CHAPTER NINE

The world according to Mr Lee

I called up Haeng-Yi Kim, who usually went by his Japanese name, Kosuke Kaneda. Like many Koreans in Japan, he used an alias. For Koreans in Japan who wanted to avoid racial discrimination and harassment, or simply wished to fit in better, a Japanese name was indispensable. Kaneda’s father ran a pachinko parlor in Saitama, and Kaneda was supposed to take over the firm for him someday. I had gotten to know him while working on a story in the late 1990s, while I was still at the Yomiuri Shimbun. From 1997 to 1999, I had doggedly pursued the story of Saitama Shogin, a bank that was a part of a financial network for Korean Japanese, but mostly for Korean Japanese with ties to South Korea or Mindan. The bank had gone under in 1999. Shogin ran its own separate banking systems, but had run into tough times after Japan’s economic bubble collapsed.

In the course of working that story, it became apparent to me that Saitama Shogin had failed because of bad loans to dubious entities, including to an Inagawa-kai–backed construction company. It had taken a lot of investigative work to prove what had happened, and the Korean community seemed grateful that our newspaper—mostly me and another reporter—had pursued the case, in some ways forcing the Saitama Police to take action.

In May 2002, the former head of the credit union was sentenced to thirty-eight months in prison for causing financial damage to the firm by engaging in negligent lending practices.

I really hadn’t spoken to Kim/Kaneda since the verdict, but he remembered me. I explained what I wanted without going into too much detail, and he promised to look into it. His father was very active in Mindan; he’d check with his dad, and he invited me to get have a Korean meal with him in Machiya—instead of going all the way to Saitama. I gladly took him up on the offer.

We agreed to meet that Friday. When I got to the little place near the station, I resolved to let him figure out the menu.

He looked a little rounder than when I had first met him; he worked at a dojo teaching Kyokushin karate at the time, which had been founded by a fellow zainichi. He still had the solid, hardened look of someone who was used to punching and being punched for a living—and who had a healthy appetite.

Kaneda told me he had taken over the pachinko parlor in Kumagaya from his father. They had opened two other parlors in northern Saitama, and although profits weren’t tremendously good, they were in the black.

He complained that the pachinko parlor was cutting into dojo time, but that he was still managing to train and run the dojo, although he was unable to train much himself.

The dinner was delicious. We had bulgogi jeongol, a delicious kind of Korean beef stew, chijimi—Korean pancakes, several kinds of kimchi, and some grilled pork that was amazing. We drank makgeolli, a kind of creamy rice wine, which I have always secretly called “milky death” in my mind. It’s sweet and cloying, and it gets you drunk before you realize what’s going on.

He had solid intel. Mr Lee had joined the Adachi branch of the Mindan in 2005, and was active in the group. However, at the same time, Kaneda’s father had heard rumors that Mr Lee was or had been closely connected to Sōren. The two pieces of information didn’t quite match up.

Back in the office, I leaned on a reporter from one of the news services to give me an introduction to a cop in the public security bureau, which he did. The cop could only tell me that Wahei Entertainment was not on a watchlist of firms connected to North Korea or to Sōren currently, but that it once had been.

I looked over all the information I had, and realized I couldn’t come up with any firm conclusions. And so I did something that broke the basic tenets of due diligence: I decided to arrange a meeting with Mr Lee himself.

I wrote a letter to Mr Lee, in very polite Japanese, which introduced me and my career so far, and mentioned that I was writing a book, to be called Tokyo Vice, which would include a chapter on the pachinko business, but that I wanted to know more about the industry’s strong ties to the Korean community in Japan.

It was partially true. I was indeed working on the book, and I did have plans to write a chapter on pachinko-related crime in Saitama. I also sent him a copy of the article I’d written on the collapse of Saitama Shogin.

I don’t think I would have been able to find the article at all if Michiel hadn’t already been working on the book. Mimi was helping me put years of files in order; she was scanning documents and articles, and sometimes translating short documents to reference later. It was nice to have the due diligence money so I could pay her about the equivalent of a pachinko parlor employee’s hourly wage for the work she was doing.

The good thing about the article was that it was one of the few articles in the paper that had my name on it. Most newspaper articles in Japan are uncredited—only special features and editorials or explainer pieces will get you a byline.

To my delight, Mr Lee agreed to meet me. His condition was that the interview would be “on background,” and that I would take steps to make sure he couldn’t be identified. He felt that advertising his Korean background would not be a plus for him or his family. I agreed. We planned to meet at his office in Adachi Ward. He had an office on the third floor of one of his flagship parlors there.

It had been a long time since I’d walked into a pachinko parlor, and when I got to his place on a Monday at 9.50 am, there was a line outside of men and women waiting to get in. By 10.00 am, the machines inside were already full of players, mostly men in their early thirties or forties.

There were ashtrays near all the machines, and despite what seemed like a top-of-the-line ventilation system, the air was filled with smoke, refracting and bending the bright lights from the machines, as if the neon was leaking out of the cases. There were several rows of the machines, with the players’ backs to each other as they deftly, slowly, or rapidly turned the control handle shooting balls up the machine, hoping they would land in the right place and win them a jackpot.

The sound was deafening. The background music, which sounded oddly like trance music, was blaring at full volume. Over and under the music, you could hear the electronic beeps of steel pachinko balls being catapulted into the playing field, and the sounds of the balls pouring into trays when someone hit gold. Off in the distance was the steady chug and clicks of balls being counted in a machine, which would give the player a receipt of his or her winnings. You could feel the wall of sound wash over you. There was the smell of bad coffee and iron in the air as well. I couldn’t imagine working a full day in one of these parlors, or even spending a few hours there.

I could see that the floor was immaculately clean. Every machine was polished and shiny. All the low chairs with faux red-leather seats in front of the machines appeared brand new and looked comfortable. I touched one. It felt like memory foam. You could rest your ass on that for hours comfortably.

As I stood watching the staff, checking each machine, and occasionally conversing with a customer—yelling in their ear to do so—I remembered that once, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department Press Club, we journalists had calculated what our hourly wages would be if we divided our paychecks by the amount of time we actually spent chained to the job. Our conclusion was that a low-ranking pachinko hall employee got a much better hourly wage.

I had never considered what a hardship it probably is to work at a pachinko parlor, until I walked into that shop. They deserved the higher salary.

I knocked on the door of Mr Lee’s office. He welcomed me in himself; the receptionist was out running an errand. Mr Lee was short, five-feet-two, possibly, but not stocky. He wore a gray suit and a red necktie. His hair was still jet black—possibly he dyed it—and long, and it was slicked back. While he seemed young for his age, his face was so wrinkled that it seemed as though his skin had been made out of Issey Miyake Pleats Please and then glued to his skull. His eyes, however, sparkled with the light of someone who was sharp and shrewd and full of energy.

We went back to his inner office, which was not large. There were bookshelves, a wooden desk made out of wood with a glass top, and a sort of reception area with a low table, a leather sofa against the wall, and two other leather seats on either side of the sofa. I looked at his bookshelf, and saw a few volumes on the law, one or two detective novels, and quite a few books on real estate. The great majority of the books appeared to be works of history, with some historical fiction. There were many books in Korean as well. I couldn’t read the titles entirely, but knew hangul (the Korean alphabet), and often the Korean books would also have kanji in their titles. There was a crystal ashtray on the small table, with a lighter next to it.

He sat on the sofa, and I sat on the side chair and took notes. He lit a cigarette, after asking me if I was okay with it, and smoked while he talked. He told me that the article I’d sent him had piqued his interest, and that he liked to read books, some historical fiction, but mostly nonfiction and that it would be fun, in some way, to be a part of history.

His voice was gravelly and deep—almost sonorous.

I started with softball questions about the history of pachinko, even though I already knew most of the answers. I asked him about how he dealt with the goto-shi. I asked him why there were so many pachinko parlors run by Koreans.

He was a learned fellow, and gave a wonderful exposition. And then I asked him, “I’m told that Sōren, the North Korean association, actually runs ten or twenty pachinko parlors now. Do you know if that’s true?”

He froze when I asked the question, and stood up straight. He smushed his cigarette into the ashtray and was silent. Then he raised his head and leaned toward me, his index finger pointing up.

“You should think of the government of North Korea as a giant criminal enterprise, and Sōren as their Japanese franchise. That’s all they are. The repatriation movement in the fifties was the largest kidnapping ever committed, and they’ve made trillions of yen off of it. Then they drained all our savings from the bank system they set up, and as long as we have relatives in North Korea, they will continue to shake us down. They held our families hostage for decades, and now our sons and daughters are also paying ransom for relatives they’ve never met.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what he was talking about, but I nodded. He sat back down and leaned against the sofa.

“So, in answer to your question, yes. Yes, Sōren runs its own pachinko parlors. I guess they need to, because people like me are through giving them one goddamn yen.”

There are times when asking a question is just a barrier to getting an answer. I decided to shut up and let him talk. The floodgates had been opened. I was almost certain that when he finished speaking, everything would make sense.

During our talk, Mr Lee told me about his brother and the repatriation movement—the great effort to get Koreans in Japan to join their brothers and sisters in “The Workers’ Paradise.”

In the late 1950s, there was a major repatriation project when Kim Il Sung promised “a new life after their return to the homeland” to celebrate the tenth anniversary of North Korea’s founding. The North Korean government sought to relieve a labor shortage and to strengthen its claim as the sole legitimate nation of Koreans. The Japanese government seemed surprisingly eager to help out. Backed by Japanese politicians on the right and the left, as well as by the International Red Cross, the repatriation project dispatched 93,340 people to North Korea, including 6,731 Japanese and some Chinese spouses and dependents.

The repatriation project offered an answer to those in Japan who were disheartened by endemic discrimination and their diminished zainichi prospects. They were told that North Korea was a way out of their miserable existence in Japan. The propaganda campaign exploited the meme of a paradise on earth, where every refrigerator was full of beef and pork, and the young could study at Kim Il Sung University and possibly Moscow State University. The project officially ended in 1984, but it had effectively ended by the early 1960s after people learned what was really going on.

North Korea was a horrific totalitarian Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. People went in, but no one ever came out.

The project faced only sporadic opposition, primarily by Mindan and the South Korean government, which even sponsored terrorist acts to halt it. In reality, the suffering of zainichi in North Korea blatantly contradicted the promise of paradise, and thereby stemmed the flow. Zainichi transplants almost immediately became impoverished second-class citizens in autocratic North Korea. Newspapers such as the left-leaning Asahi Shimbun share blame for the humanitarian disaster that this sham movement created, shamelessly promoting the repatriation movement, even as evidence emerged that those who went back met a bleak fate. North Korea gained a generation of Korean Japanese as hostages they could use to shake money from the living relatives who’d been left behind in Japan. Whether that was the intention from the start, nobody knows.

Mr Lee’s oldest brother had been one of those to go back to North Korea, along with his Japanese wife, in 1962. The older brother had been running a small electronics store in Sumida-ku. Lee had told him not to go, and they had quarreled. His brother had never come back, nor had his wife.

A year after Mr Lee’s brother and his wife had arrived in North Korea, the emissaries of Sōren showed up at Mr Lee’s store (which he had taken over) with letters from his brother asking for money. And they had been squeezing him ever since. He suspected that only half of the money he sent to his brother and his sister-in-law ever made it to them.

His brother had been lucky. Some of the returnees were regarded with suspicion by the North Korean authorities and sent to labor camps; they never came back alive. Korean Japanese who had fled Japan because of its overt and subtle racism faced the deadliest racism and xenophobia one could imagine from their so-called brothers and sisters.

Mr Lee had last seen his brother and sister-in-law ten years before, when he took the ferry to North Korea, known as Man Gyong Bong 92. The Man Gyong Bong was a cargo-passenger ferry, named after a hill near Pyongyang. The ship had been built in 1992 with Sōren funds, and had been used to transport passengers and cargo between North Korea and Japan.

When he went, he took cash and whisky for his brother. For his sister-in-law: good green tea, Japanese sweets, and magazines.

“They seemed miserable, and we were only given a short time to speak. My brother looked skeletal. Keiko, his wife, tried to put on a happy face. People were starving to death where they lived; they were alive because they represented money for the kingdom. I felt if they could have gotten on the ship with me and left, they would have in an instant.”

The ferry had been discontinued in 2006, when Japan banned all North Korean vessels from entering Japanese waters.

Relations between North Korea and Japan had worsened since Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s historic visit in 2002, when North Korea admitted to having abducted Japanese citizens—ostensibly to train spies—over several decades. They allowed some abductees to return with Koizumi when he went back to Japan.

Yes, North Korea had kidnapped over 100 Japanese citizens in and out of Japan over several decades—a horrifying crime that many in the West still don’t know about.

There were also reports that the ferry had been used to facilitate some of those kidnappings—carrying the victims as cargo—which hastened a ban on the ship. Other former Sōren members admitted to using the ship for espionage, and there were also reports that it had been used to ferry methamphetamines into Japan, where well-connected yakuza groups, such as the Goto-gumi, sold them to the public.

To the best of my knowledge, the ferry had definitely been carrying meth into Japan. I knew that the ship was also certainly being used to carry massive amounts of cash to North Korea, and I had written an article for the Yomiuri on it during my stint covering customs.

That small article had set off some alarms as well.

It wasn’t a surprise that, in order to cut off the flow of money to North Korea and the flow of meth to Japan, the ferry had been banned, but it left many families in Japan with no means of contacting their relatives left behind.

Mr Lee knew all of this.

“I can see why Japan hates North Korea. It is a country that threatens Japan with missiles, kidnaps their citizens, and sells drugs that poison the nation. I see all of this—but I also remember how Japan lied to us all—and those who fell for the lie returned home and were abandoned. We were victims of an ethnic cleansing—and the Red Cross helped, and the U.S. looked the other way. I also hate North Korea, but I will never forgive the government of Japan.”

Out of sheer dumb habit, I asked him, “Why not?”

He responded angrily.

“Because they knew—they knew that thousands of women and children and thousands of their own people married to Koreans here would be returning—not home to a land of milk and honey, but to a land where people were already starving. And even when they knew that thousands of returnees were being sent to labor camps to die, they stayed silent. Because they wanted to get rid of all of us—all the Koreans who had been slave labor, and all who had come to Japan seeking prosperity under the empire. We were their Jews, and the concentration camp was in North Korea. And they sent us there.

“I didn’t go, but nearly 100,000 people did. That is a crime. A deliberate and evil crime. Japan was Stalin with a smiley face and an obsequious bow. They killed us with pamphlets and posters and the Red Cross. All the while, the U.S. smiled and helped them do it because it was expedient.”

He almost ran out of breath. He decided to light another cigarette.

“It wasn’t a repatriation. It was an ethnic cleansing by Japan and a kidnapping by North Korea. And both sides shook hands on it.”

Lee pulled books from his shelf and showed them to me. He had documents as well, neatly bound in color-coded binders. After skimming through a few of them, I understood why he was so fascinated by history.

We talked for hours—because I was interested. I had pretty much gotten everything I needed to know. There was only one question left.

“What happened to your brother?”

Lee paused and said flatly, “He died two years ago. I think he killed himself. I don’t know. Keiko, his wife, died before him. Even after he was dead, they didn’t tell me immediately. Only when I refused to send more money without proof of life did they tell me he had passed away. Then they demanded money for the funeral. I told them to fuck off.

“There’s no point in taking care of the dead—not when it means giving money to the people who killed them.”

Lee had severed all contact with Sōren after learning of his brother’s death. He joined Mindan to reconnect with other Koreans in Japan who had no ties to North Korea. And that’s where he was now.

I thanked him for his time. I went home, and prepared to file my report for Oldman. It took me a day to write it up. I gave the firm a thumbs-up and recommended that they give Mr Lee the loan.

Oldman sent me back a short reply.

“Excellent work and wonderful context. This will prove useful in the future. The history of Koreans in this country is truly a sad affair.”

He suggested we meet the following week for lunch, and I suggested a good Korean place. Mission accomplished.

Mr Lee was more or less correct in his harsh assessment of Japan’s “final solution” to its “Korean problem.” As early as 1955, the Japanese government’s foreign ministry was working on plans, in conjunction with the Liberal Democratic Party, to get rid of the nation’s poor Korean residents. Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, a war criminal and the grandfather of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, hastened secret talks with North Korea to bring them on board. The U.S., anxious to cut a security treaty with Japan, was prone to giving Kishi what he wanted without a protest.

According to a well-researched paper, “The Forgotten Victims of the North Korean Crisis,” the “U.S. Ambassador in Tokyo Douglas MacArthur II [who played a key role on the U.S. side] told his Australian counterpart in 1959 that the ‘American Embassy had checked Japanese opinion and found it was almost unanimously in favor of “getting rid of the Koreans.”’”

At this sensitive moment in U.S.–Japan relations, the state department was clearly cautious of intervening in a scheme that was an obvious vote-winner for the Kishi regime. Besides, MacArthur personally sympathized with the public emotion, commenting (as the Australian ambassador at the time reported) that “he himself can scarcely criticize the Japanese for this as the Koreans left in Japan are a poor lot including many Communists and many criminals.”

The irony of MacArthur’s remarks comes from willful ignorance that it was Japan’s postwar policies that made them poor, limited their job opportunities, and nudged them into criminal activity.

Japan hadn’t left them many choices: pachinko; Korean barbecue owners; love hotel operators. It was either that or a one-way ticket to the workers’ paradise, North Korea.

There’s a Japanese saying that comes to mind when talking about the repatriation debacle. “Kiite Gokuraku, Mite Jigoku.” “It’s paradise when you hear of it, but when you see it, it’s hell.”

It’s a saying that applies to many things in Japan. What you hear about something and the reality of what it is are often worlds apart.