CHAPTER TWO

Driving past the point of no return at full speed

By April 1975, Saigo was a confirmed juvenile delinquent. His only skills were playing the guitar and winning fights. At the age of fourteen, he passed the exam to get into Tokyo Machida High School. By the third day of his first year, his troublemaking, frequent fights with classmates, bad attitude, and maybe even his bad-ass haircut resulted in him being given an ultimatum: leave on his own, or get kicked out within a week.

During this time, he had two loves: music and motorcycles. Gaido aka The Evil Path was a legendary rock band, and he was one of the original members.

In the 1970s, Gaido had a huge following of delinquent youth, young yakuza, and motorcycle gangs. Their songs and lyrics were extremely controversial for their day. Songs such as “Yellow Monkey” ridiculed modern Japan, and their neo-punk version of Japanese right-wing anthems inflamed conservatives as well. One of the songs that Saigo helped write, “Kaori,” was a hidden ode to smoking pot. Kaori, in Japanese, is a woman’s name, but it also means “scent.” The lyrics noting that “Kaori will always give you away” referred to the strong smell of marijuana. Songs like this and their general attitude made them the rebel rockers of their time. At their best, they sounded like the Sex Pistols crossed with Kiss (although they existed way before the Sex Pistols). Saigo was a member by 1974, when he was just thirteen years old. In the original line-up, he played guitar and did some vocals. His senior, Shinji Maruyama also did vocals and played the drums. Although thin, Maruyama was as tall as Saigo. He had an extremely flat face and a wide smile that seemed to go from ear to ear.

Gaido took intense delight in pissing off the authorities. They wore deformed kimonos, put on make-up, and made liberal use of the Japanese flag. No one could tell whether they were right-wingers or left-wingers; everyone knew they were troublemakers.

Machida is sometimes called the Detroit of Japan — a surprising number of great Japanese rock bands such as Luna Sea have emerged from its bleak urban landscape. It was an industrial town when Saigo was growing up, with little to do, few parks, and a general atmosphere of urban decay. While part of Tokyo, it was a strangely lawless place. The term “urban jungle” wouldn’t be simply a cliché, but a judicious description. The town was full of bars, brothels, and live-music venues. That was entertainment in the town: getting drunk, getting fucked, and/or listening to rock.

Today, Machida has two nicknames. The first is Nishi Kabukicho, which refers to its network of sleazy sex shops, love hotels, and massage parlors. The second is Machida Music City. However, being born in Machida alone was no guarantee of being a talented musician.

Saigo wasn’t the best guitarist, and by the time the group made their first full-fledged live performance, he was relegated to the sidelines; he had roadie status. Gaido’s early performances are captured in a two-record set, “The Crazy Passionate Machida Police 1974 (Live).” The two-record set consists of the band playing at the Machida Gymnasium in February 1974, and then again at the Machida Town Festival in September 1974. They played on a temporarily constructed stage right next to the Machida Police Station. In between songs, the band — clad in white kimonos, jeans, and torn clothing — taunt the cops by asking, “Mr Policeman, are you having fun?” and the cops and locals are heard asking them to get off the stage and stop playing. The Gaido groupies can be heard rowdily cheering the band and telling everyone who complains to shut up. A grainy videotape of the performance made its way onto YouTube a few years ago. If you look closely, you can see Saigo, in a red dress shirt with hair permed to look like an Afro, happily dancing near the stage. He appears almost giddy with delight.

The performance not only irritated the police, but because of the large numbers of motorcycle gang members attending, the media took notice. A portion of the performance was aired on national television, portraying Gaido as a corrupting influence on Japan’s rebel youth. It was the best advertising the group could have hoped for.

Since Saigo had left school and was no longer a performer in the band, he had plenty of time on his hands and not much to do, so he bought a motorcycle. He rode it for a year, and then, as soon as he turned sixteen, he got a license and joined the local motorcycle gang, Mikaeri Bijin (Beautiful Girl Looking Back, BGLB). They were the two-wheeled kings of Machida City.

And they were feared.

During the 1960s, Japan was considered to be one of the world’s most conformist nations. Groups of juvenile delinquents or those who had fallen through the cracks of the rigid educational system started to gather to form large motorcycle gangs. The gangs became a popular haven for them because many kids wanted to be different and to stick out from the rest of society. At first, the gangs were called kaminari-zoku, meaning “the thunder tribes,” but that name didn’t last long. The Japanese media created the term bosozoku, which means “tribe that drives fast and violently” or “speed tribes,” as they came to be known in the west. They would go to places where there were a lot of people — Enoshima, Hakone, Shinjuku, Shibuya.

Like many things in Japan, bosozoku started as a movement imitating American culture. In Japan’s rapid-growth period, the Hells Angels became infamous in Japan, and Japanese youth began to emulate them. Staying true to his heritage, Saigo patched his jacket with the Japanese flag, also called the Hinomaru, but added the American flag as well.

There were several variations of speed tribes, and even motorcycle gangs with women riders as well.* They became well known for riding noisy customized motorcycles. A common trend was to cut a bike’s muffler down so it made an ear-splitting howl. Saigo didn’t agree with doing that. He thought that was a nuisance to the public.

[* A rarity in Japan’s traditionally male-dominated delinquent world culture.]

Bosozoku also became known for their elaborate uniforms, which they called tokkofuku — a nod to the stylized outfits that Japan’s kamikaze pilots wore to their deaths. BGLB made their own embroidered uniforms, stickers, and flags. They spent far more on their motorcycles than other groups did. Some of the men spent more than 500,000 yen on modifying their bikes.

The year that Saigo joined up, the speed tribes became a fully fledged “social problem” after the Shonan Shichirigahama incident.

In early June 1975, the Tokyo speed tribes and the Kanagawa prefecture speed tribes, after months of bitter battles, decided to duke it out on the coastal road in Kamakura City. The gangs, many with silly-sounding names such as The White Knuckled Clowns, armed themselves with bokken (wooden swords), nunchucks, lethally remodeled model guns, chunks of lumber, baseball bats, and other crude weapons.

The scene could have been the inspiration for the opening scene in the iconic film Akira.

The result was absolute mayhem. The groups came riding in on over 350 vehicles, resulting in a gang fight in which twenty-seven people, including five policemen were injured; four vehicles were set on fire, or alternatively, blew up; twenty-eight vehicles were destroyed; and 412 people were arrested or put under protective custody. The motorcycle gangs wanted to be noticed; the kids wanted attention, and they got it.

BGLB was an all-male gang. The group grew to include several hundred motorcycles. Saigo rose to become the second-generation leader of his BGLB Speed Tribe in 1976. By that time, the associated gang members had risen to 1,500 people.

The bosozoku, in many ways, resembled the lawless gangs, called gurentai, that wreaked havoc in Tokyo in the chaos after World War II. Gu meant “stupidity,” and rentai was slang for a “regiment.” Thus the translation for gurentai was “the regiment of the stupid,” or “the stupid regiment.” Nowadays, we call them gangs. They went around collecting protection money, terrorizing the locals, and constantly fighting with other speed tribes over real and imagined slights.

Among all of them, Saigo was the toughest, and he was huge for a Japanese man of his era. It was here that Saigo earned his nickname, Tsunami. “Saigo would show up without warning and swiftly decimate his enemies,” said a fellow gang member. “He was a force of nature. He was overwhelmingly powerful, afraid of nothing, and, just like a tsunami, no one ever knew when he was coming or how much damage he would do when he showed up.”

But Saigo wasn’t just a young thug who had made his way to the top with sheer brute force — he also had a good business sense. As the organization got bigger, he made every member who joined put a BGLB sticker on their bike, and forced them to pay 3,000 yen, which was quite a sum at the time, for a two-sticker set. He had spent 50,000 yen on creating the printing plate for the stickers, but with the membership increasing at a huge pace, he soon made back his money. The actual production cost per sticker was a mere 300 yen, giving him an almost ten-fold profit margin and more.

The gang would gather every Friday and Saturday at the Daikyo Gasoline stand on the edge of town. There would be hundreds of bikers. Most of them had illegally altered their bikes, with the mufflers removed, and their capacity for speed improved. Several helmets would be passed around, and all those attending would throw in some money for “gasoline costs.” Saigo would pocket most of it.

Other times, he and his pals would call for donations in their various fundraising drives, which they called kanpa. The word itself was derived from the Russian word kompaniya (компания), which was used to refer to collecting funds for a political campaign. However, there was nothing political in what BGLB was doing; they stood for nothing and had nothing they wanted to accomplish, other than cause trouble.

Sometimes there was a reason for the kanpa. “We need to buy gifts for our buddy in the hospital.” “We need to get some new baseball bats.” “We gotta fix our bikes.” However, often there was no reason given. Money was requested, and young punks who wanted to be cool and ride with the big boys turned in what cash they had. Some members of the gang began forcing their juniors still in school to buy stickers as well. “Sticker fees” became a synonym for low-level extortion in parts of Tokyo.

“It was a lot like what we’d do later in the yakuza,” Saigo said. “The people at the top were always collecting money from the lower gangs at the various yakuza rituals, ceremonies, and special occasions.”

The BLGB had some unspoken rules. If you violated them, you were out of the gang, and would be beaten severely as you were booted out:

1. No fooling around with another member’s woman

2. No starting gang wars without executive approval

3. No snitching to the cops

4. No robbery, theft, or rape

5. No bothering women, children, and elderly people*

[* Driving loudly through neighborhoods and disturbing the sleep of women, children, and elderly people was somehow exempt from this rule.]

6. No disrespecting your seniors in the organization.

Saigo wasn’t content with just running the biggest motorcycle gang in Machida; he wanted to run the biggest gang in Tokyo. Through fights and intimidation, BGLB began to absorb the other motorcycle gangs as well.

“It was like doing mergers and acquisitions. We’d pick a fight with a local gang, beat the crap out of their leaders, and offer them a choice: join us, or never ride again. Most of them joined us.”

One by one, the local groups fell under the umbrella of the organization, even the dreaded Gokuaku (Ultimate Evil). Saigo enforced the basic rules that all gang members had to follow, but there was very little that could get you kicked out once you got in. In fact, leaving the gang was the hard part. It officially could cost you 10,000 yen, or a beating. Most people who left just chose to quietly fade or move away.

As a manager, he made sure to keep one step ahead of the law. When the traffic laws were changed to mandate all motorcycle riders wear helmets, all his members were made to get helmets. When the laws were changed raising the driving age for large motorbikes, he made sure that people were only riding bikes that they were properly licensed for. Saigo was starting to learn that to be a successful outlaw, you needed to keep up with the law. Just like the blind spot in a mirror, there was always a blind spot in the law you could work with, if you just stayed on top of things.

However, as the groups got bigger, reaching their peak around 1976, the conflicts between factions became increasingly violent. A mob mentality began to take over. It became standard to have two men per bike; they rode in teams. Before each run, the “executive members” would be assigned a role to perform.

Some groups would hold the rear, keeping police cars from breaking up the convoy; another group would be the scouts, checking for oncoming gangs or the authorities. Sometimes, a special patrol would be carrying extra weapons. On every bike, the team was divided into one man who carried a weapon, and the other guy who drove the vehicle.

When other gangs began to carry wooden baseball bats to knock over pursuing police and Saigo’s people, he ordered all his members to get metal baseball bats. When the other guys got metal baseball bats, Saigo ordered his members to arm themselves with tantō (Japanese daggers). When baseball bats or daggers were in short supply, members would knock over “for sale” signs on property lots, pry the signs off their posts, and use the posts, with nails sticking out of them, as weapons. Saigo, through a friend whose father was a yakuza member, managed to acquire several Japanese swords, and armed his closest lieutenants.

His favorite sword had a curved blade. It was mass produced as an officer sword during World War II. The quality was dubious.

When a fight began, Saigo would stop his bike, jump off, and unsheathe his sword; brandishing it in the air, and daring anyone to come close to him. Even guys still riding their bikes, with baseball bat–wielding thugs sitting behind them, wouldn’t dare lunge at him — one mistake, and they knew they might be skewered like chicken at a yakitori stand. He would glower at the assembled enemy, yelling, screaming, and behaving very much like a Japanese Conan the Barbarian.

He slashed up a few guys with the sword, but never stabbed anyone — that would surely kill them. And while the best-made Japanese swords are allegedly able to slice a man in half, his sword was more for show. It scared the hell out of people anyway. He knew enough to keep it shiny. The edged and tapered point was blunt and slightly rusted, but the ridges of the blade, called shinogi, were so polished that if he tilted the blade in the sun or in strong moonlight, it was like flashing a light in someone’s eyes.

The original definition of shinogi was the edge of a blade. Back in the Edo period, samurai and ronin (masterless samurai) made their living as swordsmen in battle and as security guards. The more you worked, the more you used your sword. Over time, the edge would wear away.

Saigo’s sword, however, had a sharp edge. He could have cut off someone’s arm or leg with it. He wielded his sword with two hands. It was heavy. He always made sure to just cut the arm. If you slice with full power, you’d cut off the arm. So you hit, and then you pull, stopping in full swing. Saigo might have amputated someone, but he most likely didn’t. His opponents would always run away, and he didn’t stick around to check for spare limbs lying about either. He cut deep sometimes, but never cut all the way through. “I was really careful not to kill anyone. I’d say, ‘This time, I’ll let you live,’ and I always did. It’s bad to kill people. We were careful. We would never slice at a guy when he was riding with his woman, and never slice a woman — even when she’d slice us up with a razor or whatever she was carrying.”

As the violence escalated, however, Saigo began to fear that what had started as good, violent fun might really turn deadly.

There came a point when things were too out of hand for him. There were too many people, too many fights, and the scale of gang warfare reached proportions that the police would not and could not ignore.

In 1977 and 1978, the news was filled with tales of terror caused by the speed tribes. In Osaka, motorcycle gangs attacked the police with two-by-fours spiked with nails. In the Fukushima prefecture, two gangs clashed, resulting in a fight between forty gang members in a junior high school courtyard. The kids armed themselves with bokken and glass bottles, and they fought until six of them were seriously injured. The Black Emperor gang raided a gas station in a guerrilla attack, laying siege to the police and taking over the pumps. The police arrested and/or detained 109 of them. Yakuza groups began incorporating the bosozoku into their ranks, using them to sell methamphetamines and to extort money from the local populace. The motorcycle gangs were becoming more and more like the yakuza.

The National Police Agency took a dim view of the speed tribes, and by October 1, 1978, a new law went on the books forbidding dangerous unified activities while driving. The law was designed to punish the speed tribes for running on the roads at high speeds in groups, racing each other, and even gathering their vehicles together to move in a convoy. The members were constantly being fined for driving over the speed limit, but the new changes in the law imposed a 50,000-yen penalty for dangerous driving — the kind of hefty fees that could put a teenage punk into serious debt.

Everyone thought the new laws would be the end of the speed tribes. The power of the groups was in their numbers. If they couldn’t drive together, they had no power. The penalties were steep, and no one wanted to be the first person captured under the new laws. Many bosozoku were quitting the lifestyle completely.

One day, while riding, Saigo and his gang were caught by the police. The police threatened that they’d be arrested unless they broke up the group. Saigo was pretty much tired of the bosozoku scene at that point anyway, so he decided to give up life as a motorcycle gangster. He dissolved BGLB, and decided to go back to music.

By this time, he had become infamous in his hometown. The local paper even interviewed him and published a heartwarming feature on his retirement, wishing him a better, more creative, and useful life.

One of his former band members, Maruyama, got him a gig playing guitar with a split-off from Gaido now called Kusare Gaido (Rotten Gaido). By this time, Gaido had split up and reformed so many times that it had become several bands, each claiming the Gaido title.

Gaido had never been a stable band, and the infighting among members was as legendary as the group itself in Japanese rock history. The band had made a trip to Hawaii in 1975 and played at the Sunshine Head Rock Festival on January 1, making them the first Japanese rock band to play on U.S. soil. That year, the band released a flood of singles and live albums. By 1976, Gaido was one of the hottest bands in Japan, but in September they suddenly announced they would be disbanding at the Machida Festival.

On October 16, 1976, they played their last concert in Hibiya. The individual members went on their solo careers, but Maruyama created Kusare Gaido. And Kusare Gaido looked like it might be able to claim the title of the “Gaido of all Gaidos.”

For Saigo, Kusare Gaido filled the space left by the speed tribe. The BGLB had played a major part in the growth of the band, forming the bulk of the Gaido groupies. He felt he belonged, and had already started writing his own songs. He thought that, while society was criticizing them, they were going to rise up and be famous.

Maruyama told him he was trying to reform the band under the original name, and put together a new album, which would be their fifth, by the following year. They had Nippon Columbia Records aboard, which operated the Columbia Records label in Japan. This was the big time.

Saigo was working odd jobs to get by. He was still living with his parents, but he assured them that he was on the path to rock stardom, and spent long hours practicing the guitar. At least, as far as his parents were concerned, he wasn’t running around with the bosozuku anymore and had some sort of life goal.

But Saigo couldn’t quite give up his love of driving at full speed. Months had gone by since the anti-speed tribe laws had gone on the books. The motorcycle gangs had decided to lay low to gauge how hard the cops would crack down on them. Yet nobody had been arrested. The law hadn’t been broken. The police didn’t even seem to be enforcing it. Saigo and his pals decided that the cops were all talk and no walk. They were not about talking or walking; they were all about riding.

One quiet Saturday afternoon in Machida in August 1979, Saigo and his former crew gathered together. They wanted to ride again. Saigo thought it was a very bad idea, but he didn’t want people to think he was a coward, so he went ahead and decided to do it anyway. One hundred and twenty vehicles assembled at the Daikyo Gas Station. The run was a disaster. In fact, it made the papers the next day.

Bosozoku leader arrested as “Accomplice;” First Use of Revised Law to Arrest Co-Criminal

The second-in-command of a bosozoku motorcycle gang was arrested on the 20th as an accomplice in reckless driving, authorities from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Transportation Investigators and the Shibuya Ward Police revealed.

In the early morning hours of the 12th, police apprehended four members of a bosozoku gang under suspicion of violating the “Cooperative Dangerous Driving” clause of the Road Traffic Act. Included in the group was the gang’s second-in-command, an 18-year-old unemployed Machida resident, who was riding on the back of one of the bikes. The suspect maintained he was innocent as he was not in control of the vehicle while the driver was breaking the law. Police arrested him as an accomplice, however, saying that the youth had premeditated intentions to violate the Road Traffic Act.

Saigo was charged with dangerous driving, obstruction of public duty, and other violations. The court fined him 50,000 yen and sentenced him to two months in a juvenile detention center.

In 1980, Maruyama told him the band was getting back together. However, asking Saigo to join was out of the question. Even though Saigo was an original band member, and Maruyama thought his bosozoku run was funny, the manager said that a delinquent like Saigo would just drag the band down. Anyway, he couldn’t show up to band practice while he was in juvenile detention — so he got cut. The manager told Saigo, “Listen kid, you can gather your delinquent friends and come cheer on the band. Someday, maybe you’ll be a band member yourself. Right now, bow out and support the band.”

Saigo regrets that final run. “I was at the turning point of my life, and not only did I miss the turn, I ran a red light at full-speed and wound up in jail. I drove off the road into a swamp, and I’m the only one I can blame.”

The future looked dark for Saigo. He wasn’t going to be a rock star. He wasn’t going to be a bosozoku gang leader. He was going to to have to get a job. He found work fixing cars. He knew a lot about cars, but it wasn’t glamorous. The whole job was frustrating because he had temporarily lost his license and couldn’t drive the cars he was working on.

He had steady work and a straight job, but Saigo staying on the tried-and-true path was about as likely as him driving under the speed limit.