asahi Super Dry beer on the train and some rice crackers because it seemed like the thing to do.

There was only one thing left to do for the report. I needed to check out the offices of the yakuza front company, Blue Mountain, that had invoiced Nakatomi Holdings. In a way, Blue Mountain was also a piggy-back. Jamaican blue mountain coffee is really popular in Japan.

Blue Mountain’s invoices to the Nakatomi were in the pile of mail that I had benevolently picked off the floor, opened, and then kindly returned. The company appeared to be in the coffee import and export business, but that was a guess, prompted by a cup-of-coffee logo on their letterhead.

I still had plenty of time to do that. I decided to take a break for the weekend. And I also had to check in with Michiel.

Blue Mountain was hard to locate. They’d moved several times, and Michiel was tracking them down by navigating through the labyrinth of real estate deeds and corporate registrations that a shady fly-by-night company leaves behind as they keep moving around.

On the train back, I got a call, and left the green car to take it somewhere quiet on board. It was Michiel.

“I think I’ve got a lead on Business Brain! The CEO is one Akio Kumagaya, who used to work at Nomura Securities, and they have an office in Ikebukuro.”

“Outstanding work,” I thanked her. “I’ll see you tomorrow at the office.”

John Donne once famously wrote: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” I think that holds true for due diligence investigators. It’s not a one-man job—you need a partner, a reliable partner. And in my case, Michiel was the one person I could count on, every time. She was my girl Friday, my BFF. I couldn’t function without her.