4 FORBEARANCE

Sociality, Honor, and the Circulation of Violence

A week rarely passed without one of the guys getting into a confrontation or fight. Even Saruma, who might have appeared the least hotheaded of the bunch, had a history of winding up in detention centers. The graduate of an elite Okinawan high school and of Meiji University, Saruma had been president of his own small company that specialized in the installation of LAN lines. Yet he would also recall breaking bottles and “half killing” opponents in bar brawls. What was the point of breaking bottles, he asked, if not to half kill your adversary?

But the most well-known fighter was Rikiishi, “bodyguard,” “junior,” confidant, and friend to the lean and elegant Takeda-san. Indeed, once he was set off in a fight, Kentarō remarked, “there is no stopping” Rikiishi. By this same token, however, Rikiishi could be counted on to come to one’s aid, unlike anyone else, Akira would say. He would “come running” without giving it a second thought. Notwithstanding his unstoppable character, the steadfast Rikiishi thereby upheld a principle of consideration for buddies that Akira explained with reference to one of his favorite ideograms, namely, “forbearance” (nin).⁵ By either deciding to fight solo, that is, without involving others, or by always coming to the rescue, even the formidable Rikiishi restrained and sacrificed himself for his buddies, at least in fights. He thus embodied what Akira would elaborate as his philosophy of forbearance, with reference to its ideogram, which consists in the combination of a protective “heart” (kokoro) or “shield” (tate) and a “sword” (katana) that was only wielded at the very limit of endurance.⁶ If it got to that point, Akira, like Rikiishi, might strike and unleash violence in all its excess, but unless that moment arrived, he would control himself in the interest of others.

Though alcohol blurred judgment, the expression of an idealized code of honor could be discerned in fighting. As Shōkawa emphatically explained upon first meeting me—an outsider—the fundamental principle of fighting resided in protecting one’s buddies. He asked me if it was not “normal” (futsū) that one “look out for” the members of one’s group and, if any member was threatened or beaten up, that one strike back.⁷ As such, the compulsion to fight invoked the necessity of protecting sociality itself, and reference was therefore made beyond the dyadic relation: to buddies. And as Shōkawa continued to explain, these rules of conduct also functioned to maintain order, hierarchy, and formality within the group. As Okinawans, he said, it was not allowed to “lay a hand on” anyone senior in age to oneself. Juniors could talk back at seniors, but to physically strike them was not accepted. On the contrary, violence might be employed by seniors to reinstate the proper order of things. Or an apology could be accepted from the offending party. The reciprocity of violence could thereby give rise to alliance, much as Marcel Mauss once observed that the exchange of gifts may replace warfare, paving the way for indebtedness, sociality, and a temporality of deferral within which reputations were either created or destroyed.⁸ An apology and its acceptance created social obligation and demanded the remembrance thereof, such that obligations would be fulfilled over time and, in this case, either by sacrificing oneself for or restraining oneself from entangling a buddy in one’s brawls.⁹ In fact, this was how Shōkawa and Akira’s friendship was forged. Akira had started off their relationship with a faux pas, offending when he should have been deferential to Shōkawa, who was four years senior to Akira. But Akira had set himself aside and apologized. Camaraderie had been established by acceding to a social system of seniority that both individuals recognized, and by the time Akira ended up in detention at Asakusa police headquarters for aiding Shōkawa in a brawl, the latter was introducing Akira to others as his “younger brother” (otōto).

Still, the failure to observe proper deference was rare for core members, and its enforcement was primarily reserved for individuals within the periphery of the group, as Akira had been when he had offended Shōkawa. In this way, a younger man in his midthirties was given a battering after work one day, for he had a bad habit of becoming offensive when he was drinking, and Suzuki, Kentarō, and Rikiishi had had enough. Since it would have been awkward for Suzuki—his tehaishi caretaker—to put the man in place, Rikiishi did it. A week later, the man’s face was still swollen, and one eye was bloodred. It had been “much worse,” Kentarō said, right after the beating. But everyone continued work as before, save for a brief urging from Kentarō to fix the habit. Nonetheless, Kentarō acknowledged, it was difficult to alter habits.

The enforcement of deference transpired similarly one day outside Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall, where Kentarō witnessed a slightly younger man lambasting the senior Hasegawa for his condescending attitude. Notably, Kentarō and others in the Okinawa-gang had not been very fond of Hasegawa at the time, likely for the very same reason the man was shouting at him. Kentarō himself had moved out of Hasegawa’s apartment because he was being asked to pay a monthly shower fee of ¥5,000 ($50). Nonetheless, in this instance, the flagrant disregard of deference prompted Kentarō to take the younger man to task. Demanding what kind of behavior it was to speak thus to a “senior” (meue)—“he’s your senior, right?”—Kentarō challenged the man to a fight when the latter persisted in justifying himself. As Kentarō broke into a shadowboxing stance, flinging his fists about, he beckoned the other man to join him around the corner. Sure enough, the younger man apologized shortly after, first to Kentarō and then to Hasegawa, and as the man lowered his head and shook hands, Kentarō went about introducing him to everyone as if he were a new recruit.¹⁰

Where talk was endlessly unproductive, the threat of violence facilitated instant resolution, and in so doing, it extended the influence of the group. It was not just the prospect of fighting but of losing to a person as intimidating as Kentarō that enforced submission to a certain social order. After all, Kentarō had a reputation, and he himself professed to beating the hell out of adversaries. But as Kentarō declared one day, he was also well aware that no one in the group stood a chance against someone twenty years younger. Perhaps for this reason, he had a knack for establishing his authority before fights had even begun, and it was in one such instance that I found myself in a snack bar with Kentarō, sitting next to a hoodlum (chinpira). Dressed in baggy sports clothes, the youth was clearly sizing us up. Yet, at the slightest hint of an attitude from our neighbor, Kentarō ended the situation by simply saying: “I don’t know if you’re part of some organization, but it’s irrelevant.” His words sent a quick ripple through the man, and in an instant, the tension had been diffused, because Kentarō had made it clear that it did not matter whether he was yakuza affiliated or not. If they were going to fight, they might as well skip the posturing and have it out right away. Or they could get along drinking. It was one or the other. Kentarō thereby called the man’s bluff, and the next day he was laughing about the hoodlum cheerily toasting with us by the end of the night.¹¹

In most cases, however, fighting caused a tiresome inconvenience to other members of the group. Unlike Kentarō’s no-nonsense confrontations, most brawls involved situations in which other members either had to prevent the fight or provide aid when things got out of hand. In fact, the sixty-year-old Shōkawa was regarded as the most troublesome drunk of the lot, because he constantly embroiled others in his confrontations. But it was not just Shōkawa. One evening, the guys had to chase down Hayashi when he insisted on antagonizing his opponent, driving him down the street until they ended up in front of the Mammoth. So too, Akira repeatedly had to step in to prevent Riku, Saruma, and countless other acquaintances from fighting. It was a weekly, if not a daily, occurrence that somebody got themselves into a confrontation, such that the rest of the crew would sigh, lower their heads, and moan: “Not again.” And in addition to the trouble of preventing or aiding, there were other inconveniences to brawls. At times, the furniture in bars was broken so that everyone involved either had to pay for repairs or someone had to fix things with a drill and hammer. Naturally, the individual who had instigated the fight justified his conduct, throwing blame on the other party. He insisted that there had been no choice but to fight, and in this way, everyone had to live with the self-righteous machismo of the others. Indeed, brawls could give occasion for the group to come together.

Looking after and indulging one another fostered bonds of indebtedness that strengthened the group, but such indebtedness could also accrue to the point at which someone destroyed their own reputation. It was especially burdensome when someone ended up in detention or jail because the others had to visit. Personages like Takeda-san and Nē-san would also go by with magazines and clothing, while Matsuda deployed his police connections, at least to give the appearance of securing an early release. The strongest bond ought to have arisen on the occasion that someone was detained on account of someone else. Yet such an outcome was contingent on the remembrance of debt and reciprocal conduct over time, with a slight difference, as the return of the gift demands.

On the other hand, coming to the rescue enhanced the reputation of the rescuing individual. When Matsuda was beaten down in front of Mutō’s place, Akira stepped in since it looked like Matsuda “would take a beating.” After they had been hauled into the Mammoth, Akira proceeded to kick the other man in the stomach when he accused Akira of having started the affair. This incident earned Akira the reputation of someone who would not side with the police to play to his advantage and, with it, a nickname coined by Matsuda, for having kicked the other man inside the police box, in front of the cops. Reminiscent of Miyazaki Manabu’s “devil-may-care type,” Matsuda would henceforth refer to Akira as “the devil’s man.” As Akira himself would say, he looked to the “actions” of others to evaluate them, and in this case, his actions had established his worth.¹²

Matters unfolded similarly when Akira wound up in detention on account of Shōkawa. But it was from a third person, Riku, that Shōkawa inherited the fight. Riku had abruptly abandoned a confrontation in the hands of Shōkawa, who called Akira. Faced with a crazed opponent who was about to throw a bicycle at Shōkawa when Akira arrived, the two of them retaliated by pummeling the man to the ground with an aluminum trash can. Once the police had detained the three of them, the other man insisted on pressing charges, causing Shōkawa and Akira to spend two weeks in detention. As a consequence, the only person whose reputation remained unscathed after this incident was Akira since he had played no part in starting the fight. He had only gone running when Shōkawa phoned, as his code of ethics dictated and despite others advising him it was “better not to go.” As luck would have it, Akira also wound up in a two-by-one-meter cell, while Shōkawa lounged in an empty six-person cell. Their release gave occasion for everyone to get together, including a remorseful Riku and Matsuda, the facilitator of their early release, and in this way, sociality was sustained. Yet Akira’s self-sacrifice called for return, and Shōkawa’s failure to be mindful of this left their relationship fraught. Only by protecting Akira or someone else could Shōkawa return or pass onward the gift of self-sacrifice.¹³ Violence was thus made to circulate in San’ya and to take on an incremental character, because it was expected that buddies go the extra mile. But this logic constituted a double-edged sword. Although violence in the name of solidarity sealed buddies as buddies, it also sowed vengeance in outsiders, and the violence that was inflicted was the violence that would be (or had been) returned, originating in an impossible, inexhaustible source that exceeded the limits that forbearance would have placed on it.¹⁴

As if the damage inflicted could never be enough, there was an excess to the violence with which the guys engaged their adversaries. An indelible mark had to be left behind, either on their opponents or themselves. One day, Rikiishi took on the man reputed to “have been the strongest” in San’ya, giving him injuries that required several months of hospitalization. Fortunately for Rikiishi, this man did not press charges but did give him an elbow injury that would stay with him “for life.” Shōkawa likewise laughed at the “footprint” left by Akira’s slipper on someone’s face when he kicked them outside Sakura. Only a week later, Shōkawa recounted how he had “pride” (puraido) and had therefore held on tightly to the aluminum can as he beat his opponent, even as the aluminum sliced through his finger. In effect, the offense that precipitated the confrontation had triggered a violence whose source could not be located or extinguished. The drive to violence circulated an excess for which reciprocity could not suffice.

Fights had to be repeated because they sought to reestablish masculinity, and in doing this, they invariably referenced the degenerate social status of San’ya. It was never enough, and lest the individual in question could restrain himself, fights threatened to unleash an excess that undercut their self-assertions. The important thing was that everyone recognize them as an otoko. Rather than cause a “burden” (meiwaku) to the group, therefore, it happened that some of the guys embroiled themselves in solo confrontations and that they went on veritable fighting sprees alone. In fact, Rikiishi never involved anyone else, and when he got injured, he had been getting himself into fights for months. Having just turned fifty, this fighting spree notably coincided with a period in his life when he was suffering from something akin to panic attacks. Unable to make a fist, Rikiishi grasped a plastic bottle at all times and exhibited all sorts of strange behavior, like bolting in and out of Sakura or calling Akira in the early mornings to go for calming walks. And when he drank, he drank to the point of becoming so “hammered” that, one evening, he could be found swaying and bracing himself against the electric pole right in front of the Mammoth, grunting and barely able to keep his eyes open. Thus, he would drink and sleep in Sakura, only to wake and drink. Having turned fifty, Rikiishi would later explain that, up until that point, he had “risen and risen” at work, imagining that he would reach the top. But the moment seemed to have passed without his being aware of it, and now he was on the way down. He could keep up with younger scaffolders for a day or so. But otherwise, he fell behind. As the result of age and decades of construction work, this insufficiency was transposed through fighting into a reaffirmation of masculinity.

In fact, Akira was constantly attuned to actualizing his principle of fighting, which he would illustrate with the proverb: “Side with the weak, and crush the strong” (yowaki o tasuke tsuyoki o kujiku). Being good at karaoke, traditional enka songs, and proverbs, Akira had more than a dozen sayings memorized to suit various occasions. In this instance, the proverb referenced yakuza ideals of old, and by cloaking its world with an aura of virtue, it reversed the assignation of guilt that had constituted Akira’s life as an “outlaw.”¹⁵ By refiguring the act that landed him in jail, fighting would reverse the order of justice, guilt, and punishment. It would install Akira as an otoko in his own right, and he staked himself to this end. Hence, when Akira’s older sister died, and he was unable to attend the funeral in Okinawa for lack of cash, his powerlessness caused him to “go amok” (abareru). Taking on three opponents in the Iroha arcade, he woke in the hospital with broken ribs. The excess of violence could, in effect, be directed at the self as much as another. It could be exteriorized and passed onward, or it could be internalized in the form of self-loathing and the consequent infliction of self-harm. Just as Akira’s “anger” at Sanyukai was “eternal,” this violence was inexhaustible in its transposition, and its excess triggered repetition while giving rise to pleasure in pain. As if his ribs would never heal, Akira repeatedly refractured them and never seemed to get rid of his bandages. The mark of the altercation functioned as a badge of masculinity but compelled repetition in its insufficiency.

It was not only the excess of violence that impelled physical altercations, but a desire for these acts to signify in their excess and to do so exhaustively. Even though no one might have seen the spectacle, it was in the interest of making it intelligible that there was so much talk about what had happened, both by participants and others. Above and beyond the sociality of the group, there was a dramatic aspect to fighting that recalls Barthes’s work “The World of Wrestling.” Be it a slur, blow, wound, or the manner in which the event was recounted, there was an excess to the characterization of personalities involved, and every detail of the altercation seemed to carry a meaning. Not unlike “the forearm smash” or “hold” in wrestling, there was the “chokehold,” “beating the hell out of” adversaries, or the finishing kick in the face.¹⁶ Whether it was enforcement of submission by someone merciful enough to grant second chances, ruthless violence to eliminate a wrongdoer by someone prepared to go the whole nine yards, or the crowning blow of incontestable supremacy by someone who threw repercussions to the wind, there was a personal extravagance to acts of violence that was equally evident in the suffering incurred through brawls. Only the uncontrollable Rikiishi received elbow damage for life, whereas Akira suffered broken ribs in silent interiority, and Kentarō always returned intact, if with a nick on the knuckle. Where Rikiishi was simply unstoppable in his rage, Akira waited for the odds to be stacked against him, and Kentarō read his opponents before challenging them to an altercation that they would prefer to avoid: be it in gambling or fights, Kentarō was the “Paul Newman of Japan.” Everyone had a role to play and, in the exuberance of that performance, a mask to wear. As Akira observed of pro wrestling one day, it is enjoyable to watch precisely because it is an “act!”¹⁷

Staking themselves in physical altercations allowed for the guys to follow their convictions through and to display this accomplishment. Much as fighting could miscarry, its violence did not consist in a plunge into the sheer excess of negativity, as proponents of Bataille might have it, for there was a signification at stake in the act, if only to rest content with oneself. In the enactment of an idealized code of honor, it was not only suffering, retribution, and justice that were rendered intelligible—an eye for an eye, as Barthes himself says, plus a little more—but an ennobled model of how righteous men should conduct themselves in an ideal world. Of course, the assertion of these ideals could only occur in contradistinction to the underhanded, cunning, and devious ways of the likes of Yamamori, who performed his role of the hoodlum fiend to perfection. Either way, the efficacy of the enactment consisted of the extent to which individuals expressed an excess of interiority in the legible exteriority of signs.¹⁸ Thus, when Akira offered himself up to a battering by three men or Riku pulled a knife in Sakura, there was an aspiration for their actions to meet a standard of conduct, and this was so even when they were inebriated. Being drunk obviously tended to exacerbate difficult situations and to blur righteous distinctions. Yet the true problem was that confrontations in San’ya revived wounds whose source was always located elsewhere, and for this reason, the violence deployed in everyday spats could be well-nigh inexhaustible. The enactment of justice missed the common plight of men in San’ya, whose sufferings first and foremost derived from the state. Although it was by transgressing against the rules of general society that the group attained their self-empowering form of justice, they could not but succumb to the state power that rendered them a means within the overriding economy. The loose entity of the group filled the lacuna left by state authority, determining according to its forgiving and impromptu standards whether so-and-so had acted with consideration for its members.

Ultimately, it was failure to account for repercussions on other members of the group that caused the assertion of masculinity to backfire, and this entailed that individuals place limits on their conduct. While everyone was usually supportive of members who got the others involved in confrontations, there was a limit to such indulgence. Like Suzuki, Shōkawa had brought about one too many inconveniences, and their bragging had grown hollow and tiresome for lack of group recognition. But it was the laconic Riku who was made to bear the brunt of the blame for the two-week incarceration of Akira and Shōkawa. Kentarō, who rarely went out of his way to lecture anyone, had to sit down with Riku to talk over what had happened. The problem or violence had to be addressed and quelled at what appeared to be its source, namely, an individual who repeatedly embroiled others in his own brawls. Behind his back, Riku was now called a “troublemaker,” and even Shōkawa would mutter that Riku was “finished.” After detention, Akira, too, said that he had already intervened for Riku several times and that he would no longer get involved. From then on, he would take a “no touch” policy, claiming: “The real winner is the one who walks away.” With a few exceptions, however, almost everyone had been in Riku’s position before.

Indeed, save for Takeda-san, it seemed that almost anyone could occupy the place of the individual who was causing a burden to everyone else. In fact, only months before the fight, Kentarō and Akira were lauding Riku precisely for being the kind of person who did not entangle others in his affairs. Riku was known for taking care of things by himself, and on this note, he refused to seek or accept financial support from the state. To the exasperation of Kentarō, who was adamantly of the stance that “you take what you can get,” Riku had even severed the support he received while being treated for an illness, thought to be cancer. Years earlier, Kentarō had likewise found Riku injured in Asakusa after a fight, but despite several broken ribs, Riku insisted on returning by himself. Thus, Riku would come to be known for his warped sense of honor and for his drunken fits, when it was not unusual for him to pull a knife. But this time, Riku had broken his own mahjong dictum—people are “finished if they compromise” (magetara owari)—and he had fallen into the category of being “out,” as Kentarō called those who could not uphold their own standards. The fall and rise of individuals came swiftly, such that at one point in the year, Hayashi might have fallen out of favor, while, half a year later, Hayashi himself joined the others in complaining about someone else. The guys fell consistently short of their own standards, precisely in instantiating them, and this failure prompted repetition. It was never enough.

In this way, there was simmering tension, if not antipathy between some members, and the seemingly arbitrary choice of someone to be “out” appeared to consolidate group sentiment. This logic of exclusion is similar to the more widespread one of “bullying” (ijime) in Japan, in which a mark of difference singles out an individual target for social violence, and one is reminded of the supposedly functional operations of violence in creating unanimity.¹⁹ The designation of a sacrificial victim would deflect the reciprocal character of violence onto an external object, and in so doing, it would regenerate the unity of the social, such that the expulsion finally assumes a ritual form in which a mimetic object comes to replace the original sacrifice. Threatened on all sides, a “lawless zone” like San’ya would lend itself to the conditions under which an originary crisis necessitates the founding of the social in sacrifice, and there was, indeed, a conventional character to the manner in which everyone grumbled about so-and-so. But the violence circulating in San’ya owed its cause to the market that rendered the San’ya man disposable: there was an anterior agency that justified that good-for-nothings be disposed of, and this limitless source of violence, which had been lived daily for decades, was therefore far from immanent to relations within San’ya.²⁰ It was state recognition that contained violence within San’ya and against statist norms that the group sought justice through transgression. Violence was normally deflected onto outsiders to the group, powerless as they were before the state itself, but the tension between its members could just as well unravel its own social fabric. Notwithstanding the choice of an individual to be “out,” it was only forbearance that secured the mutual respect of buddies.

In its transgressive mode, the trope of the otoko referenced an ideal that was embodied by Takeda-san as the emblem of solidarity, hierarchy, and hospitality. In a poignant rendition of the importance of the group, Takeda-san recalled how he had first arrived in San’ya decades earlier and wondered whether he would “be able to make it in this town.” At the time, he knew no one. Hence, years later, Takeda-san would say that buddies are “everything.” If he were to go to another town, he would have to start from scratch. But in “this town”—Yama—Takeda-san had his buddies and his partner, Nē-san. For lack of any other markers of social status—college degree, résumé—recognition by others in one’s immediate vicinity took on paramount significance. Such social recognition was “everything”: it marked the difference between the violence of disposability—death—that the labor market predicated for San’ya and the dignity conferred by recognition as an otoko.²¹ In face of the objective, individualizing conditions of capitalist dispossession, the proximity of buddies in San’ya enabled a sociality of mutual recognition that stood in contrast to more advanced, fully alienated formations of sociality and discipline that exist at, say, a white-collar company or among workers for a temp agency.²²

Contrary to expulsion and confinement to San’ya, Takeda-san and Nē-san made a practice of inviting everyone home for meals and alcohol. Once or twice every month, particularly on holidays, long weekends, and breaks like the New Year or Obon, Takeda-san and Nē-san hosted gatherings for the Okinawa-gang and an endless range of friends and acquaintances. Their tiny living room was no more than five by two meters, opening up through sliding doors (fusuma) onto an even smaller tatami bedroom, a narrow kitchen with barely enough space for one person, and an entryway that fed directly into the kitchen, and beside which was located a basic Japanese-style toilet. The apartment had no shower or bath, meaning that Takeda-san and Nē-san frequented the nearby public bathhouse. During these get-togethers, the living room would get so crowded that people had to squeeze between each other at the table or sit behind one another to fit. Takeda-san would sit at the far end of the table, beside the small TV, chatting with someone and occasionally directing Nē-san to get this or that. As for Nē-san, she would sit in seiza (knees bent underneath her) in the bedroom adjacent to the living room, occasionally making food, adding it to a table already decked out with all kinds of dishes, drinks, and ashtrays. But she would overturn this image of docility with a sarcastic, quick-witted humor that knew nothing of decency in parrying comments from the guys. Nē-san also would not drink, as she could not take alcohol, and it was only much later in the night, usually after midnight, when the food had been consumed and everyone had settled into a drinking-only mode, that she relaxed and took part in gambling with flower cards. As I was instructed by Kentarō, at Takeda-san’s apartment one had to eat “without hesitation” (enryō naku) to make the hosts “happy.” Indeed, this hospitality was extended to all and sundry, some of whom came empty-handed—which was welcomed—but most often laden with large bags of ice or bottles of shochu, if not a box of Takeda-san’s Nodokoshi Kirin Happōshū beer. And when the New Year arrived, the guys would plan what to get for Takeda-san and Nē-san in advance, knowing they would spend several evenings, if not days, in their apartment, occasionally sleeping over.

The New Year left everyone penniless, but the feasts at Takeda-san and Nē-san’s apartment displayed the extravagance and largesse of a modern-day potlatch. After all, Georges Bataille once observed that it is in poverty, in the disdain for riches, and in the disregard for the value of upright labor that the modern potlatch can be rediscovered, marking the restoration of exuberance to life.²³ Indeed, feasts at Takeda-san and Nē-san’s apartment were quintessential events of nonproductive expenditure, wherein rank was established precisely through its effacement. It simply was not done to hesitate or carry on with formalities, and if gratitude was to be expressed, it was to be done without ceremony or in the form of a contribution to the potlatch. For the magic of Takeda-san’s influence resided in the absence of self-interest and calculation to his largesse.²⁴ True generosity and hospitality were to be encountered under conditions of poverty and utter social marginalization. Thus, Kentarō marveled at Robin Hood as a figure who “scatters” riches to the poor. Of New Year’s Eve at Takeda-san and Nē-san’s apartment, I wrote as follows:

Nē-san was sitting a little off to the side all the while. Not joining us at the actual table. Earlier in the evening, she’d been dealing with the food, moving back and forth. Later, she took a seat beside us in the adjacent room. When I’d offered to help in the kitchen, Rikiishi had come forth with a Japanese saying to the effect that the kitchen is the domain of women, not to be stepped into by a man. At my side, Kentarō noted that it was an old saying … but that young people today don’t care either way. Anyway, when Nē-san took a seat next to us later in the evening, she was looking on all the while to make sure we had everything needed. On occasion, Takeda-san would ask her to do this or that. The otoko of the house. And how cutely Nē-san was dressed, in baggy brown cotton pants and large-buttoned sweater with designs seamed into the pockets. Like a figure out of a Miyazaki anime. But always looking at you intently, like Takeda-san, straight in the eye. I can’t even begin to list the food that was put on the table … from the regular osechi ryōri (traditional New Year dishes) to sashimi, tuna, fish eggs, grilled shrimp, crab legs, homemade potato salad, fried spam, pork/meat stew, rice … and toshikoshi soba (year-crossing soba)—which, Takeda-san noted, had to be eaten before midnight, like they did as children, before being put to sleep. The whole table was stacked with food. Akira dealing out the ice and Jinro, and a box of beer outside the window. I think Mijime brought the crab, and Norihisa later came along with around 15 cans of the Nodokoshi Kirin Happoshu which Takeda-san drinks. It was an incredible meal … and the food just kept coming. They must have spent quite a lot of money on it all, but this wasn’t mentioned.²⁵

But the ultimate, irrevocable mark of the importance Takeda-san placed on buddies consisted in his three severed fingers, cut five times. To the uninitiated of general society, the missing fingers signified that Takeda-san was a past or present member of the mob. Like fighting and the otoko trope, their transgressive character might elicit wariness, revulsion, and fear in the outside world, but this compelled respect and deference in San’ya. The fact of Takeda-san’s sacrifice had been established in San’ya and had assumed mythical proportions. Kentarō rarely praised anyone and never adulated anyone, but he would emphatically state of Takeda-san’s missing fingers that this was “extremely rare.” In like fashion, Akira would declare that Takeda-san was a “man’s man” or even a “man of legend.” As self-sacrifice, the missing fingers indicated the amount of “suffering” Takeda-san had undergone for those under him. Kentarō added that there was “a stupid aspect to” Takeda-san, insofar as he might not have had to sever his fingers but had insisted upon it. As Akira explained, severing one’s fingers could become a “habit.” Still, Kentarō said that Takeda-san was “an incredible person” on account of his past in the yakuza, where had been part of the “top of the yakuza.” He was said to be “famous in Fukuoka.” Looking to Akira for confirmation, who nodded affirmatively, Kentarō admitted that he “only knew half” the story but that—speaking to me—“it’s clear from Nē-san’s manner” that Takeda-san is a person of considerable influence. For this reason, “because such a person is being used,” Kentarō would not call Takeda-san directly if work was available. Instead, he “put in a call to Nē-san.” Takeda-san might then “be sitting next to” Nē-san and nod, “yes, I’ll go,” which Nē-san would then convey to Kentarō.

In this manner, Kentarō made sure “to be attentive and cautious” in his dealings with Takeda-san, since, he said, “things slip out of place if Takeda-san gets angry.” Akira would also attribute an almost supernatural power to Takeda-san, claiming that if Takeda-san ordered it, or if Takeda-san was in trouble, everyone would go running. As Kentarō put it, one “cannot live up to” (atama ga agaranai) Takeda-san. Or as Akira would say, it is “not possible to imitate” Takeda-san. So too, Saruma would note that “everyone is indebted to” Takeda-san and Nē-san. The two were located at the very source of hospitality in San’ya, of all places, where most men had all but been expelled from general society, and as such, they acted as guarantors of a sociality and counterdiscourse, grounded in the otoko trope. Takeda-san was an emperor without a ¥10 billion endowment, who hoped to blow his gambling winnings on others. In this way, all talk of being an upstanding otoko started and ended with Takeda-san. But despite his elegance, often sporting a long scarf and knit sweater in the winter or a patterned collared shirt and baseball cap in the summer, Takeda-san revealed not a hint of self-importance or egotism in his demeanor, which, if anything, was self-deprecating to an excessive degree. He was at once the regular guy—who liked the children’s anime series One Piece, stayed at home to watch it, and had his phone covered in One Piece stickers—and the former mafia don. Takeda-san could have been arrogant and conceited on account of his mythic past, and yet, Kentarō said, Takeda-san would sit down at a table next to someone like me, smile, and have a drink. For this, Kentarō gave Takeda-san a thumbs-up. At once at the pinnacle of hierarchy among the guys and in San’ya itself, Takeda-san did not distinguish between people on the basis of reputation but liked them based on his experience with them. The disarming quality of his person and manner was evident everywhere, and his reputation appeared to precede and follow him about like some kind of “aura” (ōra)—a word that the younger Wakami used to describe him—only to be confirmed upon interacting with him. Takeda-san would leave an eatery, returning the already profuse bows of the owner by bowing even lower, and Kentarō might say, as if to himself, that Takeda-san was, “after all, incredible.” It was normal for the Kanamachi-ikka to put out a bottle for Takeda-san when they happened to be in the same eatery. But, likewise, Akira would remark that an otoko must have gone through an incredible amount of suffering to treat anyone with the same humility, be it the homeless man lying at the entrance to the Iroha arcade or the Kanamachi-ikka.²⁶ Takeda-san was as familiar as anyone with the drunks hanging about the entrance to Iroha, in front of Sōgidan, and would lower his head as he passed by. As such, he embodied a vanishing set of yakuza values in which the “top” looked out for “the weak.”²⁷

At work, Takeda-san was as polite and deferential as anyone could be. Indeed, if anything, he was more assiduous than the others, as he was well aware that his physical strength was not on par with other workers. When I first worked with Takeda-san, we attended the induction meeting for new workers together, and at this meeting, the twenty-eight-year-old foreman snickered because Takeda-san had written part of his paperwork in syllabic alphabet (katakana), but he did not ask Takeda-san to rewrite it.²⁸ Unphased by this condescension, Takeda-san went right to work. Only once, after years of working with Kentarō, did Takeda-san in any way object to work conditions. He had met with Kentarō for drinks, and—while looking at his fingers and noting that he had, in fact, gone to such lengths—he said he would “never again do” cement work. Apparently, he had ended up with the job of shoveling concrete on the upper story, which found others—from different companies—telling him over and over what to do, and not in the nicest manner. “You get told things” was how Kentarō put it, meaning that someone brusquely told you to shovel here and then there and to take a little off the top. In fact, Kentarō never did this task, as he always operated the vibrator. But thereafter, Kentarō refrained from sending Takeda-san to do concrete work, and in a sense, Kentarō was giving Takeda-san preferential treatment because he was unforgiving of complaints from others. Yet, unlike many others, Takeda-san had put in his time and had chosen the moment to address the issue. Kentarō’s protectiveness of Takeda-san thus emerged in barely noticeable ways, as when one day, Suzuki failed to inform Kentarō that a new worker in the group had been bad-mouthing Takeda-san on the train home. Kentarō flipped at Suzuki in front of everyone, shouting how “fucked up” it was that everyone knew but himself. The worker in question quit of his own accord, and it was not necessary for Suzuki to take further action. But the incident led Akira to instruct Suzuki that the “harmony” (wa) of the group was more important than anything else. The slur to Takeda-san had threatened the integrity and balance of the entire group.

As rarely as it was deployed, Takeda-san’s word imposed a law of order on the group. This was most evident when there was strife between individuals or among mutual acquaintances whom he wanted to get along amicably. Unity was thus restored under the figure of Takeda-san when he asked Kentarō to make up with Mijime, although Kentarō and others in the Okinawa-gang had never cared for Mijime. Kentarō went drinking with Mijime and, afterward, informed Takeda-san that there was “no more” awkwardness between them. The peace was an uneasy one, not least since it was Mijime and two accomplices who had put Akira in the hospital with broken ribs a year earlier, when Akira had apologized and then gone amok in the Iroha arcade. Yet even Akira held his peace after Takeda-san requested that Kentarō make up with Mijime. At gatherings at which Akira and Mijime were present—be it at Takeda-san’s apartment, Sakura, or Fukuhachi, Mijime’s dive bar, where the guys started drinking—Akira held his tongue, even when Mijime commented snidely: “What’s with your face color? It’s kind of blue. Are you gonna die soon?” No doubt, Mijime knew that Akira had been diagnosed with a tumor. Still, even in the absence of Mijime, Akira did not utter a single word bad-mouthing him, save in the company of those closest to him. For all the simmering tension, Takeda-san’s request had imposed a functional peace and the appearance of amity. Indeed, like the “men of influence” of whom Miyazaki writes in Toppamono, Takeda-san used to receive a fee from the Kanamachi-ikka to arbitrate and settle disputes between rival factions in San’ya. Now that San’ya had settled down, Takeda-san said, he did this for free.²⁹

It was not as if Takeda-san and Nē-san themselves had not partaken in their fair share of violence. The social fact that Takeda-san “knows everything about” the intricate hierarchies of the yakuza not only authorized him to impose order in what he described as the “lawless zone” of San’ya. As the constitutive form in which order was enforced, this fact attributed a knowledge of violence to Takeda-san that was inaccessible to others. For in San’ya, it was the strongest who survived. It was as if Takeda-san’s past, shrouded in the stuff of myth, empowered him to speak of things that the others passed over in silence. Thus, Takeda-san would lower his head and say to Nē-san, “We did some terrible things, yeah.” It had not just been a matter of striking back, Nē-san said, but of preempting: of striking before the other party did. Only in recent years—five, ten years back—had things calmed down in San’ya. But on one chance occasion, Takeda-san and Nē-san had encountered an old nemesis on the streets. Takeda-san had ended up in a scuffle with the man, rolling around on the sidewalk, while Nē-san threw rocks from the side. There had also been friends who had been killed, they said. Kentarō likewise recounted how it used to be that people disappeared, and no one would know what had happened until someone said: “Did you know?” Back then, “gangs” had likewise been active in San’ya.³⁰ Such gangs were known to keep track of the work schedules of individuals who had gone away to construction sites for days in a row, and they would lie in wait for these individuals outside Minami-Senjū Station, assault them, and strip them of their money. It had likewise been unsafe to sleep outside, especially in the Iroha arcade, since it was not uncommon for groups to beat the sleeping individual and rob them. Mijime had been the leader of such a gang, Akira said, which preyed on “the weak.” Everyone ostensibly knew of this. Yet Takeda-san would describe Mijime as a natural leader with a knack for attracting followers: a figure one could rely on to come to one’s aid, in force.³¹

Takeda-san, moreover, was attuned to the marginal social status of San’ya in a manner that, unlike the others, allowed him to comment on this fact. When everyone was drinking and Rikiishi asked me where Germany and France were, Takeda-san raised an attentive eye, which was not so much concerned as thoroughly aware that this was a situation in which Rikiishi could be made to look foolish. As if he had overcome certain wounds, Takeda-san could speak with Kentarō about being poor. Or when my partner had become visibly concerned by the rowdy crowd in his living room, he could read her concern and assure her that we would be looked after. Everyone was aware of the outcast status San’ya was accorded in the imaginary of proper Japanese society. Yet, except for the rare occasions when Akira would say to me in private that San’ya’s workers were “human garbage,” the fact of its marginalization was either passed over in silence or only referred to obliquely in passing. Akira, for instance, said that there were two reasons why he could not be with a woman. The first was his conviction for manslaughter. The second was the fact that he lived in San’ya. Because he did not explain, it only occurred to me later that Akira was implicitly referring to the stigma of San’ya. Still, Suzuki was always flirting with someone, and Ikuchi had stopped doing meth, pulled his act together, and found a girlfriend within a year of his release from prison. Finally, Takeda-san was with Nē-san, and he was most faithful to her, noting how much they had been through in the years and that it would be unthinkable to betray her. Though Takeda-san certainly drank to excess, it was even said that he was doing “all right” because of Nē-san, who reined in his consumption. More importantly, however, Nē-san validated Takeda-san as an otoko. Without Nē-san, it never would have been possible for the group to come over. Nē-san enabled the feasts and homeliness of Takeda-san’s place, and in so doing, she gave everyone the closest experience they would have to eating in a family setting.³²

Takeda-san and Nē-san were not married. Nē-san was older than Takeda-san by a few years, had been married with children earlier, and had at least half a dozen grandchildren. As for Takeda-san, he, too, had been with someone else earlier in his life. This earlier life, however, was passed over with a pause and the comment that there was “no point” dwelling on the “past.” But aside from references to past women, particularly in the presence of Nē-san, Takeda-san commented on the status of San’ya as if he had mastered the shame that separated the guys from general society. Where Akira and the others desired to be in a relationship with a woman, a prospect that Kentarō deemed “impossible,” Takeda-san and Nē-san had each other. Where everyone remained silent regarding the constitutive failures that confined San’ya to San’ya, Takeda-san discoursed freely, noting, for instance, that I was venturing into a place that even Japanese people would not come to: a “lawless zone.” Whether on account of his past, the amount of suffering he had endured, or the presence of Nē-san, something authorized Takeda-san to speak of the unspeakable: the failures that constituted San’ya.

With the exception of Takeda-san, almost everyone had run out of luck in both their family lives and romantic pursuits. Akira and Rikiishi had never had a relationship, and their only sexual experiences had been with prostitutes. Nearly everyone else had been married with kids. Saruma had been married three times and had one daughter from each marriage. He spoke to two of them once every year, and the third, whom he had never met and wished most to meet, lived somewhere in Kagoshima. Kentarō, who had been married to a nurse, had two sons in Okinawa, about the age of thirty. Hayashi had children here and there in the world, as he was an incorrigible womanizer (like Suzuki), but he also had a daughter with a Japanese woman. That this daughter was Japanese seemed to distinguish her from the other children, because this was the only child with whom Hayashi was in touch, and she had forgiven him when he had apologized for the father he had been, telling him that “things happen.” Still, Hayashi spoke frequently of his plans to return to the Philippines since he was only in San’ya temporarily, and there was a distinct sense in which his discarded women and children confirmed his identity as a Japanese man. Similarly, Hasegawa had kids in Thailand, but he could not return because he had been banned for engaging in illegal activities. Suzuki had raised his two daughters with his wife until they were self-sufficient and had only left his wife in recent years. His daughters now had kids. But he also had another child on the side, whom he had never met—but that everyone, including his wife and daughters, knew all about—and he was incorrigible in his efforts to “sow his wild oats” (tane o maku), as the others described it. Even as he planned to get back together with his wife, Suzuki was flirting with other women, and while he had been dating Ai (in the San’ya neighborhood), he had actively been trying to get her pregnant. He had told her that he would pay for the birth, and the prospect seemed to make him happy, but that was it. Sometimes, Ai would have to call Kentarō because Suzuki had become drunk and violent, and shortly after their plans to have a child, the couple broke up. But Shōkawa was the most vociferous in lamenting the loss of his boy and girl in Okinawa. His wife, whom he still lauded as being “beautiful,” had snuck into his house during their breakup and taken his son. As if it indicated his masculinity, Shōkawa recalled how the fight to keep his children had been an “incredible” affair. Yet he would lower his head when he expressed how much he regretted giving them up.

At some point, everyone expressed nostalgia for their past lives, if not regret and desire to see their children and family. These admissions rarely took place, however, and when they did, it was late in the evening, under the considerable influence of alcohol. They likewise ended quickly, observing the pattern of one man mentioning his children in passing, another suggesting it might be possible to contact them, and the first man shaking his lowered head. Naturally, Akira’s reaction to my suggestion that Kentarō wanted to see his children was to deny this fact, since, Akira claimed, Kentarō “is not that type of otoko.” Perhaps Kentarō would not have been an otoko at all had he wanted to see his kids. Yet, he had, in fact, wished for this, and Akira had been present. Nevertheless, Akira insisted Kentarō had neither regrets nor weaknesses: a trait he projected on Kentarō, as if regret reflected badly on the latter. It was not done to speak of failure. But it was precisely this failure that constituted the ground of possibility for the counterdiscourse of the otoko and that gave it its force.

On the other hand, the guys invested considerable energy and money in compensating for the absence of a spousal relation. It was common knowledge that Kentarō had a favorite “soapland” or “soap” in Yoshiwara, so called because the services provided at these brothels include a full body wash with soap, after which intercourse takes place. He knew all the women there, mostly Chinese, and for ¥10,000 ($100), it was possible to have intercourse without protection. Rumor had it that Kentarō went at least twice per month and, no doubt, more than this after he assumed the role of tehaishi. When others started saying that Kentarō had become “stingy” with cash and that Kentarō was not the Kentarō of old, it was likewise said that the cash was going to soaps. Matsuda, too, was rumored to be supporting a woman in Yoshiwara, and Akira could regale any listener with tales from back in the day when he had been in the Nibikikai: of the girls he had saved from prostitution and debt and of how he had given money left and right to hostesses, without, he said, asking for anything in return. It was out of character for Akira to mix such gifts with an expectation of return, as he took pride in the selflessness of his actions. Instead, Akira went to Yoshiwara when he had to “take care of things.” Indeed, Yoshiwara was just about the only place where the guys had intimate experiences with the other gender (Suzuki excepted). Medication even circulated to ensure that they could perform. On one such night, during his days as tehaishi, Suzuki was said to have blown upward of ¥50,000 ($500) in Yoshiwara.

Apart from Yoshiwara, the only contact anyone had with the other gender was either with Nē-san or the older mama-sans and younger waitresses at eateries, snack bars, and hostess clubs. Kentarō took daily pleasure in drinking and eating in the presence of these women, who were often from China or Korea, and he exchanged phone numbers with them so that his phone would begin ringing in the middle of the afternoon, when the eateries were empty. Or else they would call to remind him of his debt. These affairs never went beyond the confines of the eatery, even when the mama-san of Gen started doing laundry for Kentarō, presumably for a fee. So too, Saruma’s affair with a woman in Chōfu fizzled out. Suzuki expectedly broke up with Ai, whom he had threatened with violence one too many times, and dumped the next woman, a graduate of Tōdai (Tokyo University), as he started planning a reunion with his wife in Okinawa. This was a prospect that everyone thought was doomed to failure, since there was no way Suzuki could bring her to Tokyo, as they planned. As it turned out, everyone was wrong, and eleven years later, in 2023, Suzuki was still living with his wife in Tokyo. Otherwise, the only person who maintained relations with his child was the “mild-mannered” and “earnest” Norihisa. Yet Norihisa, too, had fallen out of wedlock.

But the most poignant story of broken family relations belonged to Matsuda. Born into a Buraku, or so-called outcaste, family and village in northern Japan, Matsuda recounted how the fact of being an outcaste was only made real to him when his first child was born.³³ Matsuda had been aware of his social status growing up in a secluded hamlet, exclusively for Buraku people. As a child, it was difficult to enter the neighboring hamlet because men were on guard outside the train station, to prohibit the entry of undesirable persons from his Buraku town. Such was the policed boundary dividing and separating regular folk from the outcastes. And when he got married, Matsuda’s mother-in-law objected to the marriage on account of his being Buraku. While recounting this story, Matsuda held up his right hand with the palm forwards and two middle fingers bent in towards the palm, so that only the forefinger and pinkie were protruding. He asked rhetorically if Akira “knew” what this meant—Akira nodded—and explained that it designated outcastes. The missing fingers were meant to signify that Buraku passed on physical deformities through their genes. Hence, when Matsuda’s child was born, his mother-in-law immediately inspected the fingers, giving out a sigh of relief to find them all present. Only then, Matsuda said, did he understand what it entailed to be a Buraku. When I asked Matsuda whether he was in touch with his kids and wife, he shook his head resentfully and said he had long lost touch with them.

It was this failure as economic providers, family, and father figures that prompted men in San’ya to assert themselves as otoko. Where normative society judged them to be failures as upstanding, productive, and reproductive fathers, San’ya offered reference to a counterdiscourse that functioned as an ideology of work (an otoko labored) but that also conferred a modicum of dignity through transgression. There was, in fact, a fundamental ambivalence to this discourse of the otoko, because in many aspects, it dovetailed with the statist discourse on upstanding masculinity. An otoko made a virtue of that which could not be escaped, manual labor, but flipped its stigmatization into an assertion of worth: Just look at all those salarymen in their cheap suits! Our gear costs more than their suits, and they have never labored by the sweat of their brow! Thus, the gaze of the state attained to a certain primacy, for the silencing of wounds conceded that there was shame and pain. Only Takeda-san discoursed freely on such matters and, in so doing, liberated the guys from the chains of their past.

In fact, the silence to which constitutive wounds were relegated could work most favorably for the state, for it could translate into a refusal to accept welfare. Riku refused any kind of support simply since he did not want to be dependent on anything. But others decided not to seek welfare because they did not wish for their families to know their situation or whereabouts. If someone applied for welfare, the ward office contacted their spouse or next of kin to investigate if the family could take financial responsibility for the person, thereby disclosing their whereabouts and, worse, their financial situation. By seeking welfare, the men inadvertently placed a burden on their families, many of whom had not seen them for decades, and they risked being made to feel, once again, like good-for-nothings. Rather than have the welfare office contact their family, many men went without welfare and therefore also without medical care. Naturally, some of the guys just wanted to stay under the radar of the state. Yet, as an extension of the state, it was the unit and institution of the family that caused shame. By contacting family, the state made the individual man beholden to others with whom he had either cut contact or from whom he had been cut off. In this way, the state threatened to open wounds that undercut the idealized “freedom” (jiyū) of the otoko, and the family did, indeed, exert a normative force sufficient to deter men from seeking the aid they clearly needed. In short, if the state could not do it, the family retrojected responsibility on the individual man. At one extreme, this could result in someone choosing to live in a tent along the Sumida River. Or, as with Riku, it could result in someone destroying their body, working to survive, and refusing any assistance. Despite repeated insistence from Sanyukai staff, there was one man who refused medical attention until he was on his last legs, dying a few weeks later from terminal cancer.

Manifest in the family, there was a constitutive aspect to the state’s gaze and that of general society, the stain of which was difficult to overcome, and something inevitably and unexpectedly undercut assertions of masculinity within San’ya, opening old wounds. One day, a sibling or parent might pass away, or for whatever reason, one was reminded of the past. Akira said he thought each and every day about the “guilt” (zaiakukan) of having killed someone. The instant of that fatal kick to the chest was frozen in time. But, so too, Akira said that he thought every night of all the buddies who had passed away over the years. Ultimately, it was the specter of an early death that drove the truth of disposability home, at once undoing and precipitating San’ya’s discourse of the otoko, and as we shall see, at the end of the day, it was the state that exercised this power of death over people in San’ya. Only the sociality of the group provided respite from the individualizing violence of the market, requiring that reference be made to the figure of Takeda-san: someone for whom everyone would ideally sacrifice themselves, should the sociality he embodied be threatened.

By this reasoning, the ideal otoko was someone who set themselves aside as day laborers and sacrificed themselves as otoko for everyone else. Much as there were chronic troublemakers in the group, everyone seemed to reference the same code of conduct, and when members refrained from involving others in their altercations, the response from the group was consistent with their conduct. In such instances, it was more common for others to express concern, even if this meant calling someone “stupid.” No one grumbled when Rikiishi went on his fighting spree, but Takeda-san and others worried that someone might take “revenge” (fukushū). One day, when a crowd had gathered in front of Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall (figure 4.1), Kentarō likewise went out of his way to avoid police involvement. A man holding a grudge against Kentarō suddenly exploded at him and swore to summon the police. But Kentarō slapped him across the head and told him to “get out of here,” and everyone laughed as the infuriated figure darted down the street to tell on Kentarō. Still, the imminent arrival of policemen would disrupt proceedings at Mutō’s, and after a brief pause, Kentarō went running after the man to confront him by the Mammoth itself. Everyone laughed again, and Akira noted that “it’s like a manga”: Kentarō did not even care about the police! Riku, too, had gone running after Kentarō to halt the police. By shifting the nuisance to the Mammoth, they ensured that no one else was affected by Kentarō’s actions.

If there was one thing that triggered the anger of Rikiishi or Kentarō, however, it was a past or present yakuza exhibiting his tattoos to intimidate. There was a “reason,” Akira said, that they got into fights with such men. Rikiishi, in particular, was known to take on yakuza from outside San’ya, swaggering through town in sharp-cuffed suits, shiny black shoes, crew cuts, tattoos, and gold jewelry visible through the openings in their shirts. These men were asking for it. Kentarō, too, was known to lose it if it turned out that an opponent had traditional tattoos. The person’s attitude might have been bad to begin with, but if they also had tattoos—as Kentarō might notice upon grabbing them—it triggered rage. Just as Rikiishi was “unstoppable” in these instances, Kentarō would beat the hell out of these men. Not enough could be done to eliminate the abuse of yakuza iconography. For if San’ya constituted a stain in relation to general society, the abuse of vanishing mobster ideals disclosed a constitutive stain in the discourse of the otoko. Embodied in a self-effacing figure who protected the weak against the strong, it was by referencing idealized yakuza conduct that the group protected against the intrusion of shame. The adversary who abused this ideal therefore had to be battered. But battering triggered repetition, as if the disgrace could not be contained. In San’ya, it was individuals like Yamamori, of Matsuda’s group, who personified this abuse of yakuza iconography.³⁴

Accordingly, there existed two polarized modes of being an otoko. Takeda-san represented the first mode of conduct, in which an otoko assumed responsibility for his own actions and observed deference, yet dissimulated his own authority in a hospitality that extended horizontally to include everybody. In this idealized mode of the Okinawa-gang, the leader of the group sacrificed himself to look after other members. The Matsuda-group represented the second mode, in which a man dissimulated money-grubbing egotism by pretending to selfless authority and made use of yakuza iconography for personal gain. Ultimately driven by pecuniary profit, the latter was a sham of the former and replicated the market logic that the former looked down upon.

This difference between the Okinawa-gang and the Matsuda-group was clearly evident in their respective hierarchies and wage systems. When I arrived in San’ya, Matsuda still had not founded his construction company, Sanja Kensetsu, and neither the Okinawa-gang nor the Matsuda-group constituted formal institutions per se. But the groups could be differentiated on the basis of their informal membership. Although Takeda-san came from Fukuoka, the members of the Okinawa-gang were primarily from Okinawa, whereas members of the Matsuda-group came from a variety of places, and Matsuda used anyone as laborers who could be “used.” His seemingly limitless pool of workers included homeless people, which made it even more difficult to make out who made up the Matsuda-group. By instantiating a hierarchy of unequal and vertical relations, Matsuda’s system of remuneration reflected this complexity, because everyone fell differently on the pay grade. On the other hand, Suzuki and Kentarō paid every worker a flat amount of ¥12,500, from which they deducted ¥500 ($5) per head. In the Okinawa-gang, the tehaishi took only what was considered his fair due for providing work, and the remainder of his income came directly from subcontractors. The ¥500 of pinhane could earn Suzuki a maximum of ¥10,000 ($100) in one day. But this was the exception since Suzuki rarely sent out more than ten workers. In the Matsuda-group, however, it was normal for Matsuda to rake in a total of ¥20,000 ($200) in pinhane from his workers every day. At the top of his empire, Matsuda ripped his workers off, whereas the ultimate authority of the Okinawa-gang—Takeda-san—worked in the trenches alongside everyone else.

There was one final, definitive difference between members of the Okinawa-gang and the Matsuda-group, namely, that everybody in the Okinawa-gang frowned on the use of recreational drugs. Kentarō instantly described anyone who shot meth as “out.” Naturally, this was not said of Matsuda, on whom Kentarō depended for workers, nor of Yamamori. On the contrary, Kentarō castigated Wakami for joking about Matsuda’s habit. But when it came to younger members of the Matsuda-group, like Kon-chan, the Okinawa-gang did not hesitate in pointing out that he shot meth. With this, any talk of the likeability of the person was “finished with a single stroke.” Thus, no one said anything when Matsuda would disappear for several days, although everyone attributed it to meth, and the final downfall of Matsuda was, in fact, attributed to meth, since he had lost touch with reality and overextended his resources. Unlike alcohol, it was said that meth made a person unaccountable for his or her own actions.³⁵ It ruined their accountability as men. In Matsuda’s case, meth had even bankrupted him. In this way, Akira would recall an incident from his youth when he had been made to do meth. Not knowing what it was, he had demolished an outdoor stall (tekiya) and was consequently beaten by a gang of yakuza. Takeda-san, too, said that, among his underlings, there had been those he had warned of going down that road. No matter how much one said, it was to no avail.

Yet, despite their differences, both groups gathered under the roof of Takeda-san and Nē-san, for Takeda-san—who was at once of the Okinawa-gang and beyond it—functioned as a point of unity between the two groups. In his home, Takeda-san might take the liberty to warn Suzuki not to do meth and that he would have nothing to do with Suzuki if this occurred. In fact, when Takeda-san said this, Suzuki was sitting beside Yamamori, who was poring over his needle marks as he ran a finger up and down the veins of his arm. It went without saying that Yamamori would never have said anything in front of Takeda-san. There was no disputing who the senior figure was, and Matsuda, too, deferred to Takeda-san upon the slightest prompt.

As far as outsiders to the groups were concerned, both the Okinawa-gang and the Matsuda-group justified their conduct as an eye for an eye. Condensed in an adage that everyone in San’ya seemed to quote—yararetara yarikaese (an eye for an eye)—it was not simply that an otoko was established through reciprocity but that survival necessitated violence, and an otoko designated someone who could hold their own in San’ya.³⁶ If someone did not strike back, they could expect to be taken advantage of. It was only respectability or seniority that earned someone the luxury of refraining from retribution, but such a social reputation also implied a prior deployment of violence. Only thus could indulgence be transformed into benevolence and emerge as a sign of magnanimity.

Directed toward outsiders, the imperative of giving an eye for an eye made the guys wary of others seeking revenge. Matsuda, for one, explained that one had to develop eyes in the back of one’s head to survive in San’ya. In fact, much as Matsuda would disappear for days doing shabu, he never became excessively drunk, for fear of sleeping outside where he might be found by someone with a grudge: “Wait, isn’t that Matsuda lying there?” Indeed, one day Matsuda was beaten down in front of Mutō’s, and this was when Akira stepped in. A year later, Matsuda was to return this favor by negotiating Shōkawa and Akira’s early release from detention. Yet, just as Matsuda’s actions had returned in the form of revenge, Akira and Shōkawa would have to look out for another person holding a grudge. Shōkawa warned that it was summer and that people “get strange.” Sure enough, a few weeks later, the man dropped by Sanyukai with two buddies in tow, an appearance that Akira interpreted as an intimidation and threat. Like gambling debts, the guys would thus accrue vengeance. If they got themselves into one too many fruitless confrontations, the inevitable was bound to happen. Shōkawa, in particular, seemed to have it coming, and this was no laughing matter, as it was not merely violence but death that circulated in San’ya.

In fact, everyone could remember an incident in which the death of a buddy had occurred on account of someone else. They might not have been 100 percent certain, but it was likely their friend had been murdered. One old-timer and colleague of Takeda-san observed that it was “especially the case” in San’ya that “the bill catches up with you” (tsuke ga mawatte kuru). This stocky man with traditional tattoos, a missing pinky, and a bad knee that caused him to limp still carried his knife about, noting that there was no changing the way of “an old yakuza.” He recounted the story of someone called “Champion,” the only other individual of equal rank to himself and Takeda-san. Everyone else had been underlings, he said, drawing a line in the air between himself and those under him. Originally a boxer from the Kansai region, Champion had been so strong that he could grab someone by the throat and kill them by squeezing. Hence, Takeda-san’s colleague had intervened in countless fights to restrain Champion. But nowadays, Champion had become so weak in the knees that he had to wear braces. This was beside the point, however, for Takeda-san’s colleague said of Champion that he “cannot return” to San’ya on account of enemies. In fact, Akira had encountered Champion in a previous lifetime, more than a decade earlier, when Akira had just come to San’ya. He attributed the death of his friend to this Champion, who had driven his friend into debt and, finally, to suicide. Akira’s body would perk up at the slightest mention that Champion had made a rare appearance in San’ya. Yet, at Takeda-san’s place, when Rikiishi had hushed the room for an important phone call between Takeda-san and Champion, Akira sat with his head lowered and never mentioned Champion after Takeda-san’s friendship had become apparent. In this way, deference quelled the outbreak of violence within the group, while outsiders were fair game.

It was as if the history of the adage had been forgotten, and consequently, an eye for an eye missed the originary violence that consigned San’ya to death and oblivion. Led by militant unions, riots in the early 1980s had, in fact, embraced the slogan as a justification for insurrection against the state and yakuza, but San’ya had long been quiet, and the guys themselves had conceded defeat where the overriding forces of the state and market were concerned. This was partly due to the fact that they were powerless and perhaps partly due to the fact that powerlessness predisposed them to identify with the abstraction of a status quo that appeared to harmonize with their values: one sacrificed oneself for the greater good of the nation.³⁷ As a result, the individualizing violence of the market was introjected onto relations between neighbors in San’ya, who were misrecognized as its source. The economic principle that confined a conglomerate of useless men to San’ya was passed over, and what remained of anger at the state assumed the form of resentment against concrete manifestations of its authority: the local police. Of course, the local cops had had enough of petty fights and preferred to “turn a blind eye.” Winding up in the Mammoth was therefore not as bad as ending up in the Asakusa police station, where police actively punished fighting. At the Mammoth, the guys could be sure of release within hours, but if they were taken to another police station, it meant serious trouble. The Mammoth functioned merely to contain violence, and the guys were familiar with its policemen, often treating them as objects of ridicule. Like Kentarō, Akira enjoyed taunting the cops in front of the Mammoth, greeting them causally as he passed by or walking straight up to them to start a conversation. Kentarō said it was OK to “poke fun at” the police.

When it came to national politics, however, Akira was as right-wing as possible. If he had a “nuclear bomb,” he said, he would bomb North Korea and China off the map. After all, it used to be that warring clans in Japan had exterminated their enemies. Moreover, if he had been in good health, Akira would be driving around a black-and-white right-wing truck with loudspeakers up top. Had I heard of the Nikkyōsō (Japan Teachers’ Union)? He would “threaten” them and stick the cash in his pocket. To Akira, Japan was a “nation of the gods” (kami no kuni) and “etiquette” (reigi sahō), as symbolized by its “emperor” (tennō). The “Rape of Nanjing” had been exaggerated, and Japan had merely been “deceived” into World War II by the United States. Notably, Akira never mentioned “comfort women.” But his stance on these issues was implicit in his support of right-wing politicians like Ishihara Shintaro, if not in his denial of the “Rape of Nanjing.” So too, when Akira recounted past encounters with Philippine hostesses and prostitutes, it was with a mixture of self-aggrandizing benevolence and racism. When Akira had been released from his stint in jail as a “substitute,” his underworld bosses had presented him with a pick of three Philippine prostitutes. But Akira had not taken up the offer, preferring to chat with the woman he picked because she was “a Philippine” and because one “should not do women that easily.” Maybe his conduct was laudable, yet his rhetoric had imperialist overtones and evokes Spivak’s observation that men justify war in the name of liberating women.³⁸

While everyone in the Okinawa-gang frequented eateries and dives where Chinese, Philippine, or Thai women worked, the conviviality of these gatherings was contradicted by racist comments. At one eatery, there was laughter, fondling, and even a fining system for every occasion the guys inappropriately touched the bodies of younger waitresses (one of whom was deported, escorted out by the cops, in cuffs). And when a female proprietor called Kentarō to remind him of his debt, someone would invariably say something like: “Their way of thinking is different.” These were attentions, however, that Kentarō at once disparaged and thrived on, because it was primarily in the presence of foreign waitresses, proprietors, and hostesses that his identity as a Japanese man was affirmed. On occasion, the guys did frequent bars run by Japanese hostesses, but such hostess bars were expensive. They not only burdened the guys with hefty bills that had to be paid that same night but confronted the guys with salarymen or yakuza affiliates whose income clearly surpassed their own. It was in the local eateries and dives that the guys felt at home drinking, singing, fighting, gossiping, fondling women, or talking about the news.

In accordance with the political leanings of the group, Akira voted for the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party)—the only party that pitched “strong” leaders and, despite the name, is Japan’s conservative, nationalist part—and political conversations, which I avoided, started and ended on the note that Japan needed more leaders like Ishihara Shintaro. Only once did Akira express concern that some conservative politicians would end welfare if they had their way. Still, when welfare was cut in early 2014, Akira did not complain. Like a good subject, he acceded to the policies of the elite, adding that someone like himself had no place contesting such decisions. On the other hand, Akira claimed that the terms with which the Far Left waged politics—proletariat, capitalists, the state—were arcane and incomprehensible. Where it might have been supposed that Akira would espouse leftist politics, the opposite was the case. In omitting the fact that right-wing interests conflicted with his own, Akira transposed his vision of the ideal world onto national politics. The political elite worked for the good of the nation, and citizens sacrificed themselves for this good. Thus, Akira’s espousal of yakuza ethics dovetailed with out-and-out fascism.³⁹

The political inclinations of other members of the Okinawa-gang did not differ much from Akira, although he was by far the most vociferous advocate of emperor worship. Shōkawa had volunteered for the Jieitai (Japan Self-Defense Forces), kept an air gun in his apartment as a memento, and would expatiate on Japan’s military power. Only Kentarō expressed something like hatred for the US military bases that had all but overrun Okinawa, noting, however, that there was “nothing to do about it” (shōganai). History had run its course. Okinawans had put up the strongest front and sacrificed more than other Japanese, and if there was to be war, he would volunteer and take down at least one enemy. What manifested itself as bravado in daily life translated into a naive misrecognition of interests when it came to national politics. With the exception of Saruma, every one of the guys espoused a rhetoric of right-wing nationalism, which resonated with their everyday ideals and appeared to represent their interests but whose conservative bent was violently opposed to sustaining individuals through welfare payments. The concrete actions that actualized Takeda-san’s authority could not have been further from the hypocrisy of right-wing politicians, but the discourse of the nation (and emperor) resonated with the discourse of the otoko. Above and beyond the discrimination the guys experienced in their daily encounters with the state or police, the nation restored them to an inclusiveness that they were deprived of in these encounters. It was on account of their distance from the powers that be that the discourse of the nation successfully interpellated them.

For those receiving welfare, their state case worker was an authority to be wary and careful of, because unlike the local police, this individual possessed the power either to put them on the street or to limit their livelihoods exclusively to construction work. Appointments therefore had to be kept punctiliously, not to mention in a sober state, and the guys were surprisingly observant of this. Welfare recipients were even prohibited from drinking on welfare, and as a result, the guys were constantly conscious of the state’s gaze. If the case worker called while one was away from the phone (at work), or worse, if they paid an unannounced visit to one’s bunkhouse while one was out, it gave rise to endless speculation. More than anything, the guys were nervous they were in trouble, which, at the extreme, could cause them to lose their welfare. Most often, however, it was a trivial matter or even good news. A new insurance card might have arrived, or the ward might have given permission to move into an apartment. Hence, when the guys spoke on the phone with their officer, they adopted a tone and formality of address that was most polite and obsequious. There could be dire consequences to failing to live up to the expectations of the ward officer, and thus, anything to do with the ward office became the subject of anxiety. Especially worrisome were instances in which the guys were put in police detention and, therefore, could not keep their appointments. At such times, they could only hope that their absence had gone unnoticed and that the cops had not contacted the ward.

Indeed, given their transgressive lifestyle and their failure to declare income, the prospect of being “cut off” threatened them constantly. After delirium tremens caused his hospitalization in a mental hospital, Suzuki was particularly worrisome. The hospitalization had enabled his welfare application, but if this happened again, he would be cut off, and the state was unforgiving in this sense. One and a half years after his hospitalization, Suzuki was drinking again, and he was seeing and hearing things. To keep the ghosts away, his floor was covered in salt. He had to be weaned off the alcohol, yet if he was hospitalized (as he had been before), Suzuki would lose his welfare. Unable to work, he would wind up on the street.

Over time, San’ya had thus become a “welfare town.” The conditions of the market had dealt their blow, and being a welfare recipient was no longer frowned upon, at least not entirely. It had become “normal” (futsū).⁴⁰ San’ya’s aging population now lived and passed away behind the doors of its bunkhouses, which were at full occupancy, and with a handful of exceptions, everyone in the group had to remain in the good graces of the state. Their lives hung in the balance. Consequently, the notion of confronting the state was invested with a futility that underscored everyone’s dependence. Adding insult to injury, the onus of indebtedness had been pushed on the San’ya man. At the ward office, he had to be submissive. In San’ya, he could not but act the part of an otoko.

So too, left-wing institutions like Sōgidan had lost any appeal that they once held for people like Akira, namely, their power. In the past, Akira would say, Sōgidan “was incredible.” Anyone with but a rudimentary knowledge of San’ya could recall the riots that rocked San’ya in the early 1980s, not to mention the title of the 1985 documentary sponsored by Sōgidan and directed by Saitō Mitsuo, who was killed by the Kanamachi-ikka while filming the documentary: Yama: Yararetara Yarikaese (Yama—Attack to Attack).⁴¹ Likewise, in another well-known murder, a policeman was stabbed to death by a laborer who had had enough.⁴² But while the legacies of these events persisted in San’ya, they had largely been relegated to the past. On June 9, the day on which the San’ya policeman was killed, an annual symposium was held apropos the event and culprit, who was serving a life sentence. Portraits of Saitō Mitsuo could similarly be found in the Sōgidan office, and when it came time for Sōgidan to host its biannual events in Tamahime Park—during Obon in summer and for the New Year’s wake in winter—the labor union erected a shrine in the park with portraits of Saitō Mitsuo and others murdered by the mob. As a carryover from the past, the blue vans of riot police then lined Namidabashi, and the public order police gathered in throngs outside the park, distinctly recognizable in civilian clothes: shoulder bags or dated waist packs, plain pants, shirts, vests, caps, sharp-looking glasses, and peering black eyes. Only on these few occasions did residents of San’ya gather for Sōgidan events, which otherwise consisted of a paltry gathering of five to six members marching through the empty streets on Friday mornings. With a red and white union flag billowing above them, these members would expostulate over loudspeakers against the state, standing about with political flyers in their hands, ready to hand out to an absent crowd.

The Beneficence of Charity

In tandem with its transformation into a “welfare town,” San’ya had seen a mushrooming of nonprofits for the needy, and with a history of more than three decades operating in San’ya, the oldest of these was Sanyukai. With its long-standing director, Guy-san, this missionary institution had witnessed the rise and fall of San’ya, and it was as much an intrinsic part of San’ya’s postwar history as it set itself apart from it, working with the municipality while bowing to its commands. In fact, Sanyukai was loath to call an ambulance for rambunctious workers unlikely to receive care from the state.

Sanyukai opened its doors at ten o’clock in the morning on weekdays and every third and fourth Saturday of the month. Together with a handful of volunteers, the staff prepared benches and ashtrays in the alleyway outside, setting up every day for the generic crew of men who began gathering for their free meal around ten and who left by one in the afternoon. Without exception, the few hangers-on after lunch were either intimate with the staff or waiting for an appointment in the clinic. Everyone else—and so the regular volunteers said, often with disdain—left without putting in any work.

Every day, the process of calling the men outside up to eat occurred in the same way. Guy-san stood outside from the moment Sanyukai opened its shutters and appeared to keep track of the order in which everyone arrived so that those who arrived first got to eat first. Most often, however, this process was offhand and casual. Especially when there was a crowd of thirty or forty—toward the end of the month, when welfare payments had run out—Guy-san lost track of who had been called up to eat and who had not. Nevertheless, he knew almost everyone outside and demonstrated this knowledge when he indicated that so-and-so could go up to eat by addressing them with their name and flicking his forefinger upward, a gesture that was often accompanied by a more or less humble bowing or bobbing up and down of the head and shoulders. The scene made a spectacle of intimacy between the head of the NPO and the men outside, who often displayed an unconcealed pleasure in having Guy-san call them by their nickname, be it Kubota “the Fake,” Akira “the Okinawa-dude,” Kawamiya “Kawaii,” and Tanbo “Tanbo-chan.”⁴³ Yet this display of familiarity only belied the hierarchy of the relationship between the staff and those outside, and that was its appeal. For a moment, it dispelled the shame of having had to wait two hours for a free meal.

This daily enactment of intimacy dissimulated the gaze of social authority and replaced it with what Akira liked to call “the structure of amae.”⁴⁴ By referring to the famous book of the same title, Akira’s sarcasm indicated what should have been obvious, namely, that the power to shame remained with Sanyukai. When it so wished, Sanyukai could discard its beneficent posturing and remind the men outside that they were beneficiaries of services bestowed upon them. There was a constitutive hierarchy inscribed in Sanyukai’s charity that could not be divested from its relationship with the men outside. Even Kubota, a former post-office worker made to retire during Koizumi’s privatization of the postal system, noted that there was “something distinctly wrong” with the scenario of grown otoko sitting two hours with lowered heads to receive a meal, only to have a finger flicked at them—“something distinctly wrong,” as if Kubota could not say what that “something” was, because the concealment of shame carried a normative power. By mandating that the men wait two hours and by passing over the shame inherent in having to do so, Sanyukai designated the shame of waiting as shameful. It reinforced shame and, by holding the men in its thrall, demanded a certain conduct, the negligence of which could have serious consequences. For intimacy with the staff could mean the difference between receiving and not receiving medical care in their clinic.

But it was difficult for an uninitiated passerby to decipher what was happening in the alley outside. Except when Guy-san and other staff went around to liven up the atmosphere, most often by poking fun, the alleyway was crowded and silent. One time, a stranger asked Kawaii why there were so many people gathered in the alley, and Kawaii, who was clearly embarrassed, had to lie. He told me later that he “could not possibly say” that free meals were given upstairs. Kawaii’s reluctance to confess bespoke both a consideration for Sanyukai, since it would burden the institution if random people started lining up—brought about, no less, than through Kawaii’s indiscretion!—and a bashfulness regarding the fact that he himself was waiting for such a meal. What occurred at Sanyukai was not to be prattled about, to strangers least of all.

Many of the men who came to Sanyukai, especially those close to the staff, would complain that others came to eat but left without lifting a finger. Indeed, there were a few freeloaders even among the men close to the staff, including someone who had lived with Guy-san. Most, however, had risen through the ranks by volunteering, that is, by providing services that were indispensable to Sanyukai but that anyone else could also do. In this way, even volunteering was treated as an opportunity provided by Sanyukai: the mimesis of a job for which there were plenty of reserves and the remuneration for which came solely in the form of recognition. Thus, Akira, who had risen to the top of the volunteers, would say of freeloaders that they “know no shame” (haji shirazu). At his most derisive, he would refer to Sanyukai as a “dining hall” and to those outside as “pigs.” Albeit in less harsh terms, Kubota repeated this description when he said that none of Sanyukai’s activities “connect” to the recovery of independence. By handing out food along the Sumida River and giving meals, Sanyukai gave respite for the stomach and wallet, and thereby, it kept people coming back for more. It was, indeed, entirely possible to feed oneself every day of the year by shifting from one food handout to the next. For those lacking in requisite knowledge, Sōgidan published and circulated a calendar that listed where and when free food was on offer each day of the week.

In fact, according to one staff member, 80 percent of those who came to Sanyukai were already receiving welfare, and Sanyukai made it rather clear that this was the type of person to whom they catered. For when a truly dirty homeless person came along, they were handed a lunchbox on the pretext that it was not sanitary to let them inside. There was, of course, some truth to this hygiene claim. Still, Akira would note, there was also something obviously wrong with a setup that turned away individuals with access to neither welfare nor medical care and embraced welfare recipients who could use a little more aid: to ease the burden of their gambling habit, to balance their drinking budget, or just to find a place away from the solitude of their rooms. Every once in a while, Guy-san could thus be seen turning the corner of the alley with someone in tow. Beyond the corner, he would hand them the ¥1,000 or so they had requested. As these transactions occurred more or less out of sight, it was never clear how much someone was able to acquire from Guy-san. But it went without saying that the latter felt obliged to give and that prospective recipients calculated when Guy-san was most likely to grant their request.

The most notorious and helpless borrower at Sanyukai was Kawaii, who, once upon a time, had accrued such an astronomical gambling debt that he had been forced to flee from loan sharks. Alas, even after Kawaii had lived for a decade in a tent by the river, a dogged loan shark tracked him down when he went on welfare and his name entered the records. A lawyer at Sanyukai finally resolved the matter by having the claim declared illegal and by having Kawaii’s name eliminated from the accounts. On meeting him, however, it was difficult to believe that the soft-spoken and diminutive Kawaii had amassed a debt that sent loan sharks chasing him for more than a decade, forcing him to disappear. At Sanyukai, Kawaii was known for his colored pencil drawings of children’s anime characters—Crayon Shin-chan, Doraemon, Sazae-san, Chibi Maruko-chan—which decorated the fridge upstairs, as for his ability to sew and fix the hems of his clothing. He worked six days every week cleaning a pachinko parlor in Shinjuku. The job started at five in the morning and lasted a few hours, after which Kawaii would bicycle to Sanyukai on a pink fold-up bicycle (a gift from Akira, who had found it too feminine), arriving in time for lunch. On Thursdays, when Kawaii was supposed to make rice balls, he would peep around the door to the second floor—hoping to find the room full so that he could head back to the alley to stand around and chat only to be hailed as “late” and told to come in and help! But Kawaii, who dutifully reported his earnings to the ward office, had money trouble. Kubota described Kawaii as “ill.” After all: “What fifty-year-old asks to borrow a hundred yen?” Hooked on pachinko, Kawaii invariably ran out of money at the end of the month, when he would be asking if so-and-so could not spare a hundred yen. It was one person one day, another the next, and everyone knew that these coins were destined for the one-yen pachinko, for Kawaii complained helplessly of the headache it caused that ATMs only dispensed bills. This prevented Kawaii from withdrawing the coins that would take him through the month. But there was a way to circumvent this problem, and that was by commuting to the bank’s central branch, where money, including coins, was dispensed over the counter.

Everyone at Sanyukai knew of Kawaii’s secret habits, as of everyone else’s and of Guy-san’s lending. Yet, like the structuring events that had precipitated the arrival of Sanyukai regulars in San’ya, these topics were not spoken of. Lending and borrowing thus formed an informal economy that constituted the silent substructure of Sanyukai. Unless one was standing at the margins of the Sanyukai alley—where requests and lending took place—no one spoke of drinking, gambling, going to Yoshiwara, or borrowing from Guy-san. The staff, too, was complicit in this silencing of topics that touched on the core existence of men who came to Sanyukai. There was a proactive attempt on their behalf to transform the atmosphere into a jolly one in which jokes were bantered and conversation was limited to the recent weather and news. Certain conversations were even shut down by staff maneuvering away from subjects like soaplands, upcoming or past races, and pachinko. Otherwise, staff members sat with their heads lowered, unable to stop or participate in an increasingly indecent discourse. Nonetheless, talking about soaplands or gambling in front of the staff required a unique strain of shamelessness. Indeed, such topics went against the mission of Sanyukai—aiding those in need and, if possible, rehabilitating them for work—an institution that ostensibly did not wish to facilitate gambling or drinking by lowering the over-all cost of life. But it was through such indulgence that Sanyukai sustained the spectacle of need that justified its existence, not to mention the donations that ensured staff salaries. Hence, the habitual handouts that kept everybody coming back were swept under the rug.

For the men outside, the cost of institutional indulgence required that they accede to shame by silencing activities that involved excessive expenditures. But the paradox of the scene outside consisted in the fact that it was easier to assume the shameful place of waiting if one was shameless. Either way, it did not matter whether Sanyukai was faced with shame or the shameless pretension to shame, because whether or not the men were pretending, Sanyukai appeared as their benefactor, and their conduct adhered to the institution’s demands. They behaved themselves, and this entailed the silencing not only of gambling, drinking, or red-light districts but of how they had first come to San’ya. It was best not to speak of being fired or of debilitating illnesses, and once again, it was at the far end of the alley that Kawaii, Sawada, Kubota, and Akira might recount their life stories. Before his troubles at Sanyukai began, it was there that Akira recounted how, after his years with the Nibikikai, he had been laid off from construction work because his illness had caused him to miss too many days. Observing that San’ya constituted a “problem of disposability” (tsukaisute no mondai), he uncharacteristically lowered his head, as if to make an admission, and confessed that his health had rendered him redundant. There was nothing more “shameful” (hazukashī), Akira said, than living off “other people’s money.” He was therefore doing his “very best” by volunteering at Sanyukai.

Notwithstanding the enactment of intimacy, the staff at Sanyukai had instituted a strict line of division between Sanyukai and San’ya itself. Yamazawa, for example, worked nearly full-time at menial tasks to supplement his paltry pension, but his labor was segregated from the supervisory role that other staff assumed. Although Yamazawa had lived in San’ya for over a decade and knew more about San’ya than the staff, he was either setting up the entrance, serving tea at the top of the stairs, or helping with the preparation of rice balls and bread for distribution, while the remainder of the full-time staff held their private morning meetings. It was rumored that the case of every individual outside was discussed at these morning meetings by Guy-san, four administrators, two nurses, and one rotating kitchen member, but the contents of these meetings remained secret. When a decades-old veteran, volunteer, and worker at Sanyukai ceased coming to work, only to be found dead at home, Yamazawa was likewise excluded from the discussion of who would take his place, notwithstanding that it was Yamazawa who would have to work with this person. It was not his place to contribute to this decision. The power to decide which volunteer was qualified to rise to a paid part-time job was exclusively relegated to staff members who commuted to Sanyukai and had little experience of San’ya itself. Yet, as Kubota noted, so-and-so might be “docile and gentle” at Sanyukai while they were getting themselves into fights outside. It might be added that drunks were asked to leave and were promptly led out of the alley upon failure to do so. It was usually Yamori or Bonobe who took care of this by forcibly grabbing the drunk to see him off. But these send-offs often turned into rather comical affairs when the uncomprehending drunk returned to the reception on their heels. Drinking in the alley was thus frowned upon, except on Fridays and Saturdays after the day had finished, when select individuals were invited upstairs for snacks and drinks. Sure enough, there was justification for imposing a “no drinking” rule in San’ya, of all places. One head nurse could vividly recall a man beating another man’s head against the wall, and in another instance, someone was getting ready to stab another man with the metal pole used to roll up the shutters. This nurse, who had worked in San’ya for decades, insisted that safety was her first concern and that a male staff member be on duty all the time. In this fashion, certain acts that were intrinsic to San’ya outside Sanyukai—drinking, fighting, and being an otoko—were disallowed in the confined space of Sanyukai. In yakuza style, Akira had set himself up as a protector of Sanyukai: holding hostile forces at bay from his strategic position at the end of the alley. He had monopolized the right to violence on behalf of Sanyukai, and given the amount of labor he invested, Akira felt justified in making requests on behalf of men who felt less comfortable doing so. By providing clothing, meals, or medical appointments, he operated as a pivot between Sanyukai and the unspoken desires of San’ya at large. But this was a tricky position to occupy, for even Yamazawa had consciously adopted a stance of “not saying anything” when it came time for administrative decisions, as if he was scared. One day, the seventy-year-old Hirai expressed an opinion to the effect that Sanyukai might compensate its volunteers financially, and Yamori broke into a rage. From up in the entryway, from behind the pedestal on which the tea was placed, Yamori dealt a tirade to Hirai, shouting that he “will not accept it a second time” if Hirai—head lowered at this point, raising his hand apologetically—were to bring this matter up again. Except for Akira, who remarked that the beast had finally reared its head, no one outside criticized Yamori for his actions afterward. The responsibility lay with Hirai, who was known to grumble and had stepped out of line. In this manner, there existed a latent fear among the men outside of breaching Sanyukai etiquette, lest they fall out of favor and lose their privileges.

The conduct necessitated by such fear was diametrically opposed to that of an otoko. Where an otoko was self-reliant, Sanyukai required that the men outside wait for their food or the end-of-the-week party. It even happened that Guy-san neglected to call someone upstairs. Whether he had forgotten or forgotten on purpose, such neglect resulted in leaving someone out in the cold, and it invariably reminded them of their vulnerability. The “self-respect” and “dignity” (iji) of an otoko had to be set aside at Sanyukai. To maintain privileges, a man had to be compliant. He had to forget about values like refusing to “bend” (mageru), walking one’s “own way” (jibun no michi), “sticking to one’s principles” (suji o tōsu), “protecting” and “taking care” of buddies, or protecting “the weak.” It was precisely for this reason that some regular members of Sanyukai found it necessary to go amok away from Sanyukai. An island within San’ya, Sanyukai could only establish itself in contradistinction to the mores that it opposed, and thus, it required and fed itself off the world of San’ya outside it and of Akira within it.

The institution nevertheless substituted for the absence of familial and romantic relations, since nearly everyone had severed their relations with family. As one staff member noted, the men outside had no “connections” (en) with their kin. Even after the 3/11 tsunami and nuclear disasters, there had been no effort to contact their families, and like the Okinawa-gang, the men at Sanyukai would frequent prostitutes. Obviously, this was not spoken of in front of staff. It was only at the margin of the alley that Sawada would grin, baring his toothless mouth, when asked how he had spent his latest winnings and whether it had been on “this”: the pinkie stuck out to indicate a woman. In the absence of the staff, people like Amai would talk unabashedly of how the best job in a “pink salon” was that of the manager, who got to teach girls how to give blowjobs. But alongside this covert practice of paying for sexual services with welfare, the men at Sanyukai also engaged in more overt competition for the attention of the kitchen staff, most of whom were women. Notably, there was little possibility of succeeding with any of these women, because they were almost all nuns, and if not, they were either married with kids or at least twenty years younger than the men. Nonetheless, the men would flirt when given the chance: exchanging comments and smiling when they returned their dirty plates. Some would even take flirtation to the next step, like Izumo, who gave feminine gifts and wrote letters on pink Barbie doll paper. He had made a practice, too, of giving back “massages” to the staff downstairs and sometimes to the kitchen staff, while everyone else was out doing food handouts by the Sumida River. It was said that he snuck upstairs when everyone was out. To the consternation of others, Amai would similarly situate himself strategically close to the kitchen when the Friday and Saturday afternoon “drinking parties” were held on the second floor, enabling him to chat with the women while everyone else remained seated in the adjacent room. Numaju likewise had a relationship going with one of the kitchen staff, whom he also knew from another NPO in San’ya, and seemed to flaunt his connection with conversations that were irrelevant to everyone else. Acquiring the private phone numbers of the women was considered quite a feat, giving rise to endless speculation as to whether so-and-so had gotten so-and-so’s number. Lastly, going shopping for or, far better, with the kitchen staff was regarded as an enviable privilege: a duty that was assigned to a single individual until, by whim of the staff, another person was picked. Staff favoritism even determined the proximity with and the duration of time for which the men at Sanyukai could keep company with staff in the kitchen. Not surprisingly, the volunteers at Sanyukai therefore vied with one another to become favorites of the male staff, who occupied the decision-making positions in the organization.

Though it was far from explicit, a hierarchy could be discerned among the men outside by their proximity to the entryway and by the ease with which they spoke to each other and the staff. The fifty-year-old Izumo, who had suffered a stroke, sat either on the steps leading up to the entry or on a chair immediately adjacent to it. Adorned with giant plastic, fluorescent Buddhist prayer beads around his neck, a black T-shirt with a white dragon design, baggy black pants, round eyeglasses, and sandals, Izumo had a bald round head with a stubble of a beard and a couple of front teeth that showed every time he talked or laughed, and his jaw hung open every time someone slapped him jokingly on the scalp. Too weak to partake in food handouts, Izumo could be found giving massages either at the bottom of the steps or inside the entryway to volunteers and staff alike.

One of the oldest and longest volunteers at Sanyukai, Tanbo, too, would sit right by the entry, often on a low, fold-up camping chair that fit his short, lean stature. Originally a fisherman, scarcity of work had forced Tanbo into unemployment and, eventually, to live in a blue tent by the Sumida River. Back in the day, Tanbo had been known for his traditional performances of dance and song, and he would dress up for festivals, but the years had gradually taken the energy from him, and a stroke had led him—with the aid of Sanyukai—to take a room in the bunkhouse just in front of Sanyukai. Nowadays, he could most often be found sitting quietly by the entryway, occasionally cracking a dry joke in response to some comment by the staff or heading up the rice-ball making on Thursdays. Tanbo never ate lunch upstairs. Instead, the kitchen staff prepared a lunchbox for him every day (his name was written on it), to be eaten, he said, in the evening as a snack with his “rice alcohol.”

A relative newcomer to Sanyukai who had risen rapidly in favorability with the staff, Amai would step out of his conveniently located bunkhouse opposite Sanyukai at eleven, barely bothering to put on his shoes as he dragged them across the ground and arrived in time for lunch. Amai would sit or stand just about anywhere, and seemingly oblivious to the monumental silence that had been erected around specific topics, he conversed on everything from soaplands to gambling. Kubota, too, seemed to have mastered the art of arriving just in time for lunch. After helping to make rice balls in the morning, he would return to his room, catch an episode of a historical drama, and come back to Sanyukai for lunch. So too, Sawada, yet another incorrigible gambler in his seventies, would arrive half an hour before noon, and he would do this especially toward the end of the month. Laid off during the 1970s era of “high economic development,” Sawada had been a salaryman and then security guard, and he would occasionally show photos of himself from his earlier days, when he had been to Hiroshima and Korea on business trips: in Hiroshima Peace Park, ringing the bell at Miyajima Shrine, with a Korean hostess in a snack bar, and as a uniformed security guard. One photo showed him dressed in a loincloth, shouldering a portable shrine (omikoshi) for the Kanda festival. He had lost touch with everyone in the photos. But he still looked the likeness of his younger self in the frayed, glossy images from another era, though his back was now slightly hunched, and he had lost most of his hair. Folded to the horse-gambling page, a newspaper was invariably tucked in his back pants pocket, alongside a pack of cigarettes. Like the generic gambler, Sawada wore thick cotton pants, a button-up shirt, black plastic shoes, and, to add a bit of drama, a black cap with a white dragon design. He had the most lovable smile and was an incessant talker, hardly listening as he moved relentlessly from topic to topic, shuffling about on his feet. On the few occasions that he won at horse races, Sawada would embarrassedly admit that he had spent the money on food and soaplands.

Indeed, behind its facade of silence, Sanyukai was composed of a plethora of truly singular characters. There was Tamura, who bicycled to Sanyukai from afar and, alongside Yamazawa, received a salary for helping a few days per week at Sanyukai’s partner bunkhouse, Sanyūsō. Still in his early fifties, Tamura had a penchant for flashy dressing. He would sometimes come in yellow-black tiger design leggings strapped above his shoes, but he was most well-known for his pink G-string underwear that showed from behind whenever he sat. Years ago, Tamura—who went by an alias—had gotten into a bicycle accident and, having been laid off in the aftermath, sought help from Sanyukai. He spoke fondly of his daughters and might even tell of the life and wife he had “fled” from, but it was unclear whether he was in touch with them, and his use of an alias attracted suspicion. Tamura would tell tales of Pantagruelian proportions, of dining and drinking and staying awake for days on end. But one week he failed to show and was found dead, surrounded by bottles, in his room. Yamamoto likewise died from terminal cancer during the course of my two years in San’ya. A lean, silent, and elderly man who passed his time sitting on a fold-up stool outside his bunkhouse, Yamamoto observed life as it moved by. The quiet and ever-polite Shibasawa was always underdressed in winter, wearing nothing but a plain collared shirt and green workers’ pants. He helped every day to set up and could be found sitting on the benches, muttering inaudibly to himself while everyone else chatted. At six in the morning, Shibasawa could also be standing on Namidabashi, hoping for one of the vans that still picked up laborers for miscellaneous jobs. At the extreme periphery of Sanyukai’s social sphere, there was also Tamori, a man in his forties who was so withdrawn that it was difficult to sustain a conversation with him or, rather, to do so without becoming distracted and forgetting about him. For Tamori shied away from personal topics as if it were the plague, endlessly commenting instead on the weather for which he, too, was remarkably underdressed in winter. Despite repeated comments by the staff to dress warmly, Tamori would shiver on the benches with neither jacket nor scarf. Over time, his few clothes had become worn and grubby, and as it became increasingly apparent that Tamori was losing control over the most basic aspects of self-care, the staff repeatedly asked him where he lived, only to be told evasively that it was somewhere beyond Minami-Senjū Station. Gonkun likewise lived in his own world. At a height of 180 cm, with a protruding tummy and an equally pudgy face, Gonkun was the biggest man at Sanyukai, but he was also the spitting image of an elementary schoolboy, trapped in the body of an adult. He was always wearing the same blue shorts, the same faded and yellow button-up shirt, and the same flat-sole shoes with socks stretched up his legs. He never went anywhere without his portable radio and backpack, stuffed to the brim, and when he came to Sanyukai, he would always be sitting with a Japan road map unfolded no more than 10 cm from his face. Peering endlessly into the map, he would wait for lunch, eat, leave, and spend the remainder of his day walking about San’ya and its parks, where he slept.

Then there was Akira, who was often misrecognized as a Sanyukai employee from the way in which he worked side by side with Yamazawa, running menial tasks from opening to closing. Unless he was helping in the kitchen or preparing for food handouts on Wednesdays and Thursdays, he would stand at the far corner and end of the alley flanking Sanyukai, from where he could survey both the alley itself and all the men sitting on the benches, as well as greet and speak to the steady stream of men coming down the street forming a T with the Sanyukai alley. Akira thus functioned as a counterweight to the Sanyukai entryway, as he greeted and chatted with an endless number of passersby, including—to the discomfort of Sanyukai staff—members of the Kanamachi-ikka. From his position, greeting everyone even before they reached the entryway, it was as if Akira were the informal front man of the organization. If it were not for Sanyukai’s limited finances, it might have been assumed that Akira was making a profit from racketeering.

Having worked his way up through the ranks of volunteers from San’ya, Akira helped with the distribution of secondhand clothes from a storage house by Tamahime Park, and it was in this capacity that he could provide goods upon demand. He was approachable in his status as a fellow resident of San’ya, and it was for this reason that men would bypass the staff and queues to ask him whether he could not get this or that: a pair of shorts, a vest, underwear, a toothbrush, soap. Asking Akira did not entail the trouble of having to face the staff. It could be done informally, without fear of rebuff or of being indirectly told that they had asked for one too many favors. Akira would pull his weight with staff in place of others, making sure they got their due. When he was not working, Akira would therefore situate himself at the far margins of Sanyukai, where he could take requests and chat freely. It was as if he had set up an underground, subsidiary booth to Sanyukai, at which his leverage with the staff ensured the provision of goods. And Akira was not afraid to ask the staff for this and that for so-and-so, since, in his mind, he had worked his way into a position from which he was entitled to make requests.

Akira even pushed the balance of indebtedness in his own interest. Not only did he take care of all the menial tasks—cleaning, taking out the garbage, loading and unloading packages—which none of the administrative staff did. He also treated volunteers to beer when the day was over, and for the weekly Saturday mahjong sessions at Guy-san’s apartment, he would come with food and liquor and pay for everyone’s taxi ride there. It was therefore difficult for the staff to refuse Akira, which he was well aware of and took advantage of. In fact, Akira would ask for favors even if there was a likelihood of refusal. “I don’t care if they say no,” he said, and this pushed the onus of refusal on the staff. Rather than occupy the position of the party that hesitated to ask for fear of rejection, Akira outdid himself as a volunteer and, thereby, placed the staff in a position from which it was difficult to refuse his requests. Still, Akira used his discretion in granting favors, giving preference to some individuals over others. For Akira had foes and friends at Sanyukai, both among the other volunteers and the staff.

There was growing concern among the staff, as Guy-san said, that Akira was “standing out” (medatsu). Reminiscent of that all-too-often quoted adage, “the nail that stands up gets hammered down” (deru kui wa utareru), it was said that another volunteer should be given the opportunity to take the position Akira had carved out for himself. Tension had gradually arisen between Akira and the staff because he was increasingly acting as a broker between Sanyukai and the people outside, and from this place, he stirred the envy and discomfort of others. At the end of the alley, Akira was often surrounded by his own group of acquaintances, a congregation that was twice the size of the circle formed around Guy-san and other staff in the immediate vicinity of the stairway leading into the reception and further into the inner sanctum of the clinic. In fact, while Akira’s health was still good enough, he would get up and stand outside on the corner starting at eight o’clock in the morning, before the staff arrived. Unless one took a detour south around the block to enter from the other end of the alley, it was impossible to avoid Akira, who greeted everyone as they came and left. And Akira’s circle of acquaintances in Yama was wide, such that by standing on the corner, he pulled all sorts of other characters into the periphery of Sanyukai. After a couple of decades in San’ya, Akira knew folks from past work, from living in various bunkhouses, and now from Sanyukai, where newcomers to San’ya tended to gravitate. He had a knack for talking to anyone, be it the homeless people along the Sumida River and in Tamahime Park or the yakuza down the street, all of whom knew him by name. By standing thus on the corner, Akira was at once living his philosophy of looking out for “the weak” and aggrandizing his own sphere of benevolent influence.

Akira’s previous job in Kotobukichō had been comparable to his tasks at Sanyukai. He had made it apparent to the mob in Kotobukichō that he was “usable” as a lookout for the illegal gambling dens they operated, and as part of his work, he would stand on the street and scout for trouble, be it uniformed or undercover police or troublemakers in general. At Sanyukai, Akira was merely deploying knowledge he had acquired in other places, and this entailed working as a “bodyguard” who inserted his body between Sanyukai and trouble. Indeed, after Akira quit, the staff had no choice but to make an embarrassing call to the police when someone hit Yamori, one of the staff members. By whatever means necessary, Akira would have escorted such trouble out of the alley or spotted it before it arrived. “Nothing escapes my eye,” he would say.

Yet, as Akira’s influence expanded at Sanyukai, he was slowly but ineluctably headed on a collision course with the staff. The denouement was to occur over a member of the kitchen staff. For, in addition to being the most conspicuous and hardworking of the volunteers outside, in whose presence the atmosphere could transform instantaneously from somber to exuberant, Akira was also the favorite among the kitchen staff. When there was a lack of kitchen workers, Akira would enter the kitchen to help, and on Wednesdays, when preparations had to be made for curry the following day, Akira would stay after everyone else had left, peeling and cutting potatoes, carrots, and onions, because on Thursdays, a Christian nun in her early forties was in charge of the kitchen, and Akira was in love.

A concatenation of events snowballed into Akira’s ousting from Sanyukai. First, there was the problem of Akira’s excessive visibility. It was unfair, and the organization needed to make way for “new faces.” Akira had responded that he understood. He said that he “knew” his presence at Sanyukai had become too much. Moreover, he noted that he had become “too deeply involved.” With wariness, he watched the rise into favorability of new characters, like Amai, whom he personally vowed to keep in place, and one day, when Akira went upstairs to prepare for curry, who should be sitting there, ready to offer his services, but Izumo. It had been decided at a Sanyukai staff meeting that certain work was to be rotated among volunteers. Sure enough, Izumo’s presence was enough to drive Akira away, who increasingly took to disrupting his rhythm of volunteering every day. He might spend several days in a row drinking by Mutō’s only to appear at Sanyukai, where some staff members had started asking questions and even saying that there might be problems with Akira continuing to volunteer if his appearances were so sporadic. He had ceased to be accountable, saying in private that it “did not matter” whether he was at Sanyukai or not. Without bothering to call, he would spend a couple days working with the guys in the Okinawa-gang and then reappear at Sanyukai to volunteer. Akira had also taken to noting the instances when he and others had been slighted by staff or their affiliates. There had been the time when an employee from a partner organization had refused to give Akira her phone number, saying: “Why do I have to give you my phone number?” Akira had also taken up Christianity during his time at Sanyukai, but when Akira went to church in Asakusa, he was given the cold shoulder by members of the Sanyukai staff, who belonged to the congregation. He had found himself sitting off to the side, by himself, during the Sunday sermon. Later he would caustically remark that “this is not Christianity.” It had likewise irked him when the Christian caretaker at Sanyūsō had commented on the death of a mutual acquaintance: “That’s OK, isn’t it, since he lived as he wanted.” Taken aback by this offhand remark, Akira retorted in private: “You don’t say that. No matter what, you don’t say that.” Where Akira had wanted to reminisce, he had been rebuffed by “indifference.” Then there was the time when Akira was drinking by Mutō’s, and a Sanyukai staff member walked right by him without saying a word. When asked the next day why they had not said anything, the staff member simply replied that he did not frequent “such places” (sō iu toko). Sure enough, Mutō’s place appeared on the NHK news a few months later, during lunch no less, when the TV was on upstairs. Finally, there was that earlier occasion when Akira had flipped out at Guy-san, shouting angrily at him in front of everyone in the alley only to burst away. In retrospect, Akira would recount that he had been justified in his anger, adding that no one, especially not the paid staff, which was composed of “yes-men,” could call Guy-san into line like that. “Only I can do it.” Akira would explain that it had not been a big issue that had triggered his anger. Guy-san had only passed a snide remark at Akira, but Akira would not let it go. It would have been all right if it had come from someone else, but when it came from a man of authority, he would not let it pass.

No doubt, Akira was aware that the staff thought that he had issues. One day Akira had been shouting at Guy-san, who was considered irreproachable, and then he had been spotted drinking at the open-air dive, hiding his drink behind his back. At least at Sanyukai, it was said, Guy-san and others kept a tab on how much he drank. But by then he was drinking by himself. Things were getting out of hand. On the first occasion of his outburst at Guy-san, Akira stopped going to Sanyukai for a few weeks until some of the staff finally relented and asked Akira to come back. When things went awry the second time, they were not as indulgent.

One day, Akira was drinking by Mutō’s, and lo and behold, Amai was on his way back from shopping with Akira’s crush. As they turned the corner, Akira noticed that his crush had taken hold of Amai’s arm, to nudge him along. This “smallest detail” triggered a fit of rage. Putting his drink aside and telling Suzuki that he would be right back, Akira bolted around the corner, up the Sanyukai staircase, and pounced on Amai, flinging him to the floor.⁴⁵

Shortly thereafter, Akira stopped going to Sanyukai. He had worked with its staff for three years. Yet the final break was not reached in the form of a dialogue or verbal disagreement but as a gradual fizzling out. For Sanyukai never expressed their explicit disapproval of Akira’s conduct. Rather, some staff members took to simply ignoring Akira when he visited the Sanyukai alley, not even saying hello (which Akira did not do either), and others avoided him (so Akira thought) when they spotted him down the street, only to veer into an alley. The sad truth was that Akira did not have anything else to do. He could not work with the Okinawa-gang, since his body would not keep up, and the only alternative was to drink. Thus, Akira tried to return. Believing that Guy-san had given him permission, Akira showed up weeks later on the second floor, only to have a staff member tell him that they had “heard of no such thing.” With this, he was sent back downstairs. This was to be the last humiliation.

Contrary to anger against other individuals in San’ya, which ended with a fight, the anger against Sanyukai, Akira said, was “eternal.” The wound revived wounds that would not heal, and the silence to which the staff consigned Akira enclosed him in guilt, questioning what he had done wrong. Confined to a shameful silence before others, Akira had come to occupy a place analogous to that of Foucault’s “madman,” such that the resumption of his social existence at Sanyukai was conditional on Akira’s acknowledgment of guilt.⁴⁶

It would be another eight years before it became clear that what Akira referred to as the “it-hurts-it-hurts disease” had been misdiagnosed as “schizophrenia” one year prior to his falling out with Sanyukai, when Akira was fifty-four—a suspiciously late age to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, the symptoms of which tend to appear in the late teens or early twenties. No doubt, some of the staff at Sanyukai knew of this diagnosis, because they had accompanied Akira to the hospital innumerable times, as he went in search of treatment for his pain, and unlike Akira, they probably understood the social significance of this judgment. But whether they knew of the diagnosis or not, their elimination of Akira from Sanyukai echoed a diagnosis in which the social judgment of a person’s value had taken precedence over proper medical treatment. Akira’s pain had as little claim to reality as his righteous conduct deserved to be addressed and recognized. Perhaps it was precisely because he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia that the staff presumed that there was nothing to do about his “case.” It might be asked why Akira himself did not object to the diagnosis, and looking back, there was a moment when Akira trashed his medications because he realized that they were meant to treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (antipsychotic drugs like chlorpromazine can cause Parkinson’s disease and are therefore often paired with medication to treat Parkinson’s disease). But the fact of the matter was that Akira, like most of the guys around him, did not know what schizophrenia was, and he did not have access to the internet to check what this word signified or, for that matter, to read what staff at Sanyukai had written about him online. Be it by the psychiatrist or staff, his exclusion from and inability to access such educated discourse had been assumed, and to a certain degree, they were correct. As a result, Akira remained unaware for eight years that he had been taking a daily cocktail of sleeping pills, sedatives, antipsychotic drugs, and drugs to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s—including chlorpromazine, blonanserin, promethazine, quazepam, brotizolam, and etizolam—to cope with physical pain. One day, shortly before I asked him what medication he was taking, Akira remarked that the paracetamol—a regular painkiller, prescribed by a physician—eased the pain but that the medication prescribed by the psychiatrist did not.⁴⁷ Moreover, many of the symptoms that everyone interpreted as proof of Akira’s deteriorating condition could be identified as the effects of antipsychotic drugs, such as weight gain and extremely slow, if not impaired, and repetitive bodily movements suggestive of Parkinson’s disease, akathisia, or tardive dyskinesia.

After eight years, in 2019, this was how Akira’s condition was explained when I arranged for him to meet at a café with the Sanyukai psychiatrist, who had volunteered with Akira for three years. Remarking on the arbitrariness of the diagnosis, the psychiatrist noted that many of the side effects would slowly subside if Akira weaned himself off the chlorpromazine, blonanserin, and promethazine, which Akira proceeded to do. But this leaves the original question of Akira’s physical pain unaddressed, not to mention the psychic pain of having been expelled from Sanyukai, and I return therefore to the moment of his humiliating departure from the institution, because this was also the moment in which he was handed over completely to the medical establishment. Akira might not have been considered “mad” per se by staff members at Sanyukai, but the force of this diagnosis was allowed to hold sway, much like a burdensome family member or troublesome child may be consigned to the care of the state or, indeed, to a psychiatrist.

There was only one place for Akira to turn for recognition after this: back to the Okinawa-gang, where Takeda-san giggled at the tale of Akira’s “expulsion.” This was a giggle that disclosed fondness of Akira’s ways, and though it could not heal, the giggle restored Akira to his errant self.