1 SETTING OUT “YAMA”
San’ya, the old day-laborer district of Tokyo, or Yama, as veterans of San’ya call it, has long since passed its heyday as the hub for construction workers servicing the central metropolis and its environs.1 Accounts vary from person to person regarding when work started to grow scarce in the area: five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years ago—but the story everyone tells is one of excess. There was once so much work and so many workers that the main thoroughfare of San’ya, Namidabashi (which translates as the “bridge of tears”), was blocked every morning by throngs of street-level labor brokers and laborers. Between six and eight, from Monday to Saturday, the five-hundred-meter stretch of Namidabashi was so packed with workers, brokers, and their minivans that cars could not pass through. In fact, there was such an excess of work available that you could take your pick by going from broker to broker, asking about the work and wages, and settling on your preference.2 Such was the surfeit of work and workers that even drunkards sleeping on the sidewalk would be hauled into the backs of minivans by brokers seeking to fill their quota of workers for the day and thereby to maximize their cut of workers’ wages. Likewise, the daily wage was an exorbitant amount of money. It was not unusual for a scaffolder to earn the equivalent of two thousand dollars in less than one week. But upon returning from the construction site where the scaffolder had passed the nights in a sleeping bag hoisted high on a skyscraper, the entirety of those wages would be squandered on food, liquor, women, or gambling in a display of camaraderie and generosity as superabundant as the labor market from which his wages had originated. Indeed, after these expenditures, it was quite common for men to incur debts to local eateries or to their friends.3
The cycle of work (shigoto) and play (asobi), of monetary accumulation, bankruptcy, and dependence on others, was thus perpetuated and repeated. In the mythic San’ya of old, laborers disposed of money, reaped from the exhaustion of their bodies, with a recklessness that seemed to signify inexhaustible funds, squandering it to the point of indebtedness through activities that were as destructive as the labor from which it was obtained. But while the high-rise buildings and fancy apartment blocks of Tokyo remain standing, San’ya and the men of San’ya have been reduced to dilapidation, age, and illness. Today, practically every doya (bunkhouse) expressly built to house laborers in San’ya is fully occupied, and these bunkhouses continue to line San’ya’s backstreets, called the doyagai.4 The famous Palace Hotel stills stands along Namidabashi, and countless small bunkhouses with their characteristic horizontal, rectangular window slats, two per floor (one for the top bunk, one for the bottom), can still be found lining its backstreets.5 But many of the bunkhouses, particularly those flanking the main thoroughfare of Namidabashi, have been converted into cheap, shiny hotels catering to tourists and businessmen. Meanwhile, in the back alleys, the aging tenants of the old bunkhouses no longer do construction work to earn their livelihood but are mainly on state welfare. Akira, a San’ya veteran whom I met volunteering at an NPO, says that at least one person passes away every day in San’ya. Indeed, ambulances are a common sight in San’ya’s backstreets, as are drunken bodies passed out on the cement amid garbage and the smell of piss. In fact, in 2012 the five-hundred-meter stretch of Namidabashi is empty between the hours of six and eight. If anyone can be seen going to work, it is but a few solitary figures, seeming stragglers, heading toward Minami-Senjū train station between seven and eight. They would be inconspicuous and unidentifiable, if it were not for their stuffed backpacks, loaded with a workman’s tools, or their standard-issue work clothes. The only other figures to be seen in the early morning on Namidabashi are a small crowd of middle-aged men sitting on chairs spread out in front of a cheap, open-air sushi bar, drinking from pint glasses of shochu mixed with green tea or water and ice. On the corner of Namidabashi and a narrow side road, the sushi bar only opens in the early mornings, rotating its hours with the next-door, hole-in-the-wall dive bar run by Mutō, to which customers return in the evening to drink and gamble on boat races screened on a small TV, standing on a shelf in the upper left corner of the boxlike, all-but-bare-necessities bar counter.
San’ya has acquired the reputation of that place where backpackers on a shoestring stay or where good-for-nothings on welfare blow away public funds on liquor and gambling, and with the strained national economy, the negative image of San’ya has only been compounded in recent years by mass-mediated incidents of people abusing the welfare system to their advantage.6 During the two years I lived in Hashiba, adjacent to San’ya, I was reminded countless times by friends, family, and others outside San’ya of what kind of environment and what type of person is encountered in San’ya. One person simply winced when I said I was living close to Minami-Senjū Station. A friend could not divorce San’ya from the image of being “dangerous” and insisted that she would “absolutely not go,” adding that the situation of men in San’ya was “their own fault”: a burden to society and others who work to support themselves. Making objects of the men in San’ya, one psychologist I met observed that their habits of drinking and gambling exhibited the pathological characteristics of “addiction.” But the most virulent of all preconceptions was expressed by individuals who had never been to San’ya or, for that matter, to its counterparts of Nishinariku or Kotobukichō in Osaka and Yokohama—namely, that San’ya had simply become a place where foreign backpackers come to sleep, as if “Yama,” which did not exist to begin with, had been wiped off the map and out of history.
Whether consciously or not, such reactions suggest that San’ya has been disavowed in the Japanese imaginary and that it is inextricably linked to practices and signifiers long ago relegated to the margins of modern Japan. Indeed, San’ya is located in a marginal section of the premodern “low-city” (shitamachi), where the “commoners” (shomin) of the Edo period once lived. A little more knowledge of the area reveals that Minami-Senjū Station stands next to a former execution ground and that San’ya is flanked to the southwest by Yoshiwara, the largest red-light district of the Kantō region, and to the south by Imado, a neighborhood associated with the Buraku minority, considered outcastes during Japan’s feudal period.7 Not surprisingly, the day-laborer district of the modern construction industry is located next door to the center of Tokyo’s sex industry, and while discrimination against Buraku people continues to inform decisions regarding employability and marriageability, San’ya has become a space of the unsanitary, of the dying, and of the dead, whom it was once the role of Buraku to dispose of.8
Yet each of the above preconceptions is true to a certain degree. San’ya can be dangerous since men fight in San’ya; on occasion there are stabbings and, at least once per year, a murder of or by an acquaintance.9 Likewise, the San’ya man can be found drinking from five in the morning, sometimes to the point of death, and gambling when the chance presents itself. What accounts for the necessity of such reactions, however, and no doubt also the joy of the psychologist working in San’ya, is the normative violence by which the social requires and establishes itself vis-à-vis that which it is not. Hence, one need not have been to San’ya in order to judge it: one must merely know what it stands for, the associations it triggers, and its impropriety. Complicit with the medical and the political, an economic principle dictates the separation and confinement of certain types of individuals to San’ya, be they the criminal, the disabled, the psychotic, the terminally ill, the addicted, the unemployable, and other figures marginal to modern Japan, like the Buraku, the Okinawan, the Chinese, or the Korean.10
In an uncanny reversal, however, San’ya reveals itself as a mirror image of general society otherwise hidden.11 For in the containment of economically unprofitable elements of general society, these same elements have been recycled in a way that has accelerated the death of these human elements, as they are set to work at the most menially demanding labor, in a confinement that limits expenditures to the momentary consumption of liquor and the practices of gambling. San’ya gives the lie to general society, because when a man in San’ya is called “unusable” (tsukaenai), no one makes a secret of the fact that he may be or is dying, which many men were, and this is what is most unsettling about the associations it calls forth: it discloses the truth of capitalist Japan and the violence with which this truth is repressed. In fact, during the heyday of the 1980s bubble economy, it was the smell of San’ya that triggered immediate repugnance, of urine and feces in the gutters and of piles of uncollected garbage.12 To act as if places like San’ya do not exist, or as Akira phrases it, “to put a lid on what stinks” (kusai mono ni futa o), is to instantiate the social structure that consigns San’ya to oblivion and death. Every veteran of San’ya knows that the murders and deaths that happen in San’ya are not reported in the mass media. It used to be that the bodies of deceased men in San’ya, anonymous in the official registry and with no kin to claim them, were appropriated by hospitals for experimentation, only to end up as skeleton specimens in university classrooms.13 In this way, the human costs of Japan’s postwar economic recovery have been swept under the carpet.
Today, now that the chapter seems to be closing on San’ya, it would constitute no less of an injustice to claim that its story is finished. For the social structure that consigns San’ya to death is alive and well in this claim, and the reality that faces San’ya now is none other than the catastrophic aftereffects of untrammeled commodification and of the excessive lifestyles of men with nothing to lose but their dignity.
On the Other Side of the Bridge of Tears
No doubt, the men in San’ya have grown circumspect in their spendings after their primary source of income, construction work, all but vanished. But the old sign warning drivers to beware of drunk men sleeping on the street still stands, slightly askew, by the corner of Namidabashi and Meiji-dōri road. The entryway to the Iroha arcade (figure 1.1), between the old liquor store called Nodaya and the once-militant union for day laborers and homeless people, Sōgidan, is littered with one-cup sake cans and liquor bottles spewing out of temporary aluminum trash cans alongside piles of garbage.14 Here and there, someone is passed out drunk, like a dead, stray body enveloped by the smell of piss rising from the street. From almost five in the morning until late evening, a small crowd can be found drinking there, its members switching in and out as the day progresses.
FIGURE 1.1. The entryway to the Iroha arcade, San’ya’s main thoroughfare.
Just a few meters inside the canopy that covers the Iroha arcade, a two-by-two-meter mat has been placed in front of one of the many shuttered stores. Kept in place by red traffic cones when nobody is there, the cardboard mat marks the spot where Gīn runs his gambling joint. In the afternoons and early evenings, four to five figures huddle silently over a deck of hanafuda (flower cards) spread out on the mat as they divine the winning eight or nine, in plain sight of police cars that silently circulate the streets.15 Gīn, a diminutive person dressed in tweed pants, collared shirt, and his signature Scottish touring cap, reputedly also runs the distribution of drugs in San’ya, consisting primarily of injected meth. For whatever reason, his hands are always covered in Band-Aids and sores.
Beside Gīn often sits Yamamori, a man who shows that he has been in the yakuza for years by allowing his traditional, elbow-length tattoos to emerge from below the sleeves of his T-shirt, and if there is any doubt, the scar of a knife wound across his cheek reinforces this image.16 Indeed, the silent gesture of slashing a forefinger across the right cheek, accompanied only by the word “this,” is used to signify the yakuza in San’ya, for while many are very well acquainted with yakuza, if not actual or past members of the mob, the word yakuza is not lightly spoken but merely indicated by this gesture. An incorrigible gambler, always upping the stakes, and a bad boy of intimidation and vulgar ostentation, Yamamori also makes a show of his money. Having won repeatedly at the races, Yamamori would sport a wallet stuffed with ¥10,000 bills (approximately $100) so that the wallet was brimming with a wad two to three centimeters thick. Of course, only a few weeks later, the bills were no longer in his wallet since, as he matter-of-factly said, they had been put in his savings account. Moreover, Yamamori was rather careful in his use of cash, saving his public spending for moments in which everyone could witness his lavishness. He thereby went counter to the spontaneous spectacles of generosity still to be seen on Sundays: when the main horse races are screened, winners helplessly announcing their winnings, followed by cash gifts and expenditures that frequently leave winners penniless by the end of the day. Yamamori seemed to seize every opportunity to use his “outlaw” (autorō) appearance and manner, sometimes purely for the fun of it, by intimidating outsiders to San’ya. When during the course of a taxi ride with Yamamori and two others the taxi driver expressed uncertainty regarding where we wished to go, Yamamori took the opportunity to harangue the driver with a string of invectives lasting the entirety of our ten-minute journey: “You don’t know where it is? It’s on your fucking tab then! I’ll fucking kill you, you hear!?” Meanwhile, the two others told the taxi driver where to go, tiredly remarking to Yamamori to “let it rest,” and when we finally got out, Yamamori himself paid the fare from his bulging wallet. In the tram ride afterward, he made such a loud mockery of our group that oncoming passengers scurried past for the end of the compartment. Nor, for that matter, did Yamamori’s intimidation tactics merely amount to the empty tantrums of an adolescent fifty-year-old. The threat of physical violence that they implied was real. One time, an older woman had to restrain him with the plaintive words “You’ll kill him,” as he persisted in beating an already blood-bespattered and unconscious man.
Yamamori was a former yakuza, and through his connection with Gīn, he surely felt connected to and therefore entitled by the local yakuza organization (the Kanamachi-ikka), yet the arrogant behavior he exhibited was precisely the kind that could land him in serious trouble with prominent figures in San’ya. In fact, it had “been agreed in advance” that Yamamori, a so-called member of Matsuda’s “group,” would not “lay a hand” on Kentarō or Rikiishi of the so-called Okinawa-gang (Okinawagumi).17 On several occasions, it had been the very abuse of iconography associated with the yakuza that had triggered Rikiishi or Kentarō to go on a rampage, putting the other party in place by beating the hell out of them. Coupled with a haughty attitude, the revelation of traditional body tattoos could prompt rage and, possibly, long-term hospitalization, not to mention the ousting of an adversary from San’ya, for it was not simply that Rikiishi or Kentarō could not tolerate the puffed-up entitlement that accompanied traditional tattoos. The abuse of yakuza iconography stained values of justice, self-sacrifice, and hospitality that they associated with a vanishing underworld and therefore necessitated that they reestablish the proper order of things.
Yamamori’s style of vulgar ostentation must be counterposed to another type of self-conduct to which deference was accorded in San’ya. This opposing term can be located in the senior figures of the Okinawa-gang, Takeda-san, and his partner, “Nē-san” (older sister), as everybody addressed her. Like Yamamori, Takeda-san had once been a member of the yakuza, but he did not flaunt it. Though it was difficult for Takeda-san to dissimulate the fact that he was once in the mob—since he was missing three fingers, two from above the middle joint and one from below it, indicating that they were cut no less than five times—I spent almost an entire year working with him, moving in and out of changing rooms, without once noticing (as someone later pointed out to me) that Takeda-san’s body was covered in tattoos. No matter how hot it was, Takeda-san always wore a white, cotton, long-sleeved shirt thick enough to conceal his tattoos, and it was only from intimate friends that one learned that Takeda-san had been lieutenant (kashira) for an eminent yakuza leader from his hometown of Fukuoka, known by anyone with the slightest knowledge of the yakuza, and that Takeda-san was on the list of individuals against whom the local yakuza (again, the Kanamachi-ikka) was not permitted to raise a hand. Contrary to common lore that members of the mob cut their fingers over contraventions that they themselves had committed, it was said that Takeda-san had lost his fingers to take the blame for those working under him. In Akira’s words, this made Takeda-san an “incredible person.” Takeda-san and Nē-san were thus recognized for their effortless tact, elegance, discretion, and the humility with which they interacted with everyone, showing the same modesty and deference regardless of social difference. Combined with the aura of Takeda-san’s past, the everyday conduct of Takeda-san and Nē-san operated as cause of the esteem with which they were regarded. Takeda-san and Nē-san took care of everyone, inviting them home for endless meals and drinking. They were present when someone was put in jail and always exhibited consideration, such that it was said that “everyone is indebted to” them. One word from Takeda-san, who had himself made a practice of the dictum that nothing is more important than one’s buddies (nakama), and potential schisms within the group were resolved.18 Even other senior members, like Kentarō, a burly, fifty-seven-year-old, no-nonsense worker who ensured the availability of work for everyone through his presence at the construction site, would set aside differences and make peace, if so asked by Takeda-san.19
In their power to resolve constitutive and seemingly insuperable tensions between factions and individuals, Takeda-san and Nē-san occupied a mythic place in the atomized social world of Yama. In the absence of Takeda-san and Nē-san, social relations in the Okinawa-gang might well have split and devolved on the economic principle of every man for himself, devoid of hierarchy, deference, generosity, and buddies. Contrary to Yamamori forcibly pulling rank for his own purposes and abusing the iconography of the yakuza world, Takeda-san actualized a principle of selflessness in the name of the individuals he cared for and for those to whom he held social obligations. Like the Caduveo face painting of which Claude Lévi-Strauss writes in Tristes Tropiques, Takeda-san and Nē-san embodied symbols of sociality par excellence, and the respect accorded to them actualized the dream of individuals searching for social institutions they might have, if the individualizing violence of the market did not obstruct their formation at every turn.20 In San’ya, it was the principle of masculine sociality itself that was sought so that the quality of person, status, and history were repeatedly emphasized in an insistent and pervasive reversal of the individualizing labor market, which reduced men to the quantitative value of their wage and imposed an objective condition of existence that compelled them to sell their labor as segregated units. Perhaps the disruptive and individualizing violence of the labor market could not be resolved, but it could certainly be concealed with a dream of sociality, hospitality, and self-sacrifice for the weak, which was, indeed, inscribed on Takeda-san’s body in the condensed form of his missing fingers and his hidden traditional tattoos, the power of which would only be revealed and wielded in the name of justice and sociality. For this reason, much as Takeda-san formed a counterpoint to the loud and self-centered Yamamori, and much as Takeda-san was loosely a “member” of the Okinawa-gang, his figure transcended exclusive affiliation. It was common practice for Nē-san and him to invite all and sundry home, thence unifying the Okinawa-gang with the Matsuda-group and, in the embrace of hospitality, imposing peace on individual tensions.
Such gatherings, however, were almost exclusively composed of men. While the absence of romantic engagements made it appear that there were no women the guys would have brought along anyway, one day Takeda-san himself stated the gendered basis of these gatherings. When Suzuki, the only worker with romantic successes, suggested that he bring his girlfriend along to introduce her to me, Takeda-san dismissed the suggestion, asking rhetorically why Suzuki would bring his girlfriend to a gathering “of otoko.” An exception was made to this rule when my foreign partner was invited home. She and I wined and dined with the group, and Takeda-san paid exceptional hospitality to her, ignoring my presence beside her. But it was Nē-san’s presence in the adjacent room and kitchen that established Takeda-san’s eminently self-effacing authority.21 While her social position among the guys must be distinguished from that of the female proprietors of the snack bars and eateries they frequented in the evenings, the attentions of these women was necessary to affirm the trope of the otoko.22 Takeda-san was deferential and respectful to everyone, regardless of gender, but the hospitality of an otoko was grounded in sexual difference.
It was these visible practices and the deference with which Takeda-san treated everyone, be it the owner of an eatery or the homeless people in Iroha, all of whom knew Takeda-san, that earned him the praise, given behind his back and never in his presence, of being a “man’s man” (otoko no otoko). It was not simply the trope of the otoko but of embodying the vanishing values of a specific world of men—namely, those of old-style yakuza—that earned Takeda-san his respect, bestowing him with that inescapable aura that attached to his person no matter where he went. On this note, it was common for men in San’ya to describe their relations in yakuza terms: shatei, meaning “younger brother” or “underling,” and aniki, meaning “blood brother” or, more literally, “older brother.”23 When I asked Kentarō why, aside from daily conduct, such high esteem was given to Takeda-san, his response was brief to the point of being hasty, as if he did not want to be caught in an indiscretion. First, he recounted the circumstances under which he had met Takeda-san. More than a decade ago, Rikiishi, an underling to Takeda-san, had challenged Kentarō to a fight: “You wanna take me on?!” It was Takeda-san who put a stop to this by interjecting his body between the two, insisting that Kentarō was the senior figure and that Rikiishi back down. Second, Kentarō made direct reference to Takeda-san’s former life in the mob by stating that Takeda-san “knows everything about such things,” that is, concerning the intricacy of hierarchy in the mob world. It was no coincidence that Takeda-san, guarantor of sociality and honor in the “lawless zone” of San’ya, embodied in practice the knowledge that was ascribed to his mythic past. The trope of the otoko reinstated sociality where it was lacking, but it also threatened to undo the propriety of “general society” by exceeding the negativity and shame that confined San’ya to San’ya.
The normative force of acting like an upstanding otoko rendered the lives of the old-guard San’ya man and almost any active construction worker antithetical to the philanthropic mission of nonprofit organizations operating in San’ya. Indeed, the very notion that men in San’ya need help could not run more counter to the “self-reliance” (jiritsu) predicated by the idealized otoko, and for those on welfare, the contradiction of asserting masculine independence consisted in their dependence on the state. But it was precisely this dependence that was relegated to the outside of Yama in the performance and assertion of masculine self-reliance. By the same token, the once-powerful labor union for day laborers and homeless people, Sōgidan, had acquired the trappings of asinine ideological interests that could not be further from the imperative of looking after oneself and one’s group: prancing down Namidabashi every Friday morning with a red flag and speakerphone, preaching the renunciation of war and liberation for workers across the world. Participating in a demonstration or lining up for food handouts (takidashi) fell outside the purview of men even remotely affiliated with the workers of the Okinawa-gang or Matsuda-group.24 Takeda-san was not even aware that the oldest nonprofit organization in San’ya, Sanyukai, operated a medical clinic offering free services. His lack of basic knowledge testified to the split between the adjacent worlds of the active construction worker and of Sanyukai, hidden in an alleyway only one hundred meters from Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall, where the guys drank.
But a medical clinic offering free services would have served the needs of no one more so than the active construction worker. Along with the homeless men and women, although primarily men in blue tents along the Sumida River, individuals without recourse to welfare or health insurance were most likely to be found among the active construction laborers of San’ya. At least a quarter of the active workers I became close to were receiving welfare, including Takeda-san, Shōkawa (both sixty), Saruma, or Akira (in their midfifties), none of whom declared their income and, thus, were illegally supplementing their meager welfare (approximately ¥100,000 per month, or $1,000) and running the risk, if found out, of losing this support altogether.25 The latter prospect was dire, as it would most certainly leave some on the streets and others working excessively with a sick body, which was bound to shut down. Notably, no one expressed shame over receiving welfare except Akira while he was at Sanyukai, who had a brain tumor and was strictly forbidden by doctors to do manual labor (other people’s tax money, Akira said); the others appeared to echo Kentarō’s explicit principle that “you take what you can get,” because it would have been well-nigh impossible for the worker in his fifties or sixties to earn a living at manual labor, given the scarcity of work and the fact that many of the guys were ill. Others, like Rikiishi, Norihisa, Maku (in his seventies), Kentarō, and Matsui, were all registered for “out-of-work aid” (abure teate), which was designed specifically to sustain the livelihood of day laborers, and received a maximum of ¥50,000 per month ($500), provided that they worked.26 Then there was Suzuki and Matsuda, the respective tehaishi, or street-level labor brokers, for the Okinawa-gang and Matsuda-group, who were each said to earn as much as ¥500,000 ($5,000) every month simply by doing the work of tehai, that is, of brokering labor at the last interface between employers and laborers.27 And then there were people like Tetsu, who lived in a tent by the river; Sawamiya, who traveled between San’ya and Nishinariku in Osaka, depending on work availability, and faked the loss of his ticket upon arrival (by explaining to station staff that he had traveled from the closest station, the trip could be made for ¥150, about $1.50); Riku, who refused to seek any help from the state and, to everyone’s surprise, decided to cut off state aid when it turned out he didn’t have cancer; the twenty-eight-year-old Wakami, who earned his living flat out, working five days every week, and who spent the rest of his time at slot machines; the two who worked for the subcontractor company, Tenjima, for ridiculously cheap wages, having gone into debt to the yakuza and were housed in a dorm (ryō) or the confinement of a takobeya (literally translated as an “octopus room”) while they worked off their debt; and the countless other nameless figures, oftentimes picked off the street or the environs of Minami-Senjū Station by Matsuda, who would use them as convenience demanded, slashing half their wages in the process.28 Except for those indebted to the mob or those running from the law, it was entirely possible to work the system to earn welfare benefits or, for Wakami, to get out-of-work aid. Yet Sawamiya, like many others, did not wish to have his whereabouts known to his family in Okinawa, and the first thing the ward office would do was to contact his next of kin. As for Wakami, he could not have been bothered to register himself for out-of-work aid, although even he, after two years, was feeling the toil of working every day. At some point, the inevitable was bound to happen: injury at work, for which construction companies were most unlikely to compensate workers, particularly day laborers.
Sanyukai
People would start gathering in the narrow, twenty-five-meter back alley that flanked the entryway to Sanyukai at ten every morning, slowly amassing over the next two hours as they stood or sat on white plastic benches lining the alley, until lunch was served on the second floor at noon. Almost without exception, this amorphous gathering of people comprised men in their fifties and above, although, on occasion, and later toward noon, someone younger in their thirties or twenties might appear. And sometimes Yasuko, who lived in a tent in the nearby Tamahime Park, made her way out to the benches, asked for tea from the reception area at the top of the five stairs leading up to the entry, and sat back down to chat loudly and indiscreetly about whatever she wanted; she had an unmistakable presence with a nasal voice and bulging layers of homeless clothing. Otherwise, it was rare, indeed, to see any women at Sanyukai, and if they did come, it was for an appointment with the doctor that day, after which they promptly left. Apart from that, it was in the company of a man, like the homeless, tanned, meek woman with glasses who seemed to push her bearded father around in a wheelchair all day, sleeping in the streets of Asakusa at night.29 Not once during the year and a half I volunteered at Sanyukai did I see anyone but the regular crowd of men go up to the second floor to eat. Thus, the crowd of men outside sat and waited for lunch. Some would smoke, dropping ash in the aluminum ashtrays interspersed beneath the benches, while others engaged in inconsequential conversations. Favorite topics included the latest news, the weather, sports, and perhaps even—although the subject of gambling was consciously avoided—the latest horse races. The generic character was that of a man in his midfifties, dressed in grayish pants, a plain collared shirt with an equally plain vest or jacket in winter, and low-budget, black plastic shoes or jogging gear. Most often, this figure would be silently hunched over on the benches, alone. Given the signal for lunch, he would walk upstairs, eat without uttering a word, maybe even bow in passing to the staff downstairs, and head home. At one o’clock, when the Sanyukai kitchen stopped serving lunch, the alley outside would often be empty.
A clear hierarchy structured the provision of meals because it was none other than the head of Sanyukai, a stocky European man with decades of experience working in San’ya as a Catholic philanthropist, Guy-san, who decided and indicated whether someone would be given a meal. Once lunch had been prepared upstairs, he would do so by walking the alley and signaling to individuals with his index finger, most often calling them by their name, to go eat. Because the tatami room upstairs only seated twelve, six at each table, only twelve men could go up at a time, and Guy-san would have to repeat this process of signaling individuals to go up. The tatami dining room always had a small TV switched on, usually to the NHK news (Japan’s largest public broadcaster), during lunchtime. Its walls were decorated with posters and photos of Sanyukai’s past activities, some Christian missionary artwork, colored pencil drawings of children’s anime figures by Kawaii (one of the men outside who professed to being mistaken for a woman), and collections of four-leaf clovers collected by Aokan, who lived in a tent by the Sumida River and claimed that trillions, literally trillions, of ants paraded through his tent in summer. One wall of the dining room was stacked waist high with donated rice bags, many from Fukushima; another led to the staircase up- and downstairs and would become so crammed with shoes that there was hardly space to walk. Last, there was a toilet adjacent to the dining room, a small closet, and a doorway and counter opening onto the two-by-five-meter kitchen where the cooks, almost all women, would stand and chat after serving lunch. When one group had finished eating, which for some regulars involved thanking and flirting with the cooks when giving back the dirty plates, the next round was sent up to eat, often clashing with down-coming traffic on the narrow staircase. Finally, Guy-san would go up to eat and sit at a table surrounded by the regulars he appeared closest to—called the “Guy-san group” by the kitchen staff—which invariably included Izumo, Numaja, Amai, and Akira. Those who could not make it up the stairs either because they were in a wheelchair or were truly “homeless” and were not asked up, ostensibly for hygienic reasons, were given lunch boxes to take with them. It rarely happened that there was not enough food to go around, since the number of people outside would rise and fall with the time of the month, enabling the staff to anticipate how many meals would be needed. In the mornings, Guy-san would give the kitchen staff a number that varied from twenty to thirty at the beginning of the month to sixty or so at the end of the month, when welfare allowances had all but run out.
This daily gathering of men outside Sanyukai produced a spectacle of need and, in so doing, confirmed the necessity of the service Sanyukai provided. The kitchen kept track of the number of individuals who came to eat every day, commenting as they wrote the numbers down on the fridge calendar that there “were not so many” or “a lot” on that day. Likewise, the rare occasions when there were so many people that Guy-san had to lower his head and turn the last away became the subject of much gossip. But with the exception of the one or two homeless persons who came to eat, almost all the people waiting outside were receiving welfare, and the same went for the people who frequented the clinic. As the Sanyukai staff confessed in interviews, at least 80 percent of the individuals who regularly came to Sanyukai were already welfare recipients. It should also be added that, with the occasional exception of Akira, virtually none of these men were active construction workers, who constituted a separate social formation on the other side of San’ya. In other words, everyone who ate lunch at Sanyukai (many of them daily) were receiving a monthly allowance of approximately ¥100,000 ($1,000) and, as welfare recipients, already had access to medical care from hospitals and doctors, gratis. For these men, Sanyukai provided additional aid in getting through the month by easing the constraints of welfare.
In an online Sanyukai blog entitled “Daily Events,” it is regarding these men that a long-term staff member declaims on the mission and everyday task that faces the staff: “What can we ourselves do for the person, right in front of us now, ‘with difficulty’ in some aspect? What can we do for this person that will be ‘most for their own good’? While listening to their talk one by one, we ourselves respond through trial and error.”30 What enables this line of inquiry, materialized by the threshold at the top of the five stairs leading up into the Sanyukai entryway and the knee-high table from behind which a staff member serves tea, to the right of which the enclosed clinic was located behind yet another partition, is the division of “we” or “us” (watashi tachi) from “this person” (kono hito). Hence, from inside the back alleys of San’ya, Sanyukai instantiates the structural division that confines San’ya to San’ya, and what is at stake in this “consultation” work is the place of Sanyukai itself, grounded in the ostensible coincidence between an individual in need or “with difficulty” (komatteiru) and what the NPO can “do for” (shiteageru) this person. Notably, the direction of “doing for” is as unidirectional and downward as the act of serving tea. Gifting functions, above all, to confirm the place of Sanyukai staff as providers of that which the men outside desire. Sanyukai desires to be desired.31 But this question—what does the other want from me?—is posed from both sides. Even before the individual ascends the steps to Sanyukai, they know the institution will ask—“What can we ourselves do?”—and to make their visit a success, they have internalized this question, so that they can give the institution what it wants from them. In short, the man from San’ya knows that he must be able to answer properly, that is, to be recognized in accordance with Sanyukai’s demands, which is to say that he must confirm that Sanyukai is needed by confessing that it can give him what he needs. As a lacking individual “with difficulty,” he is interpellated into a structure of desire in which he is “right in front of” an institution that designates itself in terms of the collective “we.” This is the structure of shame, and thence the Sanyukai staff member continues: “It’s not just people who come for the clinic; people who somehow want to get off the street and return to a normal lifestyle come over and over for consultation.”32 Individuals not only come to Sanyukai when they need medical services: they come and they come “over and over,” desiring the “normal lifestyle” (futsū no seikatsu) that Sanyukai can provide. Notwithstanding that many homeless people did want to get off the streets, whether or not they desired the return to a “normal lifestyle,” replete with work, family, bills, and the alienation of a one-bedroom apartment, was rather questionable. In fact, the homeless people by the Sumida River had already turned down an offer made by Sumida and Taitō Wards, in an effort to clean the river area, to move into apartments.33 Aokan seemed quite content with his trillions of ants every summer, showing his face at Sanyukai every few weeks, watering his many plants, and walking the stretch between Tamahime Park and his blue tent, laden with water bottles. As for Tetsu, the scaffolder who also lived in a tent by the river, he was clearly saving money to repay his debts, although he was later diagnosed with cancer, as other homeless people before him had been, refusing to seek help until it was too late. Nevertheless, the general desire was ascribed to these “homeless” of wanting to return to a “normal lifestyle,” and the “consultation” by Sanyukai emerged as the site at which lack was produced, internalized, and individualized through a process of “listening” that uncovered the preexisting needs of the individual.
More often than not, however, what the Sanyukai staff encountered was a mimesis of the desire to be “normal” (futsū), since proximity to the institution came with its benefits. Whether the men outside truly needed the meal upstairs or not, Sanyukai staff themselves postulated that many were pretending. On the one hand, Sanyukai could not do enough to be desired by a group of men who were already receiving welfare and had recourse to aid from other NPOs, and on the other, the men outside had to perform their desire before an institution that doubted them. Their state of lack or of being “with difficulty” demanded an impossible confirmation that would give necessity to the existence of Sanyukai.
The spectacle of the crowd gathered outside Sanyukai thus served a dual purpose. Because showing up on the dot at noon and expecting to receive food would have been outright shameless, the men gave themselves to be seen waiting two hours, and in doing this, they invested a proper amount of time in a shameful place that validated Sanyukai as provider. In fact, for newcomers who may have had a consultation but whose faces were still unfamiliar to the staff, there was no choice but to arrive early and be noticed because meals were served to individuals in the order in which they had arrived and only by permission of the staff, who approved those who were allowed upstairs and, on rare occasions, declined others. And during especially busy times of the month or year, when everyone was low on funds, it was especially important to arrive early since there might not be enough meals to go around. At least initially, there was genuine shame in having been reduced to the point at which one had no choice but to wait two hours to receive a meal, and the exterior signs of this shame were presented in the form of silence and having one’s head lowered. Sanyukai was, indeed, the first stop in San’ya for most individuals who had recently been laid off and forced to go on welfare. Over time, however, occupying the shameful, individualized place of waiting in front of Sanyukai mandated that shame be displaced with a shameless performance of shame that legitimated the philanthropic mission of the institution. In return, the men outside got a meal, and thereby, each party was more or less satisfied. In short, although some men undoubtedly felt ashamed, they had to disguise the shamelessness that was required to perform the shame of waiting two hours for a free lunch, and this was made ever more apparent when men who had just eaten at Sanyukai were seen making a beeline for a second free lunch at a second nonprofit organization: going from curry at Sanyukai to udon noodle soup in Tamahime Park.
There were, indeed, certain rules that had to be observed at Sanyukai, the contravention of which could earn one a bad name and, with it, the loss of one’s privileges. For example, the staff had implemented a “no drinking” policy during work hours, in accordance with which anyone drinking or drunk was frowned upon or, if obstructively so, was ousted from the Sanyukai alleyway. There was an implicit, additional proviso to this policy under the condition of which one could remain at Sanyukai: in the interest of safety, fighting was not tolerated. If fights broke out, which regulars and staff said happened much less over recent years, they were instantly broken up, and when a staff member was punched by a newcomer, the police were summoned. Thus, Kubota, a decades-old volunteer at Sanyukai and resident of San’ya, noted how differently some people behaved when they were not at Sanyukai. In contrast to the figure of obsequious helplessness they presented at Sanyukai, these men would start brawls and go wild when they were in other parts of San’ya. It was as if their behavior conformed to the geographic location of Sanyukai, on the opposite side of Namidabashi from Iroha. But when members of the Kanamachi-ikka passed through the narrow alley, as if it belonged to them in their sharp business suits and shiny, expensive black shoes, silence would descend in a reminder that perhaps the alley did not belong to Sanyukai. None of the staff, for that matter, ever ventured beyond the confines of Sanyukai and into San’ya proper. It was to the staff of this sanctuary from San’ya within San’ya, however, that the men outside had to present an idealized, pliant, and docile image of themselves as was desired and thus rise in favorability. Waiting two hours might have secured a stranger a meal, but additional steps were necessary to become known by name and to gain access to additional privileges, like Friday and Saturday parties, when alcohol was served, and it was only intimacy with the staff that guaranteed these privileges.
Akira, a volunteer of three years, said that the ritual of waiting should be abolished in favor of a token system. That way people could pick up a numbered ticket, come back for lunch, and go home without the headache of having to wait two hours. But such a system would have gotten rid of that nonrelation—each aspiring to occupy the place of the other’s desire—in which Sanyukai’s social world consisted and would have overturned the hierarchy in which Sanyukai, the apparent provider, ultimately emerged as the duped and dependent party.34 Because it was not shame but shamelessness that was precipitated by the process of waiting two hours outside. Hence, the active construction worker never went to Sanyukai. To endure the shame of the two-hour wait, one could “know no shame” (haji shirazu).
On the other side of Namidabashi, Akira had become close with his peers from Okinawa in the Okinawa-gang, and together they would take issue with the attitude of Sanyukai, disclosed in the phrase: to “do for.” Having neither computer proficiency nor access to the internet, the guys had not picked this phrase up from Sanyukai’s blog but happened to use it to depict the activities of the NPO. Redolent with condescension, in that the verb to “do for” inscribed a hierarchical relation in which the giver goes out of his way to do something for another, the guys would flip the phrase to restore the proper order of things, saying: “It isn’t ‘doing for,’ is it! It’s ‘being allowed’ to!” In their eyes, Sanyukai was “arrogant” for entering on their turf and presuming to do something for them. Rather, Sanyukai was “being allowed” (sasete moratte iru) to be in San’ya. In permitting its presence, it was the residents of San’ya who were doing something for Sanyukai.35
On a hot summer morning, Akira brought some of these members of the Okinawa-gang to Sanyukai for medical check-ups. Rather than wait in the alleyway for their names to be called—that is, together with the regular crowd waiting for lunch—Akira, Rikiishi, Shōkawa, and Kentarō removed themselves a distance of some twenty meters to the end of the alley, where they stood facing one another, leaning against an electric pole, sipping green-tea shochu from cans. Every once in a while, the obese and round Izumo, ensconced as always at the bottom of the entryway steps, would shoot a quick, nervous glance at the guys from Okinawa. Guy-san, too, would turn to look at their figures down the road, muttering, “Okinawa-gang.” For Akira, the visitation and personal entourage functioned as a double demonstration of his influence. On the one hand, Rikiishi, Shōkawa, and Kentarō would recognize his pull at Sanyukai, which enabled him to set up appointments for them without the routine hassle of having to approach and ask the staff personally. On the other hand, Sanyukai was made to witness the other world of construction workers, masculinity, muscle, and flagrant disregard for Sanyukai etiquette to which Akira was connected and by which Sanyukai appeared to be disconcerted, if not also threatened. Akira acted as the guarantor that the guys would be seen in the clinic, regardless of the fact that they were drinking. In fact, the Christian nurse had popped her head out of the clinic earlier in the morning to kindly ask the guys to hold off alcohol, since they were—“for once”—getting a checkup, and there was no reason for it to be wasted. Nonetheless, there the four of them stood with shochu in their hands, except Akira, who refrained, and because they stood at the far end of the alley, when each of their turns came the Sanyukai staff member called their names from inside the entryway, as he usually did, but for lack of response, stuck his head out the entryway and tried once again—“Shōkawa, please come in!”—only to have to put his slippers on in final frustration, shuffling into the alley to call their names one last time. Oblivious and caught up in their conversation, yet somehow sure that someone’s name had been called, Shōkawa then looked at me, pointing stupidly at his own face with his index finger—saying “me?”—and waited for a confirmation. When I had confirmed with the staff that Shōkawa’s name had been called, the latter set aside his drink and, sporting what appeared to be the best demeanor he could muster, dawdled down the alleyway, climbed the stairs up into the clinic, and bowed profusely as he crossed the threshold. Next came Rikiishi, carrying the weight of his upper body up the stairs, bowing curtly at the threshold, and crossing into the clinic.
Besides the consultation itself, the medical checkup could obviously not take place because the guys all had alcohol in their blood. This became the subject of much gossip at Sanyukai in the days after. What was this behavior, to show up at the clinic drinking?36
Akira and the members of the Okinawa-gang embodied the afterlife in the present of San’ya, as it had been in its heyday. On the one hand, the group, or gang, was composed of a group of men that worked together for various construction companies and for whom Suzuki acted as tehaishi, though it was his older brother, Kentarō, who had the reputation and connections that secured steady work availability. On the other hand, the Okinawa-gang constituted a loose group of drinking buddies whose central figures, many of whom were from Okinawa, pulled a slew of other figures into its orbit. In this way, Norihisa and Rikiishi were both central members of the Okinawa-gang but were employed as scaffolders for a separate company. Shōkawa, too, had another buddy who provided him with work as an ironworker. In the evenings and especially on Sundays, when everyone got together for the horse races, sometimes even going to the Okinawan restaurant in Asakusa, Gajū-Maru, the members of the Okinawa-gang could be seen drinking here and there in San’ya, be it at Sakura, Iseya, Hikari-Sushi, Chūfukuro, or on the street by Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall. Nor, for that matter, were the working arrangements set in stone. Anyone could work as a dokata (navvy) with Kentarō, and if work was scarce for the others and they needed the money, it was not unusual for Suzuki to send Shōkawa, Rikiishi, or Norihisa to work as navvies with Kentarō and the other regulars.37
Akira himself did not work at first, having only recently become intimate with the Okinawa-gang through an encounter at a San’ya dive bar, where he noticed that Saruma, Kentarō’s cousin, was speaking with a Miyakojima accent, an island off Okinawa proper, where Akira, too, was born. Nor had Akira been long in San’ya on this occasion, returning to it after several years in Kotobukichō in Yokohama, where he had put himself to use at an illegal gambling joint. The suicide of a friend and the fact that his face had become too known prompted his return to San’ya, where he had first come to seek work fifteen years earlier, when he had been put on probation for infighting by the Nibikikai, a defunct yakuza organization for which Akira had worked for ten years, specializing in what he called kiritori (extortion). Though he had not told anyone about his past, this past was part of what made his personality so attractive to others, especially at Sanyukai: never showing “weakness” (yowami) and fearlessly staking himself and his reputation for those around him. When he tried to kill himself, it was also this machismo, turned ludicrous, that led him repeatedly to contend that he would have succeeded had the knife been sharper. Inside the last few years, Akira had, in fact, been diagnosed with a brain tumor that could not be extracted. Together with other physical ailments, this prevented him from engaging in any form of strenuous physical labor or, for that matter, from finding employment, and it required that he be on medication all the time.
Hence, I first met Akira at what would otherwise have been the unlikeliest of places, Sanyukai, where he volunteered to keep himself busy, or as he himself explained: to “do his best” (gambaru). At the time of our first meeting, Akira was fifty-four years old. Standing some 160 cm, with a stocky, stout build but a slightly protruding belly, Akira’s physique bespoke his younger days when, as he put it, his muscles had been “bulging.” At the time of our encounter, Akira had also been sober for an entire year, since he had been told by doctors to abstain from liquor, due to his health. This was to change drastically, however, after a concatenation of events that included a falling out with Guy-san and the passing away of Akira’s older sister, for whom—though he did not say so—Akira was not able to mourn because he did not have the funds to travel to the funeral in Okinawa. Even if he had had the money, he might not have been welcome.
The most painful things were thus unspoken in San’ya. Indeed, the precipitating, structuring events that had originally prompted individuals to come to San’ya—unemployment, crime, illness—were not dwelt upon but passed over during drinks in moments of pregnant silence. The men, be it at Sanyukai or in the Okinawa-gang, rarely if ever mentioned what effectively kept them in San’ya, namely, the absence of a family or wife, children or parents. Their “connections” (en) with spouse, children, and parents had “been cut” years, if not decades, ago. One exception to this rule was Suzuki, himself a relative newcomer to San’ya three years earlier, where he had come to join Kentarō after leaving his wife and grown kids. Every month, Suzuki would send money to his mother in Okinawa, and throwing guilt on Kentarō by reminding him of this, Kentarō would retort: “Who would send money to that bitch?!” Likewise, Akira would occasionally say that he had “left Okinawa behind for good.”38
One day, after returning to Sanyukai from a few weeks abroad, I found Akira as vivacious as ever, typically transforming the daily atmosphere by exercising his penchant and skill of making others laugh at his inanities. But while I had been gone, he had gotten into a brawl in the Iroha arcade and wore a chest strap to hold his fractured ribs in place. As it turned out afterward, his injuries included a fractured disk in the spinal column, in spite of which he continued to volunteer at the nonprofit organization, overseeing its menial tasks by hauling luggage back and forth.
As Akira explained what had happened, he had “lost it” or “gone amok” (abareta) in the Iroha arcade after learning that his older sister had passed away. He had let a sarcastic comment slip about someone at a dive bar, after which he was confronted by the man and two others, demanding that he compensate for his words. When I noted that it might not have been necessary to fight over this, Akira explained that with some people, “it doesn’t matter how much you apologize.” The three men had not backed down even after Akira apologized. What they wanted was “money.” In what would be described as a “man’s dignity” (otoko no iji), Akira had refused to lower himself to this demand, promptly taking the matter outside, and woken up in the hospital. He said he was pretty sure that he had taken one of the guys down, though there had been three of them. Akira whisked off the suggestion that these men were still around, saying that they were probably scared, “hiding somewhere.” The police had, in fact, asked Akira if he remembered who had done this to him, to which he had feigned ignorance. Pointing to an old knife wound on his throat, he added that he had not informed on the person who had done this either. That was what it meant to be an otoko, and he had a reputation to uphold in San’ya.
My first real encounter with this world of San’ya, of fighting and reputations, took place on the eve of the yearly Sumida River fireworks festival. At this stage, I had yet to work and see the labor at construction sites that constituted the inescapable and otherwise invisible backdrop to the enactment of masculinity in San’ya. Aside from an occasional beer with various individuals at Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall, I had not yet even been introduced to the group or met Takeda-san. This was my first full-on exposure to the heady, boisterous atmosphere of a night in San’ya, replete with an introduction by Akira and the politely dismissive response that I would continue to meet until well after I started working with the group:
I thought I’d catch Akira and his buddies by the corner dive, but it was closed. When I then headed over to Iroha, there was Akira standing beside Suzuki in the middle of a small crowd, beside the entryway to Iroha, under the roof beside the gambling sheets. Akira standing there in his sports shorts, brown slippers, and white plain T-shirt. Sushi had been put out for the guys on the gambling sheet, and Akira was helping himself. The fireworks were over. The corner dive had been closed early because of the fireworks, they said, and they’d been watching it from the street. You could see it even better from there, Akira said, raising his arms big to show the fireworks. He’d been drinking, but not that much. We all headed to Sakura afterwards, and a regular party was going. Suzuki’s brother—who ended up sleeping at my place—was sitting by the far end of the counter, having just ordered curry. He said he didn’t want a drink because he’d eat curry and then just head to sleep. I gave him a glass of beer nonetheless. The karaoke was going. Around ten guys—more, twelve or so—were sitting at the two tables across from the counter. Suzuki’s older brother had been working all day, in the heat, Akira had said. I learned a lot of new names last night. Makoto with the real downcast, somber eyes, but kind looking. He recalled how he’d spat blood, how blood had come out everywhere, from his nose, his mouth, his piss. He “thought he was going to die.” So he’d gone to Sanyukai, because he had no insurance card or anything. He’d said that twice: that he has no insurance card. On that day, the doctor hadn’t been there and only the psychologist was there. Makoto said he was on real good terms with him. But on that first day, since the doctor hadn’t been there, they had started asking about his parents. He’d broken down in tears. The conversation—with Akira at our side—continued on toward how Makoto has come through his work seeing people around him reach that point where they cannot continue to work anymore. Their bodies won’t hold. They’re at their limit. He’s seen this happen around him repeatedly. Coming up real close to my face, he ran his finger along his cheek to delineate the yakuza’s cut, and said that those he works for are primarily of that sort. The place was real lively while we were having this conversation. Someone came over to me and showed me photos of Makoto naked. Makoto had just said, indicating beneath his shirt … that because he’d been working with the mob, or for the mob, he had tattoos. The photos on this other guy’s phone showed Makoto from the back, covered from the hips to the neck. He had actually said it with a sad expression, that he’d covered his body in tattoos. Akira started speaking … saying to Makoto, “you’re at the limit,” and why don’t you “make it easy for yourself.” Suggested that Makoto come to Sanyukai, where they would get him registered, etc. Akira had said to check out Makoto’s head, which was, indeed, covered in scars. He’d been through a lot, Akira seemed to say. I think he used the word “bullied.” But this person, Makoto, “can see things,” like Akira can. Here, in this world, you meet people who can see, Akira seemed to say. Makoto nodded.… Makoto had a wooden cross around his neck that he’d been given by some priest. He held it up between his fingers. Akira said Makoto wouldn’t give that up for a million yen! Makoto nodded.… Right after we’d gotten into the place, Akira had pulled me from the counter to introduce me to the guys by the table. There were so many, I’d been shy and tried to avoid. But Akira headed straight in and introduced me in front of everyone to Takeda-san—later, I learned, the don of the neighborhood—saying who I was, what I was doing, and, bowing his head, saying: “Please take care of him.” A couple of times he said it. It was Akira’s way of saying “I vouch for this guy,” and of using his credentials for me. Now, I can’t let Akira down either. In any case, I think I was acknowledged by Takeda-san, as the talk turned to another person who had also come to San’ya to work and write on it. Takeda-san was wearing what might be mistaken for pajamas elsewhere, but white thin cotton top and matching bottom, with a zip-up—open—at the neck. Like something you’d wear before going to sleep, just out of the bath. He had a lean, slightly sallow face, but good complexion and kind-looking. Later, Akira said—whispering to me behind his upheld palm—that this is an “incredible person.” With real emphasis. “Just look at his hands,” he said. And sure enough, Takeda-san was missing three fingers. One on his right hand. Two on his left. Akira said he had not done this on account of himself, but that he had done it to take the fall for those under him. That’s why, Akira said, that people bow their heads to him when he walks down the street. Makoto agreed with Akira when he said that “he’s a real gentle person.”
It was real crowded, and at the very beginning, they’d gotten an arm wrestling match started.… This guy—Sho something was his name—was apparently real strong—everyone said so—so the guys took turns. Everyone, including Akira, lost. The guys saying, “Come on! Come on!” A real show. This one big guy, though—looked like a boxer with big nose and hefty upper body; whom, I was told, likes bright colors like yellow or the red shirt he was wearing—won. Kept showing off his muscles, flexing them jokingly, saying he’d won against the guy everyone had lost to. When the other tehaishi—Matsuda—showed his face at the entryway, though, this big brawly, joking guy sprang to his feet within an instant and charged. Before I knew it, two or three guys—Takeda-san restraining the boxer—had gotten in between the two, to keep them from fighting. Akira said this happened hundreds of times and just kept talking.
When we left the place, everyone followed Takeda-san and two others—a curly haired woman who was also drinking in there and a man called “the gangster guy”—to the cab and bowed to him before he got in. Akira effusively. Like watching the mob leader step into the cab with his entourage, and those below him bowing away.39